(Warning: this will end up with a naked man on all fours, in a display that’s meant to be sexual rather than jocular)
I had occasion this morning to vouch for Scott Schwenter (Ohio State professor of Hispanic linguistics) having gotten a PhD from Stanford, and in doing so alluded to the Vouch Joke, which I heard many years ago from Paul Benacerraf (Princeton professor of philosophy, especially the philosophy of mathematics, and the director of my senior thesis in mathematics back in 1962). PB told the joke as Alonzo Church’s only known joke (AC, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Princeton, was another of my professors and was on my thesis committee); relevant to PB’s telling of the joke, AC was one of the most earnest, least playful people I have ever known (but he was good-hearted and not without his quirks, one of which was a passion for murder mysteries, another a meticulous enthusiasm for atlases and gazetteers), and he was an American WASP Christian, a lifelong Presbyterian, while PB was a Jew, a genuinely cosmopolitan one, with an early life in Paris and Caracas before establishing firm roots in New Jersey as a teenager.
All this religious stuff is important because the joke as AC told it was thoroughly whitebread. It has two main characters (both male): the vouchee, the subject of the joke, who is interrogated by some kind of authority about his status (“Who are you?” and “Why are you here?”); and the voucher, the person the subject offers as someone who can vouch for him — two characters that AC gave WASP names to (an ordinary name like Harold for the subject and Richard for the voucher). In telling me the joke, PB prefaced it by giving the names AC used, but then actually performed the joke as a Jewish joke, in which the subject was called something like Abie and the voucher was named Moishe.
“Moishe will vouch for me; get Moishe!”
In my opinion, this makes it funnier — as a general principle, Jewish jokes are funnier than other jokes, because Jewish jokes originate as stories told by Jews for other Jews, and they are affectionate or self-deprecating or instructive or some combination of these, neither aggressive nor contemptuous — and even more delightful as a kind of commentary on AC’s whitebread version.
Now, since the joke depends on vouching, and not all of my readers are native speakers of English, a lexical note on the verb, from NOAD:
verb vouch: [no object] (vouch for) [a] assert or confirm as a result of one’s own experience that something is true or accurately so described: they say New York is the city that never sleeps, and I can certainly vouch for that. [b] confirm that someone is who they say they are or that they are of good character: he was refused entrance until someone could vouch for him.
Well, now I have given you everything (from my rather hazy memory) of the Vouch Joke except for the punchline: the authorities find the reputed voucher Moishe and bring him to Abie, who cries out: “Moishe, vouch for me!”
And Moishe gets down on all fours and barks out “VOUCH! VOUCH!”
If you’re fully into telling this immensely silly joke, you, as Moishe, get down on all fours — I am sure Alonzo Church never did this — and swing your butt like a dog wagging its tail as you vouch. That makes it into a mildly dirty joke, bringing to mind this image:
A lean muscular man outdoors, on all fours (from 2007 on Strong-Men.com, a site that’s no longer accessible): he isn’t playing Moishe vouching, of course, but a dog intently in heat — Good Boy Wants You!
May 22, 2025 at 12:46 pm |
“since the joke depends on vouching, and not all of my readers are native speakers of English, a lexical note on the verb”:
My current helper J is a native speaker of Spanish and a keen student of English. As I’d expected, he was unfamiliar with the infrequent verb vouch, so just now I had to explain the verb in order to tell him about the joke (he ended up taking notes furiously on his phone).
May 22, 2025 at 1:31 pm |
I am now also asked about whitebread. From NOAD: