Boo-Boo the Fool

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sherry Dunn calling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Hi, Sherry. Welcome to the show.

Hello.

Well, I was calling because I thought you guys would find this pretty interesting.

There is a saying, African-American Jews, when someone thinks you’re stupid, you say, well, who do you think I am? Ubu the fool?

And one day I was talking to my administrative assistant in New York. She’s Puerto Rican. And I said that phrase. I said, well, you know, who do they think I am, Boo Boo the Fool?

And she said, oh, that’s interesting. She says, that sounds like Juan Bobo.

And I was like, who’s Juan Bobo? And we Googled it, and I guess it turns out they’re the same fool.

So in African-American English, yes, they say Boo Boo the Fool, right? I have Boo Boo. Boo Boo the Fool. Boo Boo the Fool.

And in Spanish, you said Puerto Rican?

Yeah, she’s Puerto Rican. She said there’s a character called Juan Bobo.

That’s right, right. I don’t know if they’re related, but what a remarkable coincidence, right?

Yeah, it’s totally strange, you know. I tried to look it up, and from what I could tell, it may come from Africa.

It’s possible. There’s a word in Spanish, which is, well, there are several words in Spanish, Martha, right? A bobo, a bobon, that mean fool or clown.

Right, right. They go back to the Latin balbus, meaning stammerer.

Very interesting.

Bah, bah, bah.

Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.

But also, more interestingly, at least as far as the African-American term goes, the Boo Boo the Fool, as far as I can find it, dates probably to the 1950s or earlier.

I find one mention of it in 1951 in a book by Lloyd Lewis Brown. He was an African-American novelist. I’m quite sure it’s older than that.

But one interesting thing is at the time, there was a children’s toy. And you’ve seen this, the inflatable clown with the weighted bottom with the clown face. And you could hit him and knock him down. His name was Bobo the Clown.

Oh, yeah.

So it’s possible there’s a lot of, like, again, Boo Boo and Bobo, they’re not far enough apart for us to automatically insist that they’re different words. They’re very close.

So it’s possible there’s some kind of conflation there or some kind of generation of alternate forms.

Definitely Bobo the Clown is a constant name for clowns. Clown and fool are traditionally seen to go back to the jester character in literature, right?

Even in Australia and the United States, through decades and decades, even back as far as we can find in the 1940s, some clowns were called Bobo in the English-speaking world.

Now, in Puerto Rico, it’s really interesting. There was a novelist by the name of René Marques, who in 1955 published a book called Juan Bobo y la Dama de Occidente, Juan Bobo the Fool and the Lady of the West.

Did you find that citation?

I did. And, you know, just one thing I found, and I don’t know if I can’t even remember where I found this, but that there is apparently an African folktale about a fool whose name does begin with a B who gets into all kinds of mischief.

Oh, really?

We were wondering if he came through the slaves to Puerto Rico and then to the Americas, because what I found was something about an African folktale, about a fool who’s always doing foolish things.

And what was his name? It started with a B?

It was some derivative of Bobo. It was some derivative of that.

I’m afraid I don’t have any information on that. I’d love for the citation that you found. I’d love to find more information or have you send it to us. I’d love to look into this.

Certainly the fool character or the jester character, the clown character, is one of the classic characters in all human mythology. He exists in every culture that’s been recorded.

And so I’m not surprised that he’s also in African cultures. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find that the myths about this jokey character should make their way to the new world.

And then somehow still manifest themselves in the language of modern day African Americans.

This is fascinating.

Well, I just thought it was kind of a fun thing, you know, because we were talking and it turned out we were both talking about a fool.

I love that.

What a great connection you made, right, to find that the two of you shared the same idea and very similar words.

Yeah.

If I find out more, Sherry, we’ll definitely share it with you and our other listeners. And if you find out more, share it with us, will you?

Yeah, send us that African phone too.

Sure, absolutely. I definitely will email you guys. And thanks so much. I love your program. I find words very interesting, so it’s a lot of fun.

Thanks for listening.

Thank you, Sherry.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’ll take your questions about any aspect of English, Black English, White English, whatever kind of English you have to talk about. Spanglish, for that matter.

We were talking about Puerto Rico. What a great motherlode of talk that would be, right?

Si.

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