ABSTRACT
The folk have never considered proverbs to be sacrosanct, and the “fun” of parodying, manipulating, and perverting proverbs can be traced back to earliest written records. Especially in the modern age people have delighted in creating puns and wordplays based on proverbs, often only changing a single letter or word. While such parodies might be quite humorous, they also quite often express more serious socio-political satire. Wolfgang Mieder has coined the term “Antisprichwort” (anti-proverb) for such deliberate proverb innovations, and he has collected German examples in his three volumes of Antisprichwörter (Wiesbaden: Verlag für deutsche Sprache, 1982, 1985, and 1989). For graffiti that are based on proverbial structures see Allen Walker Read, Classic American Graffiti (Paris: Privately Printed, 1935); and Alan Dundes, “Here I sit—A Study of American Latrinalia,” The Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, no. 34 (1966), 91–105.
