A friend of mine from Oklahoma once asked me why I picked on the Ozarks as my subject for humor. "What's so funny about the Ozark Mountains?" he wanted to know. I told him that he'd missed the point; it isn't the Ozarks that's funny, it's the Ozark storyteller. "It's like the one-room school," I said. "We had one-room schools all over rural Missouri, but it takes an Ozark storyteller to remember the funny part of them."

I told him the "Miz Bertha" story about the city boy who came down to stay with his grandparents for a few months while his folks were thrashing something out, and the mother wanted him to attend Miz Bertha's one-room school. She caught Bertha at home and explained that her Billy had never attended a country-town school before, much less a one-room school, and was a "very sensitive child, with more tender feelings than country children."

"If he should do something inappropriate," the mother said, "slap the boy next to him and you will scare him so much he won't trouble you again." And before Bertha could even react to that, she added, "And besides, the boy next to him probably started it anyway."

And just in case my Oklahoma friend hadn't understood the fine points of Ozark humor, I went on to tell him another example of it, which is an Ozark chicken joke. This is a chicken joke as told by Howe Teague, Ozark fiddler, and even an Oklahoma man could see the difference.

"Well, they was this feller a'goin through Arkansas and he come to this place where they was chickens in the road and he slowed down so's not to run over 'em you know, but one of 'em got right in front of the car and set in to out-run it.

"The feller thought that was comical, the way that chicken stayed ahead of him and he kept givin' it more gas, just to see what that chicken would do. It got up to near 30 mile an hour before it turned off at a little old shack. He figured it lived there because they was a lot more chickens millin' around in the yard and there was an old man out there a'feedin them.

"Well the feller in the car, he pulled off and stopped to pass the time of day and he says; 'You know, I run across some of your chickens a mile back and one of them led me here. That thing stayed ahead of my car, and me drivin' as fast as the road allowed.'

"The old man says, 'Well that's one of my three lagged chickens.' Says, 'I've bred them special for folks that's partial to chicken lags, but it's a sight how fast they turned out to be.'

"'Well,' says the feller, 'how are they to eat?"

"And the old man says, 'Well, facts of the matter is, I don't know. I've never been able to catch one up.'"