Text #5: Drunk Jenga
(i) Source:
Contributor: Molly Fagan
Informant: Jacob
Semester/Year: Spring, 2021
IU Bloomington
MF: Okay, so I really don’t party very much so I’d consider myself out of the loop, besides beer pong or Cards Against Humanity or something. Are there any funny games you guys like to play? I don’t know what’s out there really.
J: I’m not a crazy partier or anything. Mostly I just like to get together with a group of people I know and like, I’m not into those huge house parties. One of our favorites is drunk Jenga.
MF: Never heard of it. How does it work?
J: Really? I feel like it’s pretty popular, but I don’t know. Anyway, it’s basically normal Jenga except with drunk people. You also take a Sharpie and write like dares or funny things that the player has to do if they pull out that block. So a lot of people classically write down dirty stuff, sometimes messed up stuff that almost feels like hazing. When I first played it as a freshman, a lot of them involved like sexual dares, and that just wasn’t fun to me. I mean it was, but it was also just uncomfortable. So our group decided to make a more “PG” version. A lot of our humor revolves around memes, you know? So some of our blocks would have things where if you pulled it, you’d have to mimic a meme and then we’d have to guess it. If they did a really bad job, they’d have to take a drink. One had you act out an iconic scene from Spongebob, and you could choose a partner for it. That was pretty funny. Some were dares where you were supposed to embarrass yourself. You know that song “Double Rainbow?”
MF: Yeah, it used to be super popular, I don’t know, a few years ago.
J: Okay yeah, so if you drew the tile with that on it, you had to sing it SUPER loud, like loud enough to piss off your neighbors. If you weren’t able to do that, then you failed. If no neighbors reacted, then sometimes we’d open a window and sing through that so that maybe people outside would be forced to hear it [laughing].
MF: Did you ever get the cops called on you?
J: Oh no, definitely not. We weren’t that crazy! But yeah, it also involved disgusting food dares. Like mix together 3 or 4 things you happen to have laying around. One time I had to do a shot of wasabi mixed with orange juice with blobs of ketchup sort of floating around. It was so disgusting, I almost threw up! But the nice thing about our version was that if you weren’t comfortable doing one of the dares or didn’t feel like taking another drink, you didn’t have to. We didn’t force anyone to go through with anything, like I saw at a party once. Oh, also, probably the funniest “dare” we have is where you have to read some romantic lines to another guy if you’re a guy, or a girl if you’re a girl. You have to maintain eye contact the whole time, and if you laugh or it’s not convincing, you have to take a shot. That one is especially funny, and I think it’s kind of a nice bonding thing, even though it’s weird. Like our group is weird anyway, so our version of drunk Jenga fits us pretty well, I think.
(iii) Texture:
Here, Jacob takes on an explanatory, educational role rather than the skeptical air he displayed in the previous story. He seemed to enjoy explaining what the game was, and how his group had added their own personal touch to the blocks to best suit their needs. He also recalls some memorable experiences in relation to the game, both personal and more general. His mention of completing a food dare is descriptive, as is his admission of his moment of gastronomic vulnerability. He mentioned that their own version of drunk Jenga did not involve coercive elements, as he had witnessed at other parties, perhaps to assuage any moral doubts his listener may potentially have. His description of how loudly you had to sing if you drew the wrong block was especially exuberant, and he emphasizes the humor derived from those intentionally risky performances. His mention of the dare involving romantic compliments directed at members of the same sex is particularly interesting, and he gives off the impression that this dare produces particularly humorous situations specific to their own version of the game.
(iv) Context:
Who created/performed the text- Jacob
Members of the audience- Myself
Location/timing- Global and International Studies Building, spring semester 2021
Jacob’s drunk Jenga is particularly context-dependent because it is played almost exclusively at small parties consisting of friends he knows well. They are all comfortable around one another, thus more open to attempting the dares they had selected democratically so as to reduce possible “bad” embarrassment and emphasize the “good,” wholesome kind of embarrassment associated with a good game of drunk Jenga. The distinction between what we might call different species of embarrassment is highly grey, but perhaps there is some merit to the idea. The contextual atmosphere of other parties at which other, more sexual, peer pressure-fueled versions of the game are played can’t be ignored given their part in shaping the more welcoming, PG version Jacob’s group created. The intimate setting in which they play the game provides an ideal environment for promoting more positive, humane (thought that’s admittedly subjective) experiences because it helps to suppress peer pressure, at least in this group’s case.
(v) Interpretation:
Drunk Jenga is popular party game, so popular as to have lured game companies into putting their own, pre-formatted versions out on the market. Despite this more recent development, it seems that many college students like to buy an ordinary, plain Jenga set in order to tailor the blocks to whatever dares and activities appeal to them most, allowing for a great deal of creativity. Plain Sharpies are often used, but some (mostly female) groups will paint their blocks with bright colors, sometimes complete with original designs. In Jacob’s case, his group opted for the Sharpie route for the sake of efficiency, and the fact that there are so many variations on this game is a testament to student creativity. Nearly all the blocks involve some sort of humor, often in the form of a dare. Dares usually require people to perform acts that violate social norms, intentionally raise the ire of neighbors and even the police, or simply to embarrass the person tasked with it. Much party humor seems to revolve around these sorts of transgressions and at least some degree of humiliation (dependent upon the participant’s personality of course). In Jacob’s case, they do aim to embarrass one another by intentionally trying to provoke neighbors by singing loudly, gazing into one another’s eyes and giving each other homoromantic compliments, or witnessing the inevitable hilarity that accompanies the reluctance and difficulty someone (so long as it’s someone else of course!) may have with consuming a disgusting concoction. This and other forms of games play around with humor in a variety of ways, and there is something distinctly collegiate about combining liberal amounts of alcohol with morally questionable dares. Jacob’s version of drunk Jenga may be much tamer, but it still plays with these same themes, all intended to result in comedy.
Bringing it All Together: Humor’s Dual Nature
It would be difficult to deny that humor is as changeable as the humans who craft and consume it; it is a double-edged sword, and swords are made to cut. In his “Exploring the Relationship between Humor and Aesthetic Experience,” Mordechai Gordon asserts that humor “can greatly reduce tension among people and enable individuals who are different from each other to get along and even live together in harmony”(Gordon 115). While I agree with this, Gordon neglected to mention the other edge of the sword: the side used to purposely sever ties between people based on any number of criteria in order to turn “us” into “us and them.” Moira Smith explores this darker side of humor in her article: “Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance.” She recognizes that humor can be a wonderful thing that can foster solidarity, bonding, and social cohesion, but “the flipside of solidarity is making boundaries, which is achieved by emphasizing not only what people inside the group have in common, but also the differences that distinguish them from others” (Smith 159). Throughout all of the stories I’ve collected here, humor promotes group bonding and renews and reaffirms bonds already in place, but there are a few instances in which humor shows its negative side, even if it’s not obvious. As Gordon mentioned above, humor often does serve as a social lubricant that mitigates conflict between people, as it did for Akilah and Kinsey, and ostensibly for “Becky.” While turning their tense moments into fun anecdotes and good stories for parties did help to smooth over some of that tension, it could be argued that “Becky” didn’t receive as much of a benefit as her roommates did. While their “dumb roommate” jokes don’t seem so bad on the surface, it’s likely that the subject of those jokes wasn’t quite as thrilled to hear them as they were. I’m almost certain that this is why they opted to tell their stories as inside jokes and to other friends, eschewing situations in which she would be present. Gary Fine and Christine Wood back this up in their article “Accounting for Jokes: Jocular Performance in a Critical Age” when they introduce the dark side of jokes (and other forms): “…jokes, with their denigrated targets, their sharp elbows, and their pungent stereotypes also divide people and groups, potentially creating alienation as well as allegiance” (Fine, Wood 299). It would seem that alienation and allegiance often occupy the same geographical range, and they certainly don’t coexist peacefully whenever they encounter one another, which is often. While the “Talking Joe” doll generally functioned to maintain solidarity between the club members who used their speaking opportunities appropriately, their guest chose poorly and managed to use the doll to alienate herself rather than achieve the allegiance she wished for, indicating that even a benevolent tool can be turned to less positive purposes. Even Jacob’s version of drunk Jenga is defined by the fact that it eliminates (as best it can) the peer pressure so often entwined with the game at other parties he had witnessed, indicating that the game has the potential to also be a double-edged sword. Humor carries with it an inherent risk; even with the best of intentions, sometimes a joke falls flat, or even worse, it unintentionally offends the people the jokester is trying to make happy. Even in the case of the “kinky professor” story, the professor is ultimately set apart as a sexual deviant, a revelation that presumably puts a crack in his professional image for the students to see and marvel at. It is told anonymously, but by its nature it does have the potential to hurt someone if not handled carefully. The Zoom disaster stories I collected, while less obvious, do still rely on the (supposed) misfortune of their subjects and they bind students together by pointing out the idiocy of others.
All that said, I believe that the items I collected are examples of humor that play a predominantly positive role in the lives of the students I interviewed. It enriches their lives, relieves the stress of being a young adult saddled with what can be crushing academic requirements, helps them cope with less-than-ideal situations, allows them to communicate difficult messages in a nonthreatening way, and perhaps most importantly of all, builds and strengthens the bonds between themselves and other students. Just as in the case of McDowell’s quarrelling spelunkers (1985), humor truly does have a large role to play in reducing tension between group members and can allow people to reconcile more easily with one another. Humor is one of the most powerful tools we humans have at our disposal, but it could do with a label that reads: “please use responsibly.”