Illustration by Britt Spencer
Every Halloween, people new to St. Louis blink in confusion at the tiny people in monster costumes on their doorstep, bombarding them with terrible jokes. On those same nights, St. Louisans who’ve moved elsewhere are appalled at the Halloween etiquette of those tykes who demand Reese’s and Snickers without attempting some stand-up first.
We can all agree that the trick-or-treat joke is a peculiar St. Louis thing. Why it’s a peculiar St. Louis thing is harder to suss out. In his 2013 book, St. Louis-isms, folklorist John Oldani hypothesizes that it originated with Irish immigrants who celebrated the Gaelic harvest festival of Samhain on October 31, when the veil between the living and the dead was thought to be at its thinnest. Ancient Celts adopted the apotropaic practice of dressing in costume to deflect the attention of ghosts; during the festival processional through the village, people offered poems in trade for food as a way to celebrate the harvest and redistribute wealth. And that romantic old practice evolved into the joke-for-a-mini-Snickers swap that we know today.
The less uplifting—and perhaps more likely—scenario is that it was all about dealing with bored kids engaging in petty crime. According to a 2011 NPR story, St. Louis isn’t the only city with a tradition of Halloween jokes; some say it all began in Des Moines during the Depression as “an attempt to curb hooliganism, which included upending trash cans, turning on fire hydrants and shooting out streetlights.” The Des Moines tradition of “Beggars Night” began after the wild Halloween of 1938, when police responded to 550 complaints of soaped windows, random fires, and bricks flying through the air. In the ensuing crackdown, public officials mandated that on October 30, kids could go door-to-door to ask for treats, but only if they worked for it with a song, a poem, a cartwheel, or a joke—because idle hands are the devil’s playthings, etc. It worked.
It seems possible that something similar happened in St. Louis. Here, Halloween jokes also show up in the historical record as a distinctly post-Depression phenomenon. And prior to that, newspapers were rife with stories of Halloween juvenile delinquency. By the 1970s, however, St. Louis’ Halloween tradition was jokes, not pranks. But old habits die hard, and, sometimes, they evolve along the way. In 1971, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, a group of five teenagers wearing paper bag masks held up a bar on McPherson, distracting the bartender and patrons with a string of terrible Halloween jokes—befuddling the adults so completely, they were able to grab $250 from the till and escape long before police arrived.
I Want Candy
In 2006, Ken Miesner’s Flower Shoppe held a competition for the best Halloween joke. The winner has been lost to time, but the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published some of the best entries.
What is a vampire’s favorite sport? Casketball.
What’s a vampire’s favorite pet? A bloodhound.
Why don’t angry witches fly on their brooms? They’re afraid of flying off the handle.
What do skeletons say to each other before eating? Bone appétit.
Where do ghosts swim? Lake Eerie.
Where do monsters find out their fortunes? In a horror-scope.
What do you get when you cross a chicken with a ghost? A poultry-geist.
