Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.
What is the origin of this rhyme?
First use I’m aware of is in a Little Rascals short but it seems to be older than that. It may have originated in a 1899 short story by William Allen White.
A quick search brings up this:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0110A&L=ads-l&P=R5702
I don’t know how much faith to put in this.
For my part, I NEVER heard this rhyme until I was an adult, and saw it in a Gary Larson cartoon. Pepper Mill grew up with this, and can’t figure out how I missed it.
I, too, grew up with this little rhyme in the 1940s and the whole thing went:
**What’s you name?
Pudding Tame.
Where do you live?
Down the lane.
What do you eat?
Pigs’ feet.
What’s your number?
Cucumber.**
Don’t ask me what we thought it all meant. It was just a sing-song rhyme children engaged in.
You might have more faith in it after you read the continuing discussion on the linguistlist. Simply click on the link above, and when you get that page, notice at the top there is kinda a toolbar, with two white lightbulbs. This is on the left side of the toolbar. This allows you to scroll back and forth to see preceeding messages and ones that follow.
So, after reading the link given by Cal, click on the white light bulb with the arrow pointing to the right. Then, repeat. Until you read a later post by Doug Wilson, which gives a definitive(to me) suggestion that it goes back to the 1500s.
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0110A&L=ads-l&D=0&P=13788 if you can’t get the toolbar to do what I suggested.
Cal, I hadn’t heard of it before The Far Side either. In fact, when I saw this thread, I tried to track down an image of that cartoon, because it cracks me up good. (No luck!)
Stephen King could get a novel out of this . . .
That was my first exposure to it, and I didn’t get the joke until the aforementioned X-Files episode.
I hadn’t thought of this rhyme in fifty years. The version I knew:
“What’s your name?”
“Puddin’ and Tame.
Ask me again and
I’ll tell ya the same.”
I heard it growing up all my life in Georgia, used by all different kinds of people. There was a black lady named Eva who worked for my grandmother that told me and my siblings and cousins that it was rude to just come up to someone and say, “What’s your name?” right off the bat just like that, and it served us right if the person replied “Pudding Tame”. The polite thing to do is always introduce yourself first. Both she and my grandmother drilled into us that there was nothing worse than being rude. For me, this was used as a teaching tool for good manners. I think the rhyme also appears in the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chanler Harris.
Of course Eva also told us black pepper would give you hemorhoids, and that sucking on a penny would cure a headache, so my impressions could easily be skewed.