Hoffmann of the Month: April

The "Hoffmann of the Month" for April is the one and only Pirla Sofol Hofmann!

You're probably saying to yourself, "who?" And I would've been right there with you until a few months ago. (I first found out about Pirla in January, but saved her for April because it's National Humor Month. Keep reading and you'll see why that's relevant.) The late Mrs. Hofmann is my first relative to receive the monthly honor, but it's a distant relation and only by marriage, so it's not too nepotistic. Her husband Bernard's grandfather was first cousins with my great-great-great grandfather. So we're barely even related.

Anyway...my mom has gotten way into family history the last few years, and as a result has made some connections with descendants of some of our distant family like Pirla. One "cousin" even sent her three volumes of Pirla's journal a few months ago. I got to look at them a little bit before my mom returned them.

Pirla Sofol was born in what is now Bulgaria in 1881, and grew up in poverty. In 1901 she moved all the way to Germany and ended up working for a while as a nanny until she got married in 1903 to the aforementioned Bernard Hofmann. Their first child died a few days after he was born, and their only other child, Otto, was born in 1905. In 1908 they emigrated to America, eventually settling in Ohio.

Pirla was likely very intelligent--her journals are in English, so she was probably fluent in at least three languages. However, her journals are also pretty dull--mainly just a chronicle of the relative drudgery of her day-to-day life as an early 20th-century wife and mother. She shares very little about her thoughts or emotions, her goals or her interests. Except for one key passage from January of 1917...

In this entry, Pirla describes how it was a particularly harsh winter, too cold for Otto (who would've been 11 at the time) to be outside much. Bernard worked long hours trying to provide for his family, so day after day it was just mother and son cooped up in the house trying to keep each other entertained. In her journal, Pirla describes a game she made up that quickly became her son's favorite. They called it "Who's there?" From the journal:

One of us will knock on the parlor table, mimicking the sound of a knock on the door. The other will respond "Who's there?" and then the one who knocked will name an object, for example "Lettuce." The other will say "Lettuce who?" after which the object will be altered to something different. "Lettuce praise the Lord." Otto will sometimes be the one to knock but he especially loves to play the "Who's there" part.

That's right...a relative of mine may have been the creator of the ultimate groan-inducing pun, the knock-knock joke! Our familial bonds may be tenuous, but she's definitely my spiritual kin. The interesting thing is that, if you look into the history of knock-knock jokes (and I'm sure you all have), they're generally believed to have originated in the 1930s. (Unless you buy the whole "Shakespeare invented them" argument presented in that link, but come on--that was NOT a knock-knock joke.) But Pirla Hofmann seems to have come up with the idea almost 20 years earlier!

I plan to look into this further, and hopefully I'll have an update on all this at some point.. I didn't get to look through all of the journals (and neither did my mom) before the owner (our "cousin") wanted them returned. I feel lucky I was able to even copy down that one passage. I've emailed them to see if we can borrow them again, or if they'd be willing to scan or photocopy some of the pages, but so far no response. Internet research has been largely fruitless; after scouring Google for hours, I did find the above photo (which I'm about 90% confident is actually Pirla), but nothing about her taste in jokes.

But still, this is amazing to me. However distant the relation may be, I'm proud to be connected to the (maybe) inventor of one of the most classic forms of comedy of all time! Congratulations to Pirla Hofmann--the "Hoffmann of the Month" for April! It's well deserved.

[April 3, 2012: UPDATE--I've uncovered some new information about Pirla. Check it out here.]