Dave Petitjean

Dave Petitjean was a humorist who told jokes in the Cajun dialect and drew on his Acadian ancestry. Born in 1928, he was influenced by the Louisiana humorists Bud Fletcher and Justin Wilson, and he began telling jokes after sales meetings. In 1961, he recorded his first album at a nightclub in Houston. He later published an Internet newsletter called Cajun Recipe for Humor and adopted the saying that a smile is contagious and people should be carriers. He briefly attended Louisiana State University at 16, before leaving for the Navy, where he served aboard the USS Estes, the 7th Fleet flagship, and was stationed in Tsingtao, China. After his Navy service, he studied agriculture at Southwest Louisiana Institute, today the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He worked for Olin Chemical for 25 years and then for Farm Bureau Insurance, retiring in 2000. He credited Bill Gove with showing him how to structure routines and build motivational messages from humor.