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Juan Tamad
Juan Tamad, "Lazy John", is the Filipino folk figure of laziness. Tellers often make him a boy, and some a young man. Many tales show him doing silly things to avoid work. Fansler's 1921 book has similar stories about lazy Juans.
Folklore is retold; versions differ.
Old stories: Juan Sadut · The Indolent Husband
Sources: Wikipedia: Juan Tamad (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikidata (CC0)
The story
Juan Tamad means Lazy John. He is the best-known fool of Filipino folk stories. Most tellers show him as a boy, and some show a young man. In each tale, he takes an instruction too literally or does the least work he can. The tales are short jokes, often told to children.
In one story, he lies under a ripe guava tree and waits for the fruit to fall into his mouth. In another, his mother sends him to buy crabs. He frees them in a ditch and tells them to walk home. When he must sell rice cakes, he feeds them to frogs. He then says he sold them on credit. In a fourth, he breaks a rice pot and sells the ground pieces as a flea powder. His mother wants a bride who speaks little, and he brings home a corpse.
The oldest dated print known is a Tagalog verse tale of 1919 about a Juan Tamad in Portugal. Later retellings appeared in 1957 and 1965. There have been films since 1947 and a 2015 TV series.