Thursday, December 9, 2010

Humor and Sexism – Part I

Or, "Why did the Woman Cross the Road?"

Why do we laugh at certain jokes and not others? Often, what makes a good joke is an element of surprise – an ending that we didn’t see coming, a character that we hadn’t anticipated, or a play on words that we’d never noticed before. This element of shock is evident in comedy from knock-knock jokes to humorous anecdotes. In relation to gender, however, shock humor is usually sexist and degrading.

To offer an example, one low-brow joke begins with a query as to why a woman crossed the road. Already the woman is degraded by her inclusion in a joke that usually features a barnyard animal. The joke continues with, “why does it matter? She shouldn’t have been out of the kitchen in the first place.” It seems that, to the teller of the joke, women belong in the kitchen, serving men. Hilarious.1

However, I’m not so sure that this is true. Is every person who tells a sexist joke – or for that matter, laughs at a sexist joke – sexist? Plenty of my peers have told or laughed at jokes like the one above, and few of them truly believe that a woman’s place is in the home, subordinate to her husband. What they find funny is the shock value of the joke – the un-political correctness of it all.2 In this way, gender roles – or archaic roles, at least – become fodder for comedy. This is a new way that gender becomes engaged in the comedy world. We’ve examined comedy specifically targeted at gender, and now we see that comedy can also use gender to create humorous tension.

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1. This is sarcastic.
2. That said, I think that those who tell sexist jokes should carefully reexamine their opinions and how they represent themselves to society. Sexism is alive and well – there's no reason to laugh at it.

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