Five Secrets to a Great Relationship
1. It is important to find a man who works around the house, occasionally cooks and cleans and who has a job.
2. It is important to find a man who makes you laugh.
3. It is important to find a man who is dependable and doesn’t lie.
4. It is important to find a man who’s good in bed and who loves to have sex with you.
5. It is important that these four men never meet.
This joke about sexual politics makes women laugh, and makes men smile politely. Would it work with opposite sign if I change the genders?
1. It is important to find a woman who works around the house, occasionally cooks and cleans and who has a job.
2. It is important to find a woman who makes you laugh.
3. It is important to find a woman who is dependable and doesn’t lie.
4. It is important to find a woman who’s good in bed and who loves to have sex with you.
5. It is important that these four women never meet.
This gendering of the joke just makes us puzzled. The original is funny because it invites us to laugh at gripes women often share about single men. The revision leaves us puzzled–who’s this about? To make the re-gendered joke funny, you have to fill it with men’s gripes about single women. Er–I don’t want to go there.
I’m working a book of science humor (my second), and I think a lot about re-gendering jokes. Good old science jokes reflect a bad old science world, where women are secretaries, angry wives, or unattainable objects of hopeless lust. I want my book to reflect the new science reality–about half the undergrads at MIT are now women–so I need to find ways to make the world of science look less like a boys-only clubhouse, while still keeping funny jokes funny.
Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes, well–do you know the joke about 3 people sharing a row of seats on an airplane? There’s a surgeon, a malpractice lawyer, and an HMO executive. The surgeon, who has the aisle seat, volunteers to get cokes for the two others. Instead of reciprocating that kindness, they spit in the surgeon’s shoes when he (note the he) takes them off to sleep. Yes, I thought about re-gendering the surgeon–but it doesn’t work with the punchline. “The surgeon puts on his shoes and realizes what happened. He looks at the other two and says, ‘How long must this enmity go on? It’s wrong, I tell you, wrong–this spitting in shoes–this urinating in cokes.”