How to react to stupid jokes I ask, “Am I to understand that you just made a joke about my breasts?”
A blonde driving down a motorway caused an accident and damaged the beautiful car of a wealthy businessman. The pissed-off guy drew a circle on the ground with chalk and told the blonde to stand inside it so she wouldn’t do any more damage. He inspected the car, but with every move he made, he heard the girl giggling. It happened once, twice, three times: whenever the guy turned his back to the blonde, he heard laughter. Finally, he asked angrily, “What are you giggling about?” The blonde responded, “Because when you weren’t looking, I was jumping out of that circle.”
I’m gloomy and it’s nobody’s business
Are you good with jokes? Personally, first of all, I regret to say that the art of telling jokes died when memes appeared and I haven’t been to a party where guests would crack anecdotes in a few years now. Nevertheless, we still like to joke around, less often laughing about ourselves, more often – about others. Humour and women have a difficult relationship because jokes often convey sexist stereotypes. It’s bitter candy in a nice wrapper. Worse than old jigs are jokes made up on the spot: about our breasts, our butts, our suspected sexual temperament, about how much nicer we’d be if we had a man.
I remember when I had a little chat with a car mechanic and it just sort of came down to my saying that I had recently been pregnant with my daughter, and he was like, “Oh, one love hole in another, ha ha!”
When we take offence at “witty” remarks or jokes, we hear, “Oh, boy, why so serious? Learn to take a joke.” In such situations I respond that I’m just gloomy like that. It’s not true, but it quite effectively shuts the mouth of whoever I’m talking to.
However, like many of us, I have a problem with reacting to sexist comments. I usually become stunned and later I come home mad at myself for not being able to bite back properly. When it’s all too late, I come up with some good comebacks and I feel sorry for myself that I didn’t have a better reflex. I suspect that the same sensitivity that makes the joke hurt us makes us unable to retort at a similar level. Personally, I’ve only managed it once. I went to the IT department to fix something on my computer and asked my colleagues if it could be done quickly, to which one responded, “If you wash our coffee cups, I’m sure it will.” I fired back, “I can’t do the dishes, but I can entertain you with a conversation about philosophy and quantum physics.”
Unfortunately, I’m no Meryl Streep, I’m generally not good at becoming a cheeky witch on cue. However, I believe that you can try to learn this and prepare yourself some universal replies.
According to my girlfriends, and I can confirm this, the method that works almost always is the one with his mother/daughter/wife/boss. “Would you say that to your wife or boss?”
“What if my husband spoke to your wife/daughter like that?”
Not only does it put the guy down – as I like to believe, it also gives him something to think about.
Pretending to be naive is fairly safe and effective, too: “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. What do you mean?” In a harsher version, we give the person we’re talking to a frosty stare and say, “Am I to understand that you have just made a joke about my fanny/breasts/sexual life?”
The biggest problem for me is the presence of children in such situations. Luckily, they have never heard sexist comments directed at me or were too small to understand them, but that can change any day. Then I’d like to be able to utter as much as a simple, “Are you really saying that to me in front of my children?” Girls with strong nerves can add, “Can I make fun of your penis in front of yours?”
And then, unfortunately, there are the pretty hardcore solutions. I have a friend who believes that sexist jokes should never be left without a response, and as it is often difficult to be witty, it is good to simply be mentally ready to use the most popular word of the Women’s Strike street protests, that is a more blunt and lapidarian version of the phrase, “My good fellow, I believe we are done here.”
Trolling your enemy
I think our relationship with jokes largely depends on what kind of sense of humour we have ourselves. I, for one, have quite a dark sense of humour, which I’m sometimes ashamed of. It is said to be fairly typical of journalists and, basically, representatives of professions in which there is a lot of time pressure and responsibility. A dark joke is an emotional outlet. Besides, I think we all have a fairly relative attitude to jokes. Let him who has never laughed at a politically incorrect joke cast the first stone. After all, many of them make us laugh precisely because they exceed the norms that we live by on a daily basis. Our principles are not set in stone either. We joke differently at dinner at our mother-in-law’s, and differently at a coven, when we’re in the safe company of women close to us and the wine goes to our heads. I wouldn’t tell my male colleagues at work half of the jokes we make with my girlfriends.
For me, laughter is a great neutraliser of small concerns and big problems. The bigger the problem, the harder I make fun of myself and my miserable situation. My mother used to joke about her brain tumour. We used to be harsh in making fun of how it made her confuse words and sound like the Oracle. I have a friend who, like me, lost her mum a few years ago. Both of us have said that our relationships with our mothers have improved greatly since our mothers died. It got us a few scandalised looks, which is why we now say so only among people who understand that this saying is not a manifestation of joy due to the death of our mums, but a bantering reference to usually complicated mother-daughter relationships.
If you have such a dark sense of humour, you can try to troll your sexist opponent. I love how beautifully and at the same time brutally Joanna Sałyga, widely known as Chustka, was able to joke about her disease. Cancer played havoc with her body and she dealt with it with jokes. She also had the best remarks to the inappropriate comments which people made about her appearance when she was losing weight and hair due to chemotherapy. When she would hear how horrible it looked when she got so thin, she would retort, “I must fuck too much.”
So if you have the courage to face the total consternation of your opponent, you can take this path, to, for example, get rid of the nosy people encouraging you to smile. It’s what I really hate: expecting women to always grace the world with their smiles. And those uncles and boomers asking, as if they had the right, “Why are you so serious? So pretty, yet so sad.” In such a situation, we can grade the effect. In the light version, we can say, “Cause I just got fired.” In the more heated version, “Because my grandma just died.”
O, irony, where art thou?
Basically, I think it’s a good idea to respond to a joke with a joke. I am sorry to see irony and self-irony have withered recently, and I believe that the latter in particular should be practised. I love it when my scatterbrained friend calls herself “the queen of chaos”. My ex-boss, bald as a coot, was nicknamed “Shaggy” by his employees, which he accepted. He used to say at meetings that he would tear his hair out because of us.
And the blonde from the joke at the beginning of this article? Is she really stupid? I think she’s making fun of the snooty guy. If someone made me stand in a circle, I’d jump out of it too. Trust me, I’m a blonde.
Author: Natalia Waloch
Photo: Andrea Piacquadio (pexels.com)
The text was published at wysokieobcasy.pl on 6 March 2021
