Bing, Janet

English

Old Dominion University

Old Dominion UniversityODU Digital CommonsEnglish Faculty Publications English2004Lesbian Jokes: A Reply to Christie DaviesJanet BingOld Dominion University, jbing@odu.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_fac_pubsPart of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, and the Feminist,Gender, and Sexuality Studies CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at ODU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in English FacultyPublications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact digitalcommons@odu.edu.Repository CitationBing, Janet, "Lesbian Jokes: A Reply to Christie Davies" (2004). English Faculty Publications. 1.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_fac_pubs/1Original Publication CitationBing, Janet. "Lesbian Jokes: A Reply to Christie Davies." Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 17.3 (2004): 323-28.Lesbian jokes: A reply to Christie DaviesJANET BINGIn his response to the article ‘‘How many lesbians does it take to screwin a light bulb?’’ Christie Davies raises issues that are important for aninterdisciplinary professional organization. In methodological discussionsand debates among scholars from di¤erent disciplines, one frequentlyfinds that what is inadmissible in one field is sometimes standard practicein another (e.g. Taylor et al. 1999). Professor Davies, a sociologist, dis-favors scholarship not based on large random samples. Moreover, in hisreply he seems to be questioning not only this particular article, but alsothe value of qualitative research in general. I would like to respond tofour of the issues Davies raises.Davies first questions the value of an extended discussion of a repre-sentative joke, the U-haul joke:(1) Question: What does a lesbian bring on the second date?Answer: A U-Haul.The goal of our paper was stated in the first sentence of the abstract:‘‘This paper explores how humor reveals shared aspects of a cultureof lesbian communities in the U.S.’’ Davies attempts to discredit ourdiscussion of the U-Haul joke by proposing other interpretations. Heeven suggests the possibility that the second date in the joke abovemight have been with a man. Since, as a rule of thumb, lesbians do notdate men, I would note that some interpretations are more plausible thanothers.Di¤erent interpretations of the jokes we discussed are possible, butsince our focus was on jokes by and for lesbians, we did solicit responsesfrom lesbians and non-lesbians as one way of assessing our interpreta-tions of various jokes. For example, in reference to the U-haul joke, oneof my lesbian colleagues said the joke was almost accurate, but thatHumor 17–3 (2004), 323–328 0933–1719/04/0017–03236 Walter de Gruytershe had moved in with her partner of ten years on the first date, not thesecond.Davies asks (this issue), ‘‘What is the point of basing a long argu-ment on the meaning of a single joke in the first place?’’ However, as henotes, ‘‘jokes are a social phenomenon,’’ and within a particular speechcommunity, any joke that is almost universally known and frequently re-peated can surely reveal something about the perceptions of that speechcommunity. Furthermore, an intensive analysis of particular texts is con-sidered a legitimate approach in a number of disciplines, including litera-ture and linguistics, the disciplines of the two authors. An approach to atext I find particularly useful is frame/script analysis, as used by VictorRaskin (1985), who provides an eleven-page (117–127) close analysis ofone two-line joke. I have used a similar approach with di¤erent types oftexts in Bing and Lombardo (1997) and Bing and Woodward (1998).A second issue is that of switching scripts. Davies questions my obser-vation that the U-haul joke switches from a sexual (DATE) script to anon-sexual (DOMESTIC) script, unlike Raskin’s well-known doctorjoke, which switches from a non-sexual (DOCTOR) script to a sexual(LOVER) script.1 Both switches exist as possibilities and are not limitedto jokes that lesbians tell each other. I have no interest in doing a statis-tical analysis of how many jokes follow this pattern, but it is easy to findother examples where a sexual script switches to a non-sexual one, as inthe joke below by Pam Stone:(2) I had a girlfriend who told me she was in the hospital for femaleproblems:I said, ‘‘Get real! What does that mean?’’She said, ‘‘You know, female problems.’’I said. ‘‘What? You can’t parallel park? You can’t get credit?’’A third issue raised by Davies’ response is his noting that certainreaders might be o¤ended by a tasteless and blasphemous joke such asKate Clinton’s (2002) recollections of her Catholic girlhood and hergratitude for the strength and dexterity that her tongue developed frommanipulating the communion wafer in her mouth. Is Davies implyingthat a journal such as Humor should include only jokes that o¤end no-body? Although I am as o¤ended by sexist, homophobic, and racist jokesas much as some hypothetical readers may be by Kate Clinton’s joke,I would never advocate censorship of any kind, and, as the co-authorof Censorship and Obscenity, Davies, I suspect, would agree with me. The324 J. Bingissue of censorship was debated in a roundtable discussion called ‘‘Humorand political correctness’’ (Lewis 1997). As Davies says in this debate(p. 497), joke tellers play with the shocking. He observes (p. 496):Of course, people tell jokes about, or even when taking part in, the most repellentof crimes. Why should anyone be surprised or bothered by this? Humor can beused as an adjunct to almost any human activity, good, bad, or abhorrent.Since I assume that Professor Davies is not in favor of censorship, I ampuzzled that he would even raise this issue.Davies states that he does not find it surprising that heterosexuals ste-reotype lesbians in terms of sexuality and have no interest in other aspectsof lesbian lives. He says (this issue), ‘‘That [heterosexuals] do not tell suchjokes [other than sexual] merely indicates that these things do not impingeon them and are not important to them; it does not follow that heter-osexuals dehumanize individual lesbians by seeing them as mere sexualentities.’’ He also believes, ‘‘jokes have no significant impact on the realworld’’ (Lewis 1997: 498). As a feminist, I question whether treating agroup of people as merely sexual does not tend to dehumanize that group.Certainly a few jokes by themselves cannot dehumanize a group of peo-ple, even an underprivileged group. However, when any group, be it les-bians or women in general, are repeatedly treated as sex objects ratherthan as human beings in jokes, in pornography, in advertisements, in themedia, in films, in books, etc., it is quite possible that this dehumaniza-tion makes it easier for others to restrict, rape, assault, and even killindividuals from these groups. Some putative scientific studies to test thee¤ects of jokes have failed to find any significant e¤ects. However, ex-posing a group of subjects to derogatory jokes and then immediatelytesting them for an increased tendency toward violence seems analogousto feeding some group half a dozen cookies and then deciding whethercookies make people fat. Repeat the same process for a year or decade,and the cumulative results might be quite di¤erent.Davies claims that men think lesbians are unimportant and that ‘‘thenature of the sexual contact between lesbians is also not particularly in-teresting to heterosexual joke-tellers’’ (this issue). A more plausible butequally extraneous generalization is that most lesbians are not particu-larly interested in men’s sexuality, but what does this have to do withmethodology? Davies’ argument here is opaque. Is he saying that becausemen are not interested in the subject there is no reason for lesbians to be?A reply to Christie Davies 325He seems to be puzzled about why lesbians make jokes at all. He says(this issue):From a male point of view lesbians are unimportant. It is then all the more inter-esting that in the absence of male interest, some lesbians should have taken towhat was traditionally an all-male pastime, namely the inventing of jokes aboutsexual behavior. Why is this the case?If methodology is the issue here, one questions the evidence for Davies’assertion that sexual jokes are limited to males. Surely male researchersmust wonder about laughter coming from all-female gatherings at res-taurants, slumber parties, powder rooms, locker rooms, book clubs, andbaby showers. Davies says he fails to find any jokes about lesbians inLegman’s (1975) collection of sex jokes about unorthodox sex. I amnot familiar with Legman’s book, and I do not accept Davies’ point, if Iunderstand it correctly. He seems to assume that lesbian sex is unortho-dox, but he also suggests that jokes about lesbian sex are missing fromthis collection because they do not exist. There may be a number of rea-sons why lesbians might not have wanted to share their jokes with maleresearchers in the 1970s.Finally, a brief explanation in response to of one of Davies’ objectionswill, I hope, clarify another issue. His commentary titled ‘‘The dog thatdid not bark in the night,’’ suggests that Dana Heller and I may not haveprovided enough context in our discussion of why lesbians tell so fewjokes about male oppression. Dana and I began to study lesbian jokesafter I had been exploring jokes that feminists tell each other (Bing 2003).Several years ago, I was quite surprised when I did a search on google.com for both ‘‘feminist joke’’ and ‘‘lesbian joke.’’ To my surprise, mysearch for ‘‘feminist joke’’ uncovered 14 anti-feminist jokes, 57 anti-malejokes and no other jokes that failed to refer to men negatively. A similarsearch the same day using ‘‘lesbian joke’’ identified 30 anti-lesbian jokes,14 jokes about lesbians, and only one anti-male joke. Although whitemiddle-class feminists in the U.S. are discriminated against less than les-bians, many putative feminist jokes frame males as oppressors, somethinglesbian jokes rarely do. This is the context that makes the absence oflesbian jokes about male oppression interesting to me. However, Davies’discussion of jokes about oppression suggests that he and I probably havedi¤erent definitions of oppression. Davies has stated elsewhere that daterape is synonymous with seduction and that American feminists absurdly326 J. Bingamplify ‘‘trivial sexual misdemeanors,’’ (Lewis 1997: 496). In any case,the debate on whether the ‘‘discontents of lesbians in America’’ constituteoppression or not is beyond the scope of a discussion on methodology.In fact, I disagree very little with Davies’ methodological conclu-sions. Jokes (including Kate Clinton’s jokes about the dexterity of Cath-olic tongues) are ambiguous and are not serious statements. Heller and Inever claimed otherwise. I agree that it is useful ‘‘to look for substantialaggregates of a particular kind of joke and to compare them with otherlarge sets of jokes.’’ Over a four-year period I collected feminist and les-bian jokes and compared the two types of jokes in ‘‘Is feminist humoran oxymoron?’’ Bing (2003). Although I do agree with many of Davies’conclusions, I also believe that the close analysis of representative indi-vidual jokes is far from an ‘‘inadmissible procedure,’’ and I find it usefulto explore the underlying frames and scripts of representative jokes.Making a script explicit still does not predict what an individual will findfunny about any particular joke, since jokes are indeed ambiguous, but itcan suggest plausible possibilities and even probabilities.This response has been mine alone because Dana Heller, my co-author,is on sabbatical, but I will give Dana the last word by quoting an e-mailshe sent after reading Professor Davies’ response: ‘‘I wasn’t put o¤ by it,but I was kind of flattered that he read the article so closely and chose todevote his valuable time and energies to a response, and such a ferventone at that . . . My one disappointment is that I did not get to hear Pro-fessor Davies’ jokes about nuns and dildoes . . . perhaps another time.’’Old Dominion UniversityNotesCorrespondence address: Janet Bing, Old Dominion University, Department of English,Norfolk, Virginia 23529; jbing@odu.edu1. ‘‘Is the doctor at home?’’ the patient asked in his bronchial whisper.‘‘No,’’ the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply. ‘‘Come right in’’ (Raskin1985: 100).ReferencesBing, Janet2003 Is feminist humor an oxymoron? To appear in Women and Language XXVI(1).A reply to Christie Davies 327Bing, Janet, and Lucien X. Lombardo1997 Talking past each other about sexual harassment. Discourse and Society 8(3), 293–311.Bing, Janet, and William Woodward1998 Nobody’s listening: A frame analysis of the Ebonics debate. Secol ReviewXXII (1), 1–20.Lewis, Paul (ed.)1997 Humor and political correctness. Humor: International Journal of HumorResearch 10 (4), 453–513.Raskin, Victor1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.Taylor, Anita et al.1999 Forum: What are the responsibilities of feminist academic publishers?Women & Language XXII (1), 4–23.328 J. BingCopyright of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research is the property of De Gruyter and its contentmay not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's expresswritten permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Lesbian Jokes: A Reply to Christie Davies

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&amp;context=english_fac_pubs

Lesbian Jokes: A Reply to Christie Davies

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Old Dominion University