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Is there a shared culture behind lesbian humor or is such a thing as “lesbian community” an imagined, rather than actual community? As Susan Wolfe and Julia Penelope (2000: 382) have observed, lesbian humor of the 1970s and 80s tended to presuppose that lesbians saw themselves as participants in a homogeneous lesbian culture and had more or less similar experiences. Thus, Alix Dobkin could once joke that lesbians can always identify each other because “We all have the same junk on top of our dressers: crystals, shells, labryses, odd feathers, river rocks.” (Wolfe and Penelope, 2000: 381). Her comment assumes shared experiences (even for lesbians who might not keep such objects on their dressers). It mitigates against the isolation and invisibility that lesbians experience in a homophobic society that has, until recently, denied their presence. In this way, lesbian ‘in-group” jokes constitute an imagined cultural community, enabling even those lesbians who may live “in the closet” to construct an image of belonging.(1) Humor written by and for lesbians can take a number of different forms, including verbal jokes, graphic cartoons, comic books and “zines,” theater and skits, literature, musical lyrics, stand-up comedy, independent cinema, and witty slogans found on buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers. While the forms themselves may be universal, their adaptation to an exclusive vocabulary of lesbian codes, experiences, and referents becomes part of the process by which lesbian humor helps lesbians negotiate their contradictory social location both inside and outside the so-called “mainstream” culture and its values.