What is lesbian humor?
July 19th, 2005
As with any attempt to define a sub-genre of humor, an attempt to define the terms “lesbian joke” or “lesbian humor” is not simple. In early May of 2002, a search of the web on google.com for the topic “Lesbian joke” resulted in 113,000 hits, and one for “lesbian humor” resulted in 250,000 hits, with many of the sites maintained for and by lesbians. This suggests that these terms have meaning for quite a few people. However, a closer look at these sites suggests that the terms have different values for different audiences. These differences reflect the tensions of a contradictory and highly fragmented cultural climate in which lesbianism may represent a consumer demographic, a genetic predisposition, a dangerous moral threat, a vanguard of liberal civil rights activism, an erotic fantasy of male heterosexuality, or some combination thereof. “Lesbian joke” may thus be defined as the articulation of an out-group whose legitimization depends on the construction of the lesbian as “other,” an object of humor whose difference emphasizes the opposition of female homosexuality to standards of so-called normality. At the same time, “lesbian joke” or “lesbian humor” may be defined by an in-group of lesbians who claim the right of self-definition. Lesbian jokes acknowledge and reject the definition of lesbian as “other,” and by noting the self-sufficiency of lesbians, judge society’s standards of normality to be irrelevant and artificial.
In an article about lesbian comic-book characters, Robin Queen (1997:233) assumes a lesbian audience for the comics she discusses. She claims that these comic book characters “play on commonly held stereotypes accessible to queers in general and lesbians specifically. . . The characters are all created by lesbians for a predominantly lesbian audience, and thus the characters’ believability relies on social knowledge that is assumed to be shared.” For example, in Roberta Gregory’s comic book series, Bitchy Butch: World’s Angriest Dyke (1999:6) the hero, a butch lesbian named Ronnie (aka Bitchy Butch) is routinely enraged by heterosexual sales persons who refer to her as “sir.” She goes ballistic when she learns that a former lesbian acquaintance has begun dating a man, and she nostalgically longs for the old days of lesbian-feminism when butch dykes had pride and when women “knew what sisterhood was all about.” At one point, she moodily questions her own legitimacy as a dyke upon realizing that she has not had a date for over two years. Bitchy Butch seems to live in a perpetual state of pre-menstrual syndrome, and she does not see herself or her oppression in patriarchal society as amusing. On one hand, it is her irrepressible rage and her inability to laugh at herself that makes her character accessible and believable to gay and lesbian audiences. At the same time, these qualities make her funny, as Roberta Gregory, herself appearing as a cartoon character in the prologue to her fifth collection, explains to Bitchy (1999:2): “I think the humor comes from the fact that often there ARE individuals who represent the most extreme characteristics presented as a stereotype of a group.”
Holmes (2000:67) proposes that humor is “intended by the speaker(s) to be amusing and perceived to be amusing by at least some participants.” However, in the case of lesbian jokes, the amusement of the participants will vary, depending on their familiarity with lesbian culture, history, and community. By analogy to Raskin’s (1985:205-209) concept of ethnic jokes, lesbian jokes might be defined as those in which the main opposition involves a script ( Raskin 1985:chapter 4) involving at least two women in a same-sex relationship. However, as the above example demonstrates, lesbian humor may also derive from the blurriness of sexual scripts, the instability of the identity categories on which we depend, and the anxieties this instability produces. Bitchy Butch asks if one can rightly consider herself a lesbian if she has not been with a woman for over two years; is a celibate lesbian an oxymoron? Unlike ethnicity, the truth of sexual desire cannot be tacitly referenced by a dialect, national characteristic or metonymic name such as O’Brien or McTaggert. How then can we define true lesbian jokes? Hemplemann (2001) makes a distinction between “true” Christian jokes, which would not be funny without a Christian script, and jokes which just happen to use Christians, but which would be funny even if the characters were replaced by members of another group. We might then assume a similar definition for “true lesbian jokes,” that is, jokes which would not be funny in a different context. For example, if you substitute the word “nun” for “lesbian” in the lightbulb joke, it is still a possible joke, but it is not funny.
In many cases, the gay community and the heterosexual community have different conventional definitions of lesbian joke. In most jokes told about lesbians by heterosexuals, the scripts activated by the term lesbian joke are usually sex scripts with references to oral sex between women. This might explain why news reports of former Senator Bob Kerrey telling lesbian jokes to former President Bill Clinton at a New York restaurant in 2001 was widely reported and deplored in the media as being in poor taste (Sigesmund, 2001). The assumption that lesbian jokes are jokes about oral sex also seems to predominate in Internet chat rooms when the topic of lesbian jokes arises. By this definition, the lightbulb joke would not qualify as a lesbian joke because it refers to potluck dinners and empowering documentaries rather than to sex. The expectations for lesbian jokes told to lesbian and heterosexual audiences are thus different.