When Is a Joke Not Just a Joke? (Part 2)

As George Eliot pointed out, with her signature understatement, “a difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”

Here’s my story about the first time I remember, consciously, the joke-not-a-joke business being played out in my professional life. I’d certainly encountered enough of it in other areas, but somehow I’d convinced myself that academics, scholars, and literary types wouldn’t do this sort of thing.

I was very young.

On the first day of my first MLA — I was just starting my Ph.D. — I encountered an academic so well known that non-grad-school, normal people would have recognized him from his appearance on various upscale television programs and from his picture in newspapers and magazines. He and I were in the elevator — and it was one of those mysteriously long MLA elevator rides.

At that point, I was still wearing my scarf from New Hall, Cambridge, in much the same way that Linus carries his security blanket. I was trying to be a Good Girl and Be Nice (projects I have abandoned since as impossible). I smiled and said hello.

With a sly and knowing look, the distinguished gentleman said “You might look fetching in your boyfriend’s scarf, but you have no right to wear it.”

He said it in that way we recognize without being sure how to define it: The line was somewhere between a flirtation and a slap. Maybe he liked a combination of both, who knows? The effect was instant: I blushed (not my usual m.o.) and stuttered out some devastatingly assertive line like “Um, well, um, I really did go to school in England. I went to Cambridge.”

To which he replied, without making eye contact, and without any perceptible warmth in his voice, as the elevator doors shut behind him: “You sure don’t look it.”

Now what I am supposed to think?

This is an insult but he thinks it’s a compliment? It’s just an insult, straight up, no mixer?

I felt ridiculous. I guessed that it meant short busty Italian women were not supposed to get beyond the seventh grade. I guessed I should stop wearing the scarf. I guessed that, quite correctly in this case, he figured he’d get the last word because I’d be intimidated by him, confused by what I was hearing, and pinched into silence.

He didn’t have to think these things consciously. He knew them the way he knew instinctively, let’s say, which books were worthless without reading them.

Those three elements — intimidation, confusion and fear — keep many of us from talking back when it’s appropriate. I want to argue that one of the most appropriate times for talking back is when someone is using humor to ridicule, undercut, or shame you — especially (but not only) when their joking has to do with gender issues.

I wish I had come up with an answer, but I didn’t say anything as the doors closed behind me.

I vowed, however, that it would never happen again.

One of my friends, a distinguished full professor who also happens to wear red suits and be a tall blond, was once interviewed about her work for the labor union. The host of the program met her with the comment “I never imagined you’d be so feminine.” She was startled, like a horse facing a snake at a crossroads. She didn’t want to go on, she didn’t want to retreat, but she was certainly conscious of the danger. So in the same bright, friendly and surprised tone, she said “And I didn’t expect you to be so masculine!” By simply turning the line around, she made him hear his own remark. No doubt he meant his surprise to be a compliment, but the subtext to his remark goes something like “Oh, I thought all successful women looked like B-movie prison matrons.” The interviewer’s little joke has big assumptions behind it.

It’s these assumptions we need to address.

So what are our options? Refusing to be silent is, I think, the first step. Silence and apparent humility have not worked as well as we might like against hostility cross-dressed as humor.

(Photo by Flickr user MNgilen)