Funny Thing About Tasteless Jokes: We’re All In on It

Beware of jokes. . . . We go away hollow and ashamed .

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even the gods love jokes. -- Plato

I had already bellied up to the bar in Laguna Beach when another guy came in and bellied up next to me. Being belly to belly and all, I guess that meant we had male-bonded because the guy started talking about women in the bar.

When he spotted one particularly attractive young lady, he nudged me and delivered a line too vulgar to paraphrase here. But his bottom line was that, yeah, he’d probably sleep with her.

So, what was my response? Did I say, “I, too, find her a particularly attractive young lady, but I’m offended by your use of a crudity to express yourself.”

No, that wasn’t my response. Rather, I just sort of shrugged and chuckled and said something along the lines of “go for it.”

Our exchange could be dismissed as the isolated primordial grunts of a couple of troglodytes, except that it resounds off a larger stage.

Police radio transmissions released by the Christopher Commission revealed some Los Angeles cops speaking crassly about their women colleagues. Lumped in with the cops’ other transmitted remarks about minorities and gays, it was a convenient leap to assume the police force is a haven for cretins.

But then I think of myself in the Laguna bar. And of good friends over the years who, along with me, have said things about women that if printed in the newspaper would sound totally different from the way we really think. They’re the kind of asides, whether they’re sexual innuendoes or sly references to society’s other minorities, that you would only say to the people you trust the most--people who you’re sure, to use the vernacular, know where you’re coming from.

A few days after the Laguna encounter, I was reading a magazine in my dentist’s office. One of the articles was entitled “Why Men Still Talk Dirty” and described how educated white-collar men spend much of their time talking about women, often in crude fashion.

The author concluded that men feel increasingly threatened and confused by women and that those feelings generate the private bashing. Hearteningly, author Jon Katz wrote, the men’s public behavior often doesn’t match their private words.

“Somehow,” Katz wrote, “exchanging macho banter helps them feel like they’re living in a time when men’s lives and relationships were clearer.”

Katz theorized that the jokes are a means of maintaining some illusion of male dominance in a society where they feel their onetime stranglehold on events slipping away. He concludes that men “don’t have a monopoly on belittling what’s frightening or strange, but they have their own way of expressing it: macho posturing and swagger.”

My confessions herewith are submitted by way of making this humble offering: Let’s not set some phony standard for cops. Everyone agrees that a police computer or radio isn’t the place to air that kind of material, but in the larger scheme of things, the criticism of a few sophomoric remarks smacks of smugness and hypocrisy. Let’s not pretend that all the rest of us have reached some state of enlightenment that still eludes police. Every police force has its T & A jokes, but so does every brokerage house and university faculty lounge.

Why not operate from the theory that there’s only so much time available to get at the problems of racism, sexism and gay bashing. Let’s not take that precious time and waste it trying to connect the dots between silly jokes and overt discrimination. In some cases, the connection may be real and direct; in many other cases the exercise will be futile and merely fill the skies with a lot of hot air.

Instead, let’s concentrate on when and where those jokes incite or spill into discriminatory action. When they do, let’s put the boot on the neck. When they don’t, let’s cut people some slack.

To be sure, police departments are not exactly bastions of male sensitivity. But male cops are little boys and then men before they’re cops, and they learn whatever lessons they learn long before they hit the police force.

And if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit they’ve learned the same lessons as a lot of the rest of us.

So, there is work to be done for all of us. And surprise of surprises, even for women too.

Yes, Emerson was right. That night in the Laguna bar, listening to that boor talk about the women, I felt hollow and ashamed.

My only solace is, I hope Plato was also right.