AbstractThis paper explores how humor reveals shared aspects of a culture of lesbiancommunities in the U.S. For lesbians, jokes and other forms of humor arean active, narrative means of self-construction and community imaginingthat help lesbians negotiate their positions both inside and outside main-stream culture. Whether consciously or unconsciously, much of lesbianhumor challenges the dominant culture by rejecting its definitions of andpresuppositions about lesbians, and by making lesbian experience centralto its understanding of normalcy. Whereas the term “lesbian joke” usuallyactivates a sex frame for the dominant culture, much humor created by andfor lesbians is based on a switch from a sex frame to a non-sex frame. Whenlesbian jokes “are” about sex, they affirm the right not only to private sex,but also to public representation. Perhaps the most surprising aspect oflesbian humor is what it does not include. For the most part there are noreferences to heterosexuality, to harassment or to oppression, but manyreferences to a self-empowering, self-conscious community based oncooperative principles.Keywords: Humor; jokes; lesbian; feminist; identity; culture.The question, “How many lesbians does it take to screw in a light bulb,”evokes a well-known type of joke, and, like other jokes of its kind, raisesdifferent expectations for different groups. One punch line is: “Seven. One tochange it, three to organize the potluck, and three to film an empoweringdocumentary.” The humor of this punch line might escape heterosexuals,gays and lesbians from other countries, or anyone who has little knowledge0933–1719/03/0016–0157© Walter de GruyterHumor16–2 (2003), 157–182
158J. Bing and D. Hellerof the development of gay and lesbian culture in the United States. Contraryto the widely recognizable structure of the light bulb joke, the less familiar“in-group” knowledge required for understanding the humor is preciselywhat gives the joke value as one of the means by which lesbians come torecognize themselves. Like many of the jokes created by lesbians for lesbi-ans, this joke assumes the expectations and definitions of the lesbian commu-nity, rather than those of the dominant culture. Some of the humor derivesfrom the fact that the joke takes a mainstream format and uses it to acknowl-edge, ignore, and ultimately undermine attempts by the mainstream cultureto define lesbians. Lesbian humor thus affirms the values, beliefs and politicsof the in-group and forms part of a shared stock of stories and myths that helpform, disseminate, and preserve an imagined community.1The shared culture behind lesbian humorIs there a shared culture behind lesbian humor or is such a thing as “lesbiancommunity” an imagined, rather than actual community? As Susan Wolfeand Julia Penelope (2000: 382) have observed, lesbian humor of the 1970’sand 80’s tended to presuppose that lesbians saw themselves as participants ina homogeneous lesbian culture with more or less similar experiences. Thus,Alix Dobkin could once joke that lesbians can always identify each otherbecause “We all have the same junk on top of our dressers: crystals, shells,labryses, odd feathers, river rocks.” (Wolfe and Penelope 2000: 382). Hercomment assumes shared experiences (even for lesbians who might not keepsuch objects on their dressers). It mitigates against the isolation and invis-ibility that lesbians experience in a homophobic culture that has, untilrecently, denied their presence and perpetuated an image of them as moraland social deviants. In opposition to these images, lesbian in-group jokesconstitute an imagined cultural community based in resistance, transforma-tion, and survival, enabling even those lesbians who may live “in the closet”to construct an image of belonging. Lesbian humor deals with seeminglyuniversal topics that are by no means exclusive to lesbian experience, rang-ing from food, fashion, family and relatives, to politics, psychotherapy, andsexuality. Humor written by and for lesbians can take a number of differentforms, including verbal jokes, graphic cartoons, comic books and “zines,”theater and skits, literature, musical lyrics, stand-up comedy, independentcinema, and witty slogans found on buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers.While the topics and forms may themselves be universal, their adaptation to
How many lesbians does it take to screw in a light bulb159a lesbian sensibility, or to an exclusive vocabulary of lesbian codes, experi-ences, and referents, becomes part of the process by which lesbian humorhelps lesbians negotiate their contradictory social location both insideand outside the so-called “mainstream” culture. Put another way, lesbianhumor, like lesbian culture, lives both within and against the norms, values,and expectations of heterosexual society.What is lesbian humor?As with any attempt to define a sub-genre of humor, an attempt to definethe terms “lesbian joke” or “lesbian humor” is not simple. In early May of2002, 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 250,000hits, with many of the sites maintained for and by lesbians. This suggests thatthese terms have meaning for quite a few people. However, a closer look atthese sites suggests that the terms have different values for different audi-ences. These differences reflect the tensions of a contradictory and highlyfragmented cultural climate in which lesbianism may represent a consumerdemographic, a genetic predisposition, a dangerous moral threat, the vang-uard of liberal civil rights activism, an erotic fantasy of male heterosex-uality, or some combination thereof. “Lesbian joke” may thus be defined asthe positing of the lesbian as object, an object of humor whose differenceemphasizes the opposition of female homosexuality to standards of so-called normality. In this case, the legitimization of “lesbian” depends onher construction as “other.” At the same time, “lesbian joke” or “lesbianhumor” may be defined by the positing of the lesbian as subject, an agentwho claims the right of self-definition. Lesbian jokes proceeding from thisdefinition acknowledge and reject the definition of lesbian as “other,” andby noting the self-sufficiency of lesbians, judge society’s standards ofnormality 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 thatthese comic book characters “play on commonly held stereotypes accessibleto queers in general and lesbians specifically. . . The characters are allcreated by lesbians for a predominantly lesbian audience, and thus thecharacters’ believability relies on social knowledge that is assumed to beshared. One of the most popular and enduring examples of this genre i
