Tim Babb’s April Foolishness
Day 9

In the spirit of my commitment to replace the misogynist term “bitch” with the gender neutral insult, “qumph,” I’ve started looking at other ways I use language that could use some improvement. I found one in my own stand up act.

I have a joke in my act about getting old….well it’s actually about MySpace vs Facebook as a metaphor for getting old. In part of the joke, I lament how I miss the women on MySpace because they were, “whores” who posted scantily clad pictures of themselves where as the women on Facebook just post boring pictures of food an their kids.

The point of the joke (and man does this process of analyzing the joke drain all the comedy right out of it) was that there aren’t two different types of women. My friend list from MySpace just got older and their priorities shifted. I can’t blame you for not believing me after reading this explanation of the joke, but it usually gets a pretty good laugh.

But recently, I was re-listening to an old set of mine where I told this joke and it sounded overly misogynistic to my ear*. So I’m thinking about revisiting the language of this joke. Specifically, I’d like to remove the word “whores” as a descriptor of the MySpace ladies. I think it makes it sound like I’m disparaging them for taking scantily clad photos…which I would never want to do for anyone. I’m not a fan of the term “slut shaming,” but I feat this might be the message folks are left with when they hear my joke. Which is unfortunate, because the message I’m trying to convey is the opposite. So how do I go about changing the language from slut shaming to slut celebrating? And will that even matter as the point of view of the joke could be viewed as, “women only have value when they dress sexy for my amusement?” This is, again, not my point. Women have much to value. Sexy dressing is just a “bonus,” if you will. An extra thing that I got used to (in the “story” of this joke) that is now gone.

I’m sure that comedians reading this are appalled that I would worry about my jokes offending people. (I’m totally kidding…no comedians are reading this.) That is also not what I’m worried about. My act is a representation of me….who I am, and what I believe in. So by taking a critical look at how I present my opinions of women on stage, I am actually taking a closer look at the misogynistic traits of Tim the guy. If I can see them in the act, maybe I can see them in me and hopefully correct them and be the dude I want to be and the example that my son deserves.

Thus completes the least funny thing ever written about comedy. Nailed it!

*This has NOTHING to do with Suey Park. In fact, if I knew she hated this joke the way it is, I would open with it every time just so she’d leave my show)