Professional humor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Professional humor or occupational humor is a kind of humor which pokes fun at the peculiarities of a particular profession.
A speaker at a professional seminar will often break the ice with a bit of professional humor. Occupational jokes tend to exploit popular stereotypes about the profession in question: lawyer jokes might present them as lacking in ethics, scientist jokes and mathematical jokes might play up their lack of worldly wisdom and accountancy jokes might address "creative accounting". For example:
A computer salesman, a hardware engineer and a software engineer are driving in a car, when the car suffers a flat tire, a blowout. They discuss what to do:
- The salesman recommends getting four new tires.
- The hardware engineer recommends rotating the tires to try to isolate the problem.
- The software engineer recommends they keep driving and see if the problem fixes itself.
Professional humor is not the same as in-jokes, which can be appreciated by only a member of a specific profession or community. At the same time, each profession has its in-jokes. An example would be a chemistry joke:
- One hydrogen atom says "I think I lost an electron". The other hydrogen atoms asks "Are you sure?" - "Yeah! I'm positive".
"Too much" jokes humorously describe actions that fans of a particular subject or hobby may do if they become too obsessed with the subject. Usually, these jokes are not considered in-jokes, as they are less obscure and would be understood by more people. Examples include:
- "You might be obsessed with NASCAR if..."
- "You know you play World of Warcraft too much when..."
- The Wikipedia Wikipediholic test
These jokes, not necessarily related to professions, may also describe those in certain demographies. Examples include:
[edit] External links and references
- Joke The Monkey - Tons of profession jokes including engineer, doctor/medical, psychologist/psychiatrist, teachers, lawyers, office, politicians, and more.
- Professional jokes, A large collection of jokes about professions: programmers, mathematicians, philosophers, physicists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, psychiatrists etc.
