Professional humor

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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, mathematical jokes might play up their lack of worldly wisdom and accountancy jokes might address "creative accounting".

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". Another hydrogen atom asks "Are you sure?" - "Yeah! I'm positive".

The joke involves the pun with the technical meaning of the word "positive", which refers to the phenomenon that if an atom loses an electron, it turns into an ion with positive electric charge.

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