Rewriting a sexist joke.

When hanging out together, my comedian friends and I make jokes about everything.  Nothing is off limits; peacocks, rape, ethnic cleansing, blenders. Things that in any other context would be seen as horribly racist, sexist or psychotic, are OK. This is in private though. As soon as I get on stage, I believe I have a responsibility not just to be funny, but to carefully consider the implications of my humor. I therefore often come up with a premise when bantering with friends that can only be used on stage after rehabilitating the idea.

Here's an example.  On Monday, I had a chat with another comedian about gold diggers.  We were at Silver Springs Hotel in Kampala and we saw a rich older, overweight man with a stunning woman in her twenties.  He said she must be a gold digger, and I went on a rant about why gold diggers were necessary for society.  I said something like, 'That man only became wealthy so he could get gold digging women. Imagine he's a philanthropist who has built hospitals with some of his money, without gold diggers that hospital would never have been built. Gold digging saves lives. Fire would never have been invented if some cave man was not trying to impress a gold digging cave woman.'

This conversation made myself and the other comedian laugh so much that I later thought about using the idea on stage.  Unfortunately, the premise is highly sexist. It assumes that men are the source of all humanity's greatest achievements and women's only role is to to motivate them.  I would not want to spout such drivel on stage.  On the other hand, we were laughing so much.  I needed to REHABILITATE THE PREMISE and extract what was funny in it without the sexist backbone.

The underlying hilarity of the rant came from my earnest defense of Gold Digging.  Surely, I could find a less sexist approach of doing the same.  My solution - one which often works when I need to rehabilitate a premise - is I PUT MYSELF AND MY INSECURITIES INTO THE JOKE. Instead of the joke being 'this is how the world is' it became 'I'm so lonely and insecure that this is how I see the world'.  Instead of saying something horribly sexist about the world, I made the joke reveal something about my perspective.

At least I think I did.  You can judge for yourself.  Here is the current gold digging routine.