I looked at the bestseller top 60, where the usual works were lined up: self-help, thrillers, vinkjes and Roxane van Iperen. But at 10 I met The Sweet Sisters – Joke Bookby Hanneke de Zoete, ex-school teacher, mother of two ‘sweet sisters’, proud owner of the rabbits Storm and Fluffy, world famous in the Netherlands through her youtube channel and author of a lot of successful spin-off books about the same sweet sisters.
This joke book, among other things, target group 4 to 8 years. Curious, I opened it. Children have a notoriously corny sense of humor. I can remember how mine, howling with laughter, told each other endless jokes of the caliber of ‘Pudding and Yesterday’, ‘a little boy’ and ‘two tits in an envelope’.
Little has changed since then, I saw with sorrow. “Why does a dog cross the street diagonally?” “To get to the other side.” “What’s green and slides off a mountain?” “A ski wi.” “Why does an idiot throw his watch out the window?” “He wants to watch time fly.”
That ‘oen’ actually got me thinking. In my youth you had no jokes, but Belgian jokes. ‘I’m so sorry you were raped! But how can you be so sure it was a Belgian?’ “Well, I had to help him.” Belgian jokes are of course no longer allowed and jokes about rape are also not allowed, so even if you replace the Belgian here with an idiot, it remains a bad joke. It must be quite difficult to put together a joke book these days, because jokes, both the annoying and the funny ones, are often hurtful.
How come? I wanted to consult Freud, who would certainly say something about an outlet for the unconscious, Jenseits des Lustprinzips or so. I have his collected work, in sixteen stout volumes, but just the book I was looking for, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten appeared to have disappeared. That was strange, but also nice, because now I didn’t have to struggle through all that worked-up gibberish.
In any case, De Zoete carefully avoids anything that could be even remotely hurtful. Even in a joke about a dead rabbit the word “dead” is not mentioned, it is reported (with no doubt Storm and Fluffy in mind) that the rabbit is “not alive anymore”.
Only for the real zealots it might not be good enough. “What do you call the island of crazy criminals?” “The Mall Thieves.” Error! Words like ‘crazy’ and ‘mal’ fall under the new standards of decency under ‘validism’ because they make fun of ‘people with disabilities’.
This one also seems to me, in the context of the gender discussion, on the edge: ‘There is a baby boy and a baby girl in a crib. The boy says to the girl: ‘I am a boy.’ The girl says, “How do you know that?” The boy says, “I’ll show you that in a minute, when the mothers are gone.” Moments later, the mothers are gone and the girl says, “Well, let’s see!” The boy pulls up the covers and says, “Look, I’ve got blue socks.”
I laughed. He reminded me of an extremely bad joke that is certainly not in this sweet little book: ‘Jan tells a joke to Piet. ‘What should you do if someone has a seizure in the bath? Throw in the dirty laundry.’ ‘Well, I don’t like that at all,’ says Piet. ‘I lost a brother to an epileptic seizure in the bath…’ ‘Oh shit, sorry, how bad!’ Jan shouts. ‘Drowned?’ No, answers Pete. “Suffocated in a sock.”