Two-dimensional, stereotyped women… seems about right.
The Indiana State Bar’s Probate, Trust, and Real Estate group has an email listserv to discuss professional developments and build a sense of community among the membership. In this way, it’s not much different than any other professional group around the country. A couple pleasantries about the weather that everyone on the list can delete in between their work emails and Fantasy Football advice newsletters.
On Friday, the group’s leader, Steven Robinson, put out a blast that stuck to a well-worn tradition when it comes to these newsletters and kicked it off with a little trivia fact to hook the readers:
Delightfully light information. It’s hard to believe Piggly Wiggly once dominated the grocery game, but here we are. In a sense, the future grocery model that Robinson’s talking about is almost a repudiation of the Piggly Wiggly model — a return to an era where you told the clerk what you wanted and they’d gather it for you rather than letting you select it yourself and grocery stores don’t have ridiculous names.
But as Chekov says, “if you mention ‘grocery/shopping’ jokes in the first act, it needs to go horribly awry in the second act.”
This is where someone will inevitably chime in that everyone should “chill out” and “have a sense of humor.” They may even turn this into a jeremiad about “PC culture” and contend that outrage over jokes represents the downfall of America. The person making these arguments will be a white dude — probably Bret Stephens.
Everyone capable of chewing gum and maintaining a basic sense of decorum at the same time can identify why “tits” jokes don’t play in a professional setting in 2019 — if they ever really did. It’s not the end of comedy to put a lid on jokes like these; it’s the end of played-out hackery.
Bringing us to the third act of our play — a little over four hours later:
It’s… an apology, though perhaps not the apology the situation warrants. While excising the tits certainly pushes this closer, the joke’s still gazing over a wide chasm at acceptability in the far-flung distance. The foray of one character’s “tits” into the z-axis are the only thing keeping the women from being entirely two-dimensional and that’s still not going to be enough. That women are jealous, overreacting harpies sucking the joy out of every moment of life is what makes this joke “funny” and consequently what makes it profoundly unfunny to a considerable swath of the intended audience.
At least this isn’t a group of lawyers charged with meting out the rights of spouses after someone dies — you know, the sort of discipline where a profound lack of respect for wives might be a professional problem!
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.