Humor tends to be rooted in concrete societies and cultures,
where it reflects the situations and structures of its
environment (as a function of both time and space). But does the
object of humor change over time? And are there some subjects
that just don’t go away, that let us pick at them over centuries
or even millennia? The blond female is a new player in the
(international) world of jokes. Earlier jokes about women were
sexual or linked to their roles in the family (wife and mother-
in-law). So, what is this blond woman? Is she a materialization
of the independent modern woman or is she the manifestation of
eternal female characteristics or is she both? The male of our
species appears in jokes placing him in the social and
occupational world, as the traditional public player of a
patriarchal society. When cracking jokes about doctors,
policemen, teachers, waiters and more recently, lawyers, the
stereotypes we italicize are male. But is there some form of
homogeneity, some gender traversing that reflects the appearance
of the female on the workforce? And how faithfully do our
Hungarian jokes reflect the transformations undergone by society
and the change in male and female roles? Can we capture the
narrowing of the gap between the gender roles, or possibly the
mixing of the two in a transformation of stereotypes as relayed
by jokes? What kind of antecedents can we find in folklore
and/or comic literature? And crucially, can these jokes play a
role in reproducing the traditional gender role structure?
