Sexual Humor

Abstract

Sexual humor is defined here as including any verbal joke which contains an explicit or implicit reference to sexual intercourse. This is not meant to include references to phenomena immediately adjacent to sex if intercourse is not mentioned directly nor directly alluded to. Thus, most of the usual mother-in-law jokes (see, for instance, Alll) or marital jokes (see, for instance, (24ii), (25i) or (37)) are not included in sexual humor because, while it is customary for husbands and wife to engage in intercourse, sex is not what these jokes are about. The practical intuitive criterion, easily and uniformly available in our culture, is that these jokes are not considered “dirty” and can be told in mixed company, sex- and age-wise. On the other hand, jokes (4), (6), (16), (21), (35), (39), (116), (148), (159), and (160) are definitely included in the category of sexual humor because all of them contain explicit or implicit references to sex. Out of these jokes, (39) and (148) will strike most people as the most explicitly sexual and, therefore, “dirtiest,” while (4) is perhaps the least explicit of them and, therefore, the most socially acceptable. These two extremes determine the range of sexual humor as intended here quite accurately. It will be recognized by most people that joke (21 = 109) tends toward the mild pole of the scale.