Creative Aging: To Laugh or Not to Laugh
“While all comedy has an overt meaning, much of it also delivers a hidden, negative message, one we may not consciously recognize or realize we are sending.” — Anne McGee-Cooper et al.
My husband Marlo looked at his smartphone and chuckled.
He turned his phone to show me a photo.
It had a single stalk of corn and the caption, “Corn maze for old people.”
I smiled.
Then I teased him. “Marlo, that’s ageist!”
He rolled his eyes and headed for his garage workshop.
Alone in the house, I wondered about that joke. Was it indeed ageist?
I tested it by filling in the “old people” slot with other minorities. “Corn maze for blacks.” “Corn maze for mentally disabled.”
Those jokes were definitely in bad taste. I would not have laughed.
But I had laughed at “Corn maze for old people.”
I followed Marlo out to the garage. “I was teasing about the joke being ageist,” I said, “but now I’m thinking it might truly be ageist. I would never call that photo a corn maze for people of color.”
“I’ve just been wondering about that, too,” he said. “Remember my mother in her last years? First she got lost driving to other towns. Then she got lost driving to her hairdresser just a few blocks from home. It wasn’t funny.”
“It was sad,” I said. “Besides, the joke depends on the stereotype that all older people have significant memory issues and get lost easily.”
Our conversation ended. Marlo turned to his woodworking project, and I headed for my office, still wondering about the joke.
“It definitely has an ageist component,” I thought. “But at the same time there is something hilarious and absurd about the image of a single stalk of corn serving as a corn maze.”
I was stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. If I said the joke wasn’t funny, I felt like a grinch. If I laughed at it, I felt guilty for being ageist.
“What makes a joke funny anyway?” I wondered. I googled it and learned that there are multiple theories of humor. Plato and others said we laugh when we feel superior. Freud said we laugh, especially at forbidden subjects, to release pent-up energy. Others said we laugh when there is an incongruity: two things that do not belong together are put together in a surprising way. Still others said we laugh when there is a benign violation of a norm.
So, when I laughed at the single corn stalk being called a corn maze for old people, was I feeling superior to people who couldn’t find their way out of a maze? Was I releasing the nervous energy of my own fear of memory loss? Was I laughing at the incongruity of a single stalk of corn serving as a corn maze? I didn’t know.
But I was convinced that the joke was ageist. I thought again about the ageism of the stereotype the joke relied on. “Can’t I laugh at any jokes about old age?” I wondered. “Do all jokes involving older adults rely on a negative stereotype to work?”
I decided to scour the the internet and see if there were any jokes that could pass the ageism test. I adapted the following examples from the “Reader’s Digest” site.
. . .
I recently asked a new acquaintance how old his children were. He replied, “My children with my first wife are 44 and 39. With my second wife my kids are 15 and 13.”
I exclaimed, “That’s quite an age difference!”
He explained, “The older ones didn’t give me any grandkids—so I made my own.”
. . .
Two older adults, Fred and Sam, went to the movies. A few minutes after it started, Fred heard Sam rustling around, and searching on the floor under his seat. "What are you doing?" asked Fred.
Sam, a little grumpy by this time, replied, "I had a caramel in my mouth and it dropped out. I can't find it."
Fred told him, “Forget it! It’ll be too dirty anyway.”
"I can’t forget it,” said Sam. "My teeth are in it!"
. . .
To my friend's astonishment, a police car pulled up to her house and her elderly grandfather got out. The patrolman explained that the her grandfather had been lost in the city park and had asked for help.
“Why, Grandfather," my friend said, "you've been going there for 40 years. How could you get lost?"
He smiled slyly. "I wasn't exactly lost," he admitted. "I just got tired of walking."
. . .
By my standards, the above jokes have passed the ageism test. Either they don’t depend on stereotypes, or they turn stereotypes on their heads.
Perhaps you see it differently. If you think one of the above jokes is ageist, please let me know.
And if you know a good joke involving older adults that is not ageist, please email it to me! Maybe I’ll get a collection big enough to fill another column.
Adapted from Creative Aging by Carol Van Klompenburg, published 2023, available from Amazon and for Pella-area residents directly from Carol. Carol has an MA in theater arts and is available for reading performances of her writing on aging, moments in her gardens, and other topics.