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Professional humor

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Professional humor or occupational humor is a kind of humor which pokes fun at the peculiarities of a particular profession.

A speaker at a professional seminar will often break the ice with a bit of professional humor. Occupational jokes tend to exploit popular stereotypes about the profession in question: lawyer jokes might present them as lacking in ethics, scientist jokes might play up their lack of worldly wisdom and accountancy jokes might address "creative accounting". For example:

A computer salesman, a hardware engineer and a software engineer are driving in a car, when the car suffers a flat tire, a blowout. They discuss what to do:
  • The salesman recommends getting four new tires.
  • The hardware engineer recommends rotating the tires to try to isolate the problem.
  • The software engineer recommends they keep driving and see if the problem fixes itself.

Professional humor is not the same as in-jokes, which can be appreciated by only a member of a specific profession or community. At the same time, each profession has its in-jokes. An example would be a chemistry joke:

  • One hydrogen atom says "I think I lost an electron". The other hydrogen atoms asks "Are you sure?" - "Yeah! I'm positive".

External links and references

 


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