You have to be careful with jokes. They can get you into serious trouble. Take Sir Tim Hunt’s joke at a conference in Seoul last week, about women scientists’ tendency to blub when criticised, and to fall in love with male colleagues. Well, he said, it was meant to be “jocular [and] ironic”, and I believe him. Thousands wouldn’t, but I do. Because I have got into trouble making stupid jokes myself, the worst one on holiday, when I was 19.
There I was, in the south of France, staying in a friend’s small B&B, where I could use the kitchen in the evenings. On my lonely way to the beach every day, while my friend was working, I met three young English men who were stranded, had no money left, couldn’t afford to get their belongings out of left luggage, couldn’t go home, and were fed up and hungry.
“I’ll make you some dinner,” I said, and suggested a simple menu.
“What’s for pudding,” they asked.
“Me!” I said. For a joke. Honestly. How could that not be a joke? Who would seriously think that I could ever consider having sex with three boys at once, who I hardly knew, when I’d never had sex with even one boy in my whole life? Off I went to prepare the dinner.
Everything went swimmingly until pudding time, when I noticed a sudden menacing atmosphere. I had to explain my joke pretty sharpish, but those boys were enraged. “Women don’t tell jokes like that,” they said. But I did.
Nobody I have ever told about my joke thinks it was funny. And Tim Hunt’s joke wasn’t funny. But he has grovelled, apologised, been publicly shamed and humiliated. Isn’t that enough? Why sack him? He would probably never dare make that sort of joke again, and now he won’t have a chance to anyway, or to discover anything else important or to teach anyone else to do so.
If anyone heard some of the jokes Fielding and I make in private, we would be sacked from the world. I asked him for an amusing comment on this, but he didn’t dare make one.
