Jokey Guy
“What are you drinking?” the man asked my husband.
A server had just swept by with a tray full of red and white wine. I grabbed a glass of the sauvignon blanc. My husband declined. He doesn’t drink anymore except on rare occasions—for his brain, his body, and because there’s only room for one sometimes-lush in this marriage. That would be me.
“What are you drinking?” the man pressed.
We assumed he was offering to fetch something from the bar. My husband started, “Well, thank you, something non-alcoholic…” but before he could finish, the man snatched a glass of red from a nearby table and declared, grinning, “I got this red here and it’s great!”
“That’s a pinot noir,” I offered, proud of myself for remembering what the server said. Twenty minutes later I would be asking another guest the same questions on repeat, like I’d been whacked in the head with a baseball. Or I was a dumb brunette. And I wasn’t even drunk. Thank you, Meno-brain!
“I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s good. Want to know why?” he said, setting himself up.
“Why?” I asked, sighing inside, already knowing the punchline.
“Because it’s free.”
He took a big sip, basking in the glow of a joke he’d probably been knocking out for forty years at weddings, work conferences, bar/bat mitzvahs, and charity events. Free of charge.
He then tossed out a “joke” about my husband’s wardrobe compared to his own. I think he was going for some form of verbal irony, my husband looked polished and put together, while this guy looked, well, comfortably below average. The problem was, he didn’t hit any tone that made it land as clever. It just came off as tediously awkward, like he was halfway between self-deprecating and accidentally insulting. And when we didn’t roll with it or knowingly consent, he doubled down. Peak dad-jab cringe.
We exchanged names, which I forgot instantly. I’ll blame Meno-brain again. We did the small-talk shuffle, he had some Monty Python-style “wink-wink-nudge-nudges”, made another joke about plus-ones at weddings, which I also instantly forgot, and we moved on.
I’ll call him Jokey Guy.
I assume this persona starts when he is young and first socializing into society, but by middle age he’s in full bloom: Jokey Guy. The years drag on and his material grows ever staler, his timing clunky, his self-awareness nonexistent. By his sixties or seventies, like this one, he’s a fossilized stand-up act, fishing for laughs from a fresh set of victims. I actually felt a little sorry for him.
The jokes in isolation are innocuous. It’s the endless parade of them that thorns my paw. They’re tacky as fuck. And rude. Because he gave the impression he was being hospitable when he wasn’t to people he had only just met. But he’s not hurting anyone. And maybe he would’ve been a hit with a bunch of twelve-year-olds.
The issue with the Jokey Guy is that he believes everything he says is witty. He doesn’t read the room. He doesn’t think about how other people experience him. He conscripts strangers into an audience for a comedy show we didn’t sign up for. He likes to push boundaries. And we’re the assholes if we don’t happily accept the lameness and the ribbing.
And I know this type well. Because my father is a Jokey Guy.
I spent my childhood and young adulthood cringing through my father’s vaudeville one-liners in restaurants, waiting rooms, and public spaces. If the server was a woman (and she often was), the jokes slipped into one-sided flirtations that landed squarely in the zone of mild harassment.
As a former server myself, I knew exactly how that felt. When the man paying the bill thinks he’s charming, you laugh along. Your rent depends on it. You smile, nod, bat back the lobs just enough to keep the tips flowing. The power dynamic is clear: the guest gets leeway, you shit-grin and eat the discomfort.
When I tried explaining this to my dad, how unfair it was to corner women who couldn’t walk away, he brushed it off. I was uptight. A Puritan.
“They like it.” His charm was unquestionable, at least to him.
I’ve since had these conversations with other Jokey Guys, an ex-boss, a coworker. Always the same defensive crouch. The hit dog hollers. They can’t admit, even for a second, that their “harmless fun” can actually feel inappropriate, irritating, or intimidating.
I can talk about anything. I don’t get offended. I’ll go there. But I want to choose when and with whom. All parties in the conversation must be on the same page, in on the same joke. I believe in respectfulness and polite manners with everyone and especially amongst “mixed company.”
Jokey Guy doesn’t care. He’s not listening, he’s waiting for his cue. He wants an agreeable-nod-if-you’re-still-breathing audience, not actual engagement. Meanwhile, women like me have been socialized since birth to monitor every syllable, every smile, every intonation for how it lands. We do the social heavy lifting. Jokey Guy gets to just wing it and assume he’s a riot.
Most of the time, Jokey Guy is relatively harmless. I have a tough skin. I can laugh at good jokes and bad jokes and uncomfortable jokes. We need humor. Levity makes the hard stuff in life a little more palatable. But the privilege of walking through life assuming your words cost nothing? That’s what enrages me.
The cost of words doesn’t vanish. It’s absorbed. A single joke might seem small, but add up years and decades of them, with interest, and they wear grooves into one’s psyche.
And then they say, “She snapped!”
Why can’t I pull a sword out and Highlander some motherfucking heads off!? Ha. Ha. Ha.
I can’t say with certainty whether this Jokey Guy would have taken it into deeper sexual innuendo if we’d stood there another ten minutes. Some do. Some don’t. But my life experience tells me it’s a short trip from the Yiddish Theatre circuit to “Is that a banana in my pants and do you want to peel it for me?”
Thankfully, I have the anti–Jokey Guy in my husband, who can steer me politely away. No heads rolled.
And yes, Jokey Guy may also be the man who pays his taxes, cheers at all of the Little League games, takes the garbage out, shovels the snow from his elderly neighbor’s walkway, and tells his wife he loves her. Lame jokes are a small price to pay if he keeps the innuendo to himself. If he remembers the server or the guest at the dinner party could be his daughter. Or granddaughter. And that some other Jokey Guy is out there dropping the same crass routine on the women he loves.
Jokey Guy persists. He’s been here my entire life and seems to be going strong in the 21st century.
Fortunately, my Meno-brain has me already checked out upon arrival at large functions. That’s one positive part of the change. A short-term memory gap as a coping mechanism for the stupid stuff I no longer want to carry for others.
I didn’t get drunk but I drank too much. The open bar meant my liver was the only part of my body doing the heavy lifting that evening.