Q: Why is a woman like a locomotive?
A: She makes a terrible noise when she whistles. (p. 99)
* An early example of gender-based “insult comedy.” Here, the conundrum is not so much a joke as it is an uncharitable observation about the opposite sex: specifically, the discordant shrieking that escapes from a woman’s lips when she tries to whistle. By turning the insult into a fanciful analogy — comparing the sound to that of a train — the author has brought a sense of play to what would otherwise be merely a cruel statement of fact.
The joke was especially relevant, because whistling was all the rage in music halls at the end of the 1800s, and female vaudevillians were largely left out in the cold by the new fad, except for the few who agreed to lipsync their whistling on stage. It’s not that women don’t know how to whistle — Lauren Bacall demonstrated a clear foreknowledge of the practice in To Have and Have Not (one of the first full-length Hollywood motion pictures about whistling) — it’s that they are actually anatomically incapable of doing so. Thinkers at the time considered it, along with childbirth, part of the curse of Eve, but we now know it to be a mere quirk of evolutionary biology.
