👨‍🦲 Why Are Bald Jokes Okay?

Why is it okay to make fun of bald people?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
And Amanda jam Nation.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
An opinion piece in The Herald this morning by journalist
Chris Harrison, there's a picture of him with a bald head,
and this is what he's talking about. People feel free
to crack bald jokes, but he can't make jokes about
other people's appearances. It's quite interesting, actually, he says. You know,
he'll be sitting in a room and the light in
a meeting in the boardroom, the lights go off and
someone says, oh, there's enough shine coming off your baldy

(00:26):
over here in Ukrainians And he lists six or seven
bald jokes and he says, yes, yes, haha. Isn't it funny?
He said, bald jokes, I've heard them all. But it's interesting,
as he says, PC society is now obsessed with inclusion.
You can't make jokes about people's weight, their gender, their race,

(00:47):
their sexual orientation.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Or made this job hard, hasn't it some of the
good old days?

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Well, he says, we are all about these days, respect
and all the stuff that we've tried not to make
jokes about, but baldness is still ripe for ridicule. It's interesting,
he said. The journey he went to going through hair
loss to be baled. He said hair going bald was
worse than being baled, and no one would make a
joke about someone who's losing their hair.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
I don't know about that.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
I know, I don't think they would. I think the
jokes are, well, you've shaved your head or whatever, you're
fully bored. It looks like you've chosen it. Therefore there's
no feelings involved. You've chosen this somehow, He says. People
assume making fun of a bald guy is harmless, a
punchline with no real victim. They think baldness invites less
emotional vulnerability than a joke about weight or appearance. But

(01:38):
such assumptions ignore the deep personal impact that hair loss
can have on self esteem, on identity, perception of aging,
and virility. It's a double stat as he said. He says,
I don't want to go back to saying, oh, we
should you know we were two PC, he said. I
just want to point out the double stack.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
It's a concern. As I get older, the DP the
Devin patch gets bigger.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
I really thick.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Well, I've been lucky, but you know.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
As I get my fifty eight to fifty seven, you know,
it's not going.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
To last there forever.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
But my dad, he had the same hair as me,
and I know that he had a slight DP up
until he died and he had cancer, he had chemo
and everything, and his hair still stayed in there. But
it is a concern when I talk to a lot
of young guys at building sites and stuff, and I'll
talk about their hair and it really worries them that
they're losing their hair.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, pressure now on men with all the ads we have,
the surgeries, you can have the cosmetic creams, you can
buy all the yeah yeah kind of stuff. There's a
lot of pressure on them to make decisions about it.
But as he says, as Chris says in this article,
going bald was much harder than being born. So I
think there there's a vulnerability around going board. But people

(02:51):
feel if you're fully baled, you've made a decision, therefore
you're invulnerable to the angst around it.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Jim Jeffries, the comedian, has made a lot about his
thinning hair and the various pills that he's taken to
keep a thick head of hair, and he was saying
that women can they can choose to wear wigs and
everyone thinks, oh, that's just a bit of fun.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
But a man puts on a wig and everyone rags on.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah, interesting, isn't it. Yeah yeah yeah, food for thought.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
It is food for thought.