AIDS was first diagnosed in 1981. At that time it was seen primarily as a gay problem; it received little media attention and there was little public awareness. Since early 1984, the situation has changed--AIDS is still seen as a gay disease, but media coverage has intensified and public awareness has increased greatly. A lot of AIDS jokes circulated in two waves tied to two events: the winter-spring 1984 media blitz focused the public's attention on AIDS, the disease was quickly dubbed "the gay plague," and a few jokes began to make the rounds; then, in the summer of 1985, actor Rock Hudson revealed that he had AIDS, and a renewed media push was quickly followed by a resurgence of the earlier AIDS jokes and a generation of many new ones, more than a few of which referred to Hudson himself.

A third, lesser media wave pertains to teenage hemophiliac Ryan White, who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. Because of his disease, parents of other children tried to keep the boy from attending classes in the Western School Corporation outside Kokomo, Indiana. This notoriety generated at least one joke: "What two types of bread give you AIDS?" "Rye and white."

AIDS is a great threat to gay men, less so to straight people, but even so the public rightly fears the disease. It could be seen as a castration complex-- AIDS is in a sense both sexual and cultural castration, and death is the ultimate castration. Rarely is anything as nearly universally anxiety provoking as AIDS has proved to be. Nevertheless, the anxiety is greatest among gay men, and this difference is evident in the circulation of AIDS jokes. The jokes seem never to have been popular in the gay community, although they had a brief circulation [there].

The early jokes were few. In addition to the "buttfucking rats" joke and the acronym for gay, mentioned earlier, the only one I collected is "What do you call a gay man in a wheelchair?" "Roll-AIDS." 8

Among the many jokes about Rock Hudson are the following:

Do you know how AIDS got to California? In an old Hudson.

Do you know what the difference between Rock Hudson and Ellis Island is? Ellis Island is a ferry terminal.

Did you hear about the Rock Hudson Memorial Hospital? It doesn't have any doctors or nurses, just aides.

Do you know what the biggest question in California is? Who had the last piece of the Rock.

Did you hear that all the alligators in Florida are dying? They have Gator-AIDS.

Did you hear about this deadly new disease that's going around? It's called hearing-AIDS. You know how you get it? From listening to too many assholes.

Did you hear about the deadly disease going around in Carmel [an affluent suburb of Indianapolis]? It's called MAIDS. You'll die if you don't have one.

"Do you know what sickle-cell anemia is?"
"AIDS for spades."

Another racist joke goes "You know they're going to have to change what they call AIDS. All the blacks keep applying for it." There are jokes that express the fear of contagion, like the Rock Hudson Memorial Hospital joke and the following:

Do you know how to give artificial respiration to an AIDS victim? [Acted out: teller pretends to stomp on chest of someone lying on floor, blows toward face.]

Do you know how to keep from getting AIDS? Sit on your ass and keep your mouth shut.

Do you know what it says on Rock Hudson's tombstone?

Asses to ashes,
Lust to dust,
If you had tried pussy
You'd still be with us.

So, why do people tell these jokes? They do not work as entertainment for the most part, but they do express attitudes and feelings. They are partly a reaction to the emphasis on AIDS in the media from time to time. They are also, and primarily, a reaction to homophobia and the fear of AIDS, which one person has labeled AfrAIDS. Hudson's disclosure of his illness allowed AIDS to be used as a means for people to express their feelings about gays. The jokes reinforce stereotypes and in doing so allow the tellers to make the psychologically comforting statement, "We won't be affected if we can keep them away from us and in their place." Thus, the jokes are a coping mechanism, but their effectiveness as such is limited; they relieve enough of the pressure, discomfort, and anxiety for people to avoid dealing with the real issue: AIDS is a lethal disease that attacks people, regardless of age, color, sex, sexual orientation, or any other variable; the virus does not discriminate. And even more, a major part of the issue that is being avoided is that gays are people just like everyone else.

Finally, the jokes provide a vehicle for bringing up a subject that is so serious and anxiety provoking that it might not be introduced into a conversation otherwise. I have several times heard conversations shift to AIDS after someone told an AIDS joke. All of these functions are therapeutic.

As AIDS has continued to spread into the straight world, joking about AIDS has declined.10 For example, Liberace's death as a result of AIDS went almost unnoticed in the joke cycles. The few jokes now in circulation are of a different nature, as the following two examples show:

Did you ever hear about the two Polack junkies? They were shooting up one day, and one of them took the needle and shot up. And then the second one took the needle from the first one and shot up with it. The first Polack said, "Are you crazy? Why did you shoot up with the same needle I used? Don't you know I have AIDS?" And the second Polack said, "Oh, that's OK. I'm wearing a condom."

A little boy came home from school one day--he was about in the third grade. And he came home and his mother said, "Johnny, what did you learn in school today?"
Johnny said, "Well, we had sex education class."
His mother was kind of shook up, and she said, "Well, what did you learn about?"
And the little boy said, "We learned all about AIDS."
Well, that really shook her up. So she said, "Well, what did you learn about
AIDS?"
He said, "Well, you can't get it from a toilet seat, and you can't get it from kissing, and you really have to watch those intersections."

These jokes are fascinating because besides not being judgmental, they are educational. The first says, "If you're going to use intravenous drugs, don't share needles, and if you're going to have sexual relations, play safe." The second joke dispels mistaken ideas about transmission. It does contain a slight antigay, antidrug, antisex message in the apparent conflation of homosexuals, injections, and intercourse in the final word (a seeming play on the standard parental warning to "look both ways"). Nevertheless, it is primarily educational.

The subject of AIDS has become more solemn, and the lore reflects this shift in tone. The following straight legend is from USA Today:

Wednesday night [22 October 1986], novelist Jackie Collins (Hollywood Husbands), ever the chronicler of sexual adventure, shared what she said was a true story on Joan Rivers' show.

A married Hollywood husband picked up a beautiful woman at a bar. They enjoyed a night of passion at a good hotel; in the morning he rolled over to find a sweet thank-you note. Class, he thought, real class. Then he walked into the bathroom and found, scrawled on the mirror in lipstick, "Welcome to the wonderful world of AIDS."

Not knowing if the woman had been kidding or not, he didn't dare have sexual relations with his wife, and it could be a long time before he'd know whether he had become an AIDS victim ("AIDS" 1986:2D).

This legend was widespread by early December 1986. In one version, the man went the next morning to be tested for AIDS and learned he did not have the disease. This variant makes it clear that people are still largely uneducated about AIDS: there is no test for AIDS per se, and it can take six months or more for the body to produce detectable antibodies to the virus.

Interestingly, the shift from gay-focused to straight-focused AIDS lore has resulted in the dropping of the moral and judgmental elements prevalent in the antigay AIDS jokes. There will probably be a few more AIDS legends, serving like the one above as cautionary tales. Then one will begin hearing personal experience narratives, first regarding acquaintances who have AIDS or who have died from AIDS, and then stories from people with AIDS themselves.

The taboo against joking about certain subjects is probably rooted as firmly in our values as it is in our anxieties. Some people would not tell racist jokes; some would not tell jokes as personalized as the ones about Christa McAuliffe. Others would not be as reluctant to joke about those subjects as they would to make light of a tragedy like the starvation in Ethiopia. Of course, there are no universal laws governing humor. People will joke about anything imaginable, but the more delicate or offensive the subject, the more likely it is to approach the line between "OK to joke about" and "not OK to joke about." The closer a joke comes to straying over this line, the less likely it is to circulate widely and to be quoted in the media. Granted, jokes are not generally covered in the news, but at least two syndicated columnists, Joan Beck and Nicholas Von Hoffman, have written about recent joke cycles (Beck 1986; Von Hoffman 1986). Surprisingly, Beck quoted several of the jokes, including ones about Christa McAuliffe and Leon Klinghoffer. Von Hoffman wrote around the jokes, quoting only a couple of radio talk show hosts. Both indicated that the jokes are in poor taste but that we are stuck with them.

The potential to offend that these jokes possess may also explain why they are usually in question-and-answer form: such a structure allows a sort of hit-and-run approach to joke telling. If the listener is offended, one can quickly change subjects. This structure may also be the reason we had no poisoned-chicken-soup jokes: that incident is more reminiscent of a legend than of a brief joke. And finally, the question-and-answer joke has probably become the predominant type of American joke. In our perceived fast-paced world we feel we lack the time for lengthy, elaborate jokes. The briefer form allows us to feel that little time has been lost if the joke flops.
Ultimately I suppose we must ask if we can really make any authoritative claims about the purposes, uses, and functions of jokes. We cannot, but we can attempt to gain some insight. Though understanding topical humor does not make these jokes any less hurtful, it can help us to realize that humor is beneficial for those who use it. Otherwise they would find another means of releasing tension, fear, and anxiety. Freud said that the opposite of the
humorous is not the serious, it is reality. Topical jokes attempt to find humor in (or force humor upon) reality, a never-ending attempt at reconciling opposites.