Professional humor or occupational humor is a kind of humor which pokes fun at the peculiarities of a particular profession.

A speaker at a professional seminar will often break the ice with a bit of professional humor. Occupational jokes tend to exploit popular stereotypes about the profession in question: lawyer jokes might present them as lacking in ethics, scientist jokes might play up their lack of worldly wisdom and accountancy jokes might address "creative accounting". For example:

A computer salesman, a hardware engineer and a software engineer are driving in a car, when the car suffers a flat tire, a blowout. They discuss what to do:

• The salesman recommends getting four new tires.
• The hardware engineer recommends rotating the tires to try to isolate the problem.
• The software engineer recommends they keep driving and see if the problem fixes itself.

Professional humor is not the same as in-jokes, which can be appreciated by only a member of a specific profession or community. At the same time, each profession has its in-jokes. An example would be a chemistry joke:

• One hydrogen atom says "I think I lost an electron". The other hydrogen atoms asks "Are you sure?" - "Yeah! I'm positive".

External links and references

• Joke The Monkey - Tons of profession jokes including engineer, doctor/medical, psychologist/psychiatrist, teachers, lawyers, office, politicians, and more.
• Professional jokes, A large collection of jokes about professions: programmers, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, psychiatrists etc.

Professional humor