Photo by Manja Vitolic on Unsplash.
It seems pretty harmless, right? Someone posted a saying attributed to Phyllis Diller: At my age my back goes out more than I do.
The Readers Digest offers: What’s a trophy for old age? Atrophy, The Digest lists 60 jokes that make growing old seem funny.
You’ve probably heard them too. Jokes about wearing special underwear, fading eyesight, seeing lots of doctors, and more. You’ve heard that song, “Grandma got run over by a reindeer.” Of course she had to go out for her medication.
And it’s funny when an old person gets hit by a reindeer. Try saying that a little Chinese boy got run over by a reindeer. Or a gorgeous gay dude, Not funny, is it?
The truth is, these jokes aren’t harmless. They reinforce stereotypes. A woman who is a registered nurse–who should know better–once told me, “Everybody’s back hurts when you turn 60.” That is simply not true. Lots of people get thru their 60s, 70s and even 80s with no back pain.
That’s what leads people to ask a healthy “older” person, “Are you okay?” Why would an older person NOT be ok? The odds are very much in favor.
But we are learning about more serious consequences.
Francine Prose has an article in The Guardian about cruel jokes involving ageism. She points out that no public figure has even been called to account for insensitive remarks on ageism. Race, yes. Relgion, of course. Sexuality? More and more. But age is a fair target.
Imagine, Francine Prose asks, that you’ve survived to a ripe old age. “Imagine,” she says, “how you might feel, in some as yet unimaginable future, to be told, simply because you have survived, to have a terrible day.”
That’s what a lot of these jokes do. A study by Judy Ober Allen, reported in Newsweek, looked at examples of everyday ageism. The study was published in an online edition of JAMA.
“These messages come in many forms,” says Newsweek. They come” in supposedly harmless birthday cards that skewer old age (“You know you’re getting older when it takes twice as long to look half as good”),”
Ageism, says the article, leads to significant worse health outcomes in a number of domains. One reason involves the health care community, which has embraced strereotypes of ageisn and used those stereotypes to guide treatment
