The other week during downtime at the resthome after most of our work was done for the shift, I pulled out the memoir I was reading, by one of the Guerilla Girls, these pretty well-known feminist activists who do edgy protest art to draw attention to sexism in the art world.
And, my one (Muslim) (Ethiopian) coworker saw that I was reading that, and she asked me what it was.
So, I told her, and she was intrigued.
I then told her about their edgy humor and I shared a few examples with her, like how they made a poster observing that some museum only had 3% of its paintings by women but like 80% of its nudes were female, which made them ask if you had to be nude to get inside the museum.
"Mmm," she was like, approvingly, when she heard that.
I also read her a bit of a theater protest flyer, and the observation that a joy of a woman playwright was to live in the moment, since you wouldn't ever enter the history of theater.
"Ooooh," she was like.
"The humor is very sharp and dark," I was like.
"Yes," she was like.
I then held out the book and she read the final point of that flyer, which was something like how as an older playwright you get used to failure, since "your breasts also flop."
"What is 'flop'?", she was like.
"It's a metaphor for 'fail,'" I was like, "And it means when something falls all at once," and I held my hands by my chest and kind of let them plop down as I blew a raspberry PFFFFFFT.
"That's flop," I was like.
"Ooooooh!", she was like, and threw her head back and laughed really heartily.
She really is cool. I wonder if that earthy sense of humor is her, or maybe it's a(n Ethiopian) thing?
Who knows, maybe it's both.
. . .
(I also made sure to test the waters with the memoir and keep the edgiest stuff till the end, to see how she reacted; I didn't want to get into harassment territory with a colleague with sharing that humor.)
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