Joke – California

“So basically, you just add ‘in bed’ to the end of any fortune cookie fortune and it just makes it so much funnier.

‘You will touch the hearts of many in bed’

See it works so well with that one”

Rocky heard about this game just a few weeks ago from another friend in Parkside Suites on the University of Southern California campus. She and a couple of friends went to eat at P.F. Chang’s and at the end of the meal, they got fortune cookies. They went back to campus and were just hanging out in someone’s room. They started opening their fortunes and read them out loud and added “in bed” to the end of the fortunes. It made everyone laugh really hard because it was very random and had sexual innuendos in them. This joke is told when people have fortune cookies to eat, so it is most likely told after people eat food from a Chinese restaurant that gives away fortune cookies at the end of the meal.

I believe that sex has become a large part of American society with all the sexual content on television and in movies. People feel freer to express themselves and their bodies. Even though sex is a more common topic, people are still not completely comfortable talking about it in a straightforward fashion. Jokes help relieve the tension and are seen as funny and that is why Rocky and her friends added sexual innuendos to fortune cookies. Turing something clean and unexciting into something sexual in a joking manner is socially acceptable. The joke was probably created by a random person who had sex on his or her mind and decided to let it out after reading a fortune cookie by adding “in bed” to the end of it. His or her friends probably heard it and thought it was very funny and so they shared it with their friends. Differing from the creator, they did not need to have sexual thoughts to pass this on because they told it for the main purpose of humor.