Blonde Joke – Stranded on an Island

Three women, a brunette, and redhead, and a blonde are stranded on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean.  There is no food or way of surviving for an extended about of time.  The mainland, however, is only ten miles away.  Knowing that they face certain death if they stay there, the redhead decides to try to swim to safety.  She swims three miles, gets tired, then drowns.  The other two islanders are obviously dismayed; however, the brunette knows that she has to at least try to swim to safety.  “I’m stronger than that weak redhead; if anybody has a chance of making it off this island, its me.”  Having said this, she sets off.  She swims and swims, passing the redheads three mile mark.  However at around seven miles, she tires out, and unable to stay afloat, drowns.  The blonde is now left all alone.  “I guess I may as well try too,” she said.  She starts to swim. One mile, two miles, three miles… before she knows it, she is nine miles away from the island.  “I’m really really tired,” she says, “I  can’t go on!”  So, she swims back to the island.

My younger brother, Nathanael Gong, told me this story when I asked him for a “funny joke.”  He currently attends Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, California.  A junior, he says he cannot remember where he learned this joke.  Having grown up in the same house in Hermosa Beach as him, perhaps it is not unsurprising that the joke sounded extremely familiar to me when he started telling it.

The source, Nathanael, explained that this joke was just one in a large series of what he called “blonde jokes.”  This category of jokes is founded on the belief that blondes are inherently less intelligent than individuals with other colors of hair.  These jokes usually imply that the subject is a blonde woman, though often they do not specify gender.  This gender implication could testify to the belief that men are more intelligent than women.  Thus blonde jokes are based a couple of bigoted ideas – that blondes are not as smart as those of other hair colors, and that women are less intelligent than men.

The reason this joke is funny, of course, is because of the stupidity of the blonde individual in this story.  Having been stranded on the desert island with two friends, a redhead and brunette, the blonde is presented with the same dilemma as her friends.  The term “brunette” is most commonly used to refer to brown-haired women; for this reason I will refer to the individuals as women.  The redhead is the first to try to escape the island.  Unfortunately for her, she is not strong enough to swim the entire distance and drowns after three miles.  The brunette goes next, making it much farther than the redhead but ultimately falling short of survival.  Based on the results of these two women, it could be inferred that the author of the joke felt that brunettes were stronger or in some way more capable than redheads.  Finally, we come to the poor blonde.  She swims a whopping nine miles before deciding she is too tired and swimming back.   This is of course the irony of the story; even though she could have swum one more mile to the safety of the shore, she instead chose to swim the long miles back to the desert island.  Her stupidity in this situation is the facet of the joke that makes this joke funny.  The listener and teller both realize the smart decision (to swim the extra mile) and the blonde’s ignorance of it. Upon coming upon this fact, both get a good laugh out of this poor individual’s stupidity.