Milkman joke
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Milkman jokes, though they appear in dozens of different forms, all have the same basic plot: a woman gives birth to an infant who more closely resembles the local milkman than her husband, revealing the child's biological father and, in the process, the mother's adultery. The joke has become a fixture in popular culture and thought, to the point of becoming hackneyed and tiresome.
The joke's context is an era in Western society that lacked inexpensive and ubiquitous refrigeration, and milkmen were an established trade. A milkman would regularly visit each house in an assigned neighborhood, usually in the morning, to drop off bottles of fresh milk and take away empty bottles from his previous visit. In the same era, men were almost without exception the sole financial supporters of their families, and a man's wife was expected to remain at home to care for their children. As the milkman would visit the home at a time when the husband would be away at work, this created an opportune situation for adultery.
As fears and suspicions over paternity are universal, each culture has its equivalent of the milkman joke. And occasionally, derivatives of the joke appear, with the milkman having been replaced by a member of some different occupation: the mailmen, plumbers or generic repairmen are often used. One variant is the series of Farkle family sketches from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, where a couple's children all resemble their next-door neighbor. Even Monty Python's Flying Circus had a short milkman sketch, where a lonely housewife lures the milkman into her house and up many stairs, then shoves him in a room with nine other milkmen, many of whom are very old (and two skeletons wearing a milkmen uniform) and locks the door. The writer of the sketch is in turn Ernest Scribbler.
[edit] Example
The mother and father of a child show their new baby to a friend of the family. The friend mentions that the baby has light hair whereas its older siblings have dark hair, and asks why. The mother says, “Oh, we have a new milkman.”
