I from the US, just learned about these today, and had a chuckle.
an essex girl was driving down the A13 when her car phone rang. it was her boyfriend, urgently warning her "treacle, i just heard on the news that theres a car going the wrong way on the A13. please be careful!"
"its not just one car!" said the essex girl "theres hundreds of them!"
American here: when I read that in my own accent I didn’t get it, so I backed up and read the punchline in an English accent and I laughed. Funny how that works
Hell, that's going back a way. I don't think that I have heard one of those since the 90s. They really haven't aged well - not that they were exactly the height of PC humour back then.
What's the difference between a shopping trolley and an Essex girl?
I had a thought about finding similarly themed jokes about men, but haven’t had any luck yet. It’s true that a good number of blond jokes could be gender agnostic so long as they are just about intelligence.
Many probably are adaptations of old jokes. I've heard that one in a neutral version, in my native language, and now here. But yeah, not nice to target women.
It seems like these are just "blond jokes" from the 80's or recycled jokes about 2nd-gen feminists in america. I have no doubt they have their roots in misogyny.
The fact that it's usually women doing the dumb thing is problematic, but these jokes are easily mapped onto whoever you want to denigrate. As a Montana, these were often jokes about North Dakota, and as the scion of a large Norwegian clan, I also often heard these as Sven and Ole jokes.
To me the latter is actually a funnier way to approach them, because it's two characters who everyone knows are dumb (and who are stand-ins for those people in your life who act this way) and you're not just blanket insulting a whole group of people.
You're right. But add rich and disconnected too. I've never been, but I think Essex is Beverly Hills with bad weather.
Edit: I love being corrected here. I can't believe how wrong I was. If anyone is interested in the post-mortem of this disinformation, I love British panel shows and hate reality TV. So jokes about The Only Way is Essex completely blend together with Made in Chelsea. I think I thought they were the same because my brain turns off when reality TV comes up.
I wouldn't go that far, there's not a snobbishness associated with Essex people that I imagine there is with Beverly Hills (though I've never been to Beverly Hills). There is classism in the stereotype but people from Essex are generally looked down upon, not (so much) the other way round.
As a feminist and a leftist, it's ok to make jokes about people, or even specific groups of people, but it needs to be clever. If you can substitute the target of a joke with any non-specific group of people, it's not really clever, nor funny.
From the UK, actually born in Essex. Yes, 20-30 years ago people laughed at these, me included. These days you wouldn't tell them in public, if at all. Same as for 'Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman' jokes.
Anytime you're picking on someone for a characteristic that:
They didn't choose
They can't change
That's a bad look. These days if you tell a joke like this at work you're likely to get bad looks and your sudden employment will look bad.
This is probably true in your little social circle but crude jokes are still told most everywhere and they will by and large still get a good knee slap.
It's tricky to define but it has to do with proximity to London (Capital city) and the developing existence of influencers or (it girls) as they were known, combined with poor education and you had a generation of glamorous idiots, that were identified as being from Essex early. Think early Kim Kardashian such as Jordan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Price