A reader writes:
I work in the marketing department of a fairly large healthcare company. I’ve been with the company for 15 years and with the marketing team for 12, and my coworkers are one of my favorite things about my job. We all get along really well, my boss and grandbosses are extremely supportive, and there is literally no drama in our department ever (there has been in the past, but the people who bring the drama always end up leaving or getting let go).
I say all that to say that what I’m writing about today is definitely an anomaly in an otherwise extremely positive work experience.
We all work remotely, but we get together in person twice a year for a couple of days and we recently had one of those meetings. We usually have one or two optional social outings, which I always attend because I enjoy hanging out with my coworkers. We’ve done things like going on a dolphin cruise, doing an escape room, happy hours, that kind of thing.
Well, this time, our administrative assistant, “Gina.” scheduled us for a Redneck Comedy bus tour. And yes, it was just EXACTLY how you would imagine it to be based on the name. I decided to give it a chance, because maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I was expecting and plus, like I said, I enjoy hanging with my coworkers so I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to do that.
But it was definitely as bad as I expected. I don’t think this guy told a single joke that wasn’t racist, sexual, or misogynistic, if not all three. And the crazy thing to me is that Gina mentioned that she had warned the guy that we were a corporate group so he should keep everything HR-appropriate. I shudder to think what his non-HR-appropriate schtick was.
So I guess my question is: am I crazy or is that type of thing wildly inappropriate for a work-sponsored outing? Everyone else (there were 10 of us altogether) seemed to think it was hilarious, although I did see a few of them occasionally groaning at some of the worst jokes. And I feel like it’s important to note that the single black person on our team chose not to attend, which I can’t imagine is a coincidence since she’s participated in all the other activities we’ve done on past trips.
I’m going back and forth on whether I should speak up and say something. I didn’t say anything at the time because I didn’t want to ruin everyone else’s fun, but I kind of regret that now, since it probably seemed like I was perfectly fine with it. But now Gina sent us a survey to fill out and one of the questions has to do with feedback on the social portion of the week. I feel pretty confident that my boss and grandbosses would hear me out and there would be zero retaliation or bad reactions or anything from them. I guess I just need a little confirmation that my gut feeling about the whole thing isn’t off-base.
You are not off-base. Speak up!
This is egregious enough that you should speak up even if you weren’t being asked for feedback, but your opinion is being actively solicited! There is zero reason to keep your concerns to yourself, and tons of reasons to speak up.
Nearly every joke being racist, sexual, or misogynistic puts this so over the line that I’m baffled that Gina didn’t say something in the moment or immediately afterwards, given that earlier she’d thought about it enough to warn the comic to keep it work-appropriate. At a minimum she should have acknowledged it afterwards — but it would have been better to short-circuit the show once it was clear bigotry and sexism would be the theme. To be fair to Gina, that’s hard to do mid-show if you’re not in a senior role. But someone else there in a position of leadership should have.
Broadly speaking, stand-up comedy can be tricky for workplace events, since so much humor relies on being edgy and one person’s “edginess” is another person’s offensiveness. So any work group hiring a comedian needs to be clear ahead of time about what’s off-limits and make sure the comedian will adhere to that — and they also need to be willing to step in if things go off the rails.
And ugh, my heart hurts for your coworker, who sounds like she had a pretty good idea ahead of time of what this was likely to be and now has to grapple with the fact that her coworkers happily went and seemed to enjoy it.
Please speak up, and don’t sugarcoat it.
