A therapist colleague recently agreed with me that the funniest things we’d ever heard were told to us by our clients. Summer break (and the week of the bar exam) seems like an appropriate time for a laugh. So…without further ado…here are some of my clients’ funniest utterances from the past few years:
- (An Arab client) “Don’t worry, Will – my name is Saif (pronounced “safe”), so all the sex I have is ‘Saif sex!'”
- “My mother did everything around the house. If my father asked her to do an extra chore she’d say ‘fine, and I’ll stick a broom up my ass so I can sweep the kitchen floor at the same time!'”
- “I prefer the term ‘MoHo’ – Fag Hag is so last year.”
- Diet coke and vodka. It’s a dieter’s drink. Just order a “skinny black bitch.”
- “My best friend and I played a game called “MFK” – Marry, Fuck or Kill. You pick three random people and decide which you’d marry, fuck and kill. But that got boring. The new variation is ‘Oral, Vaginal or Anal.'”
- “My husband’s an investment banker and works in Abu Dhabi half the year. I’m a ‘gulf widow’.”
- (A gay man, about his ex) “I tried to detard him. That’s when you un-tard a retard. Needless to say, I failed.”
- “I’m a ShoMo – a big Broadway musical queen.”
- (An obstetrician) “Dr. Jones, at your cervix. Dilated to meet you!”
- “I thought my boyfriend was a guido, going to Atlantic City to party with his yo-bro’s. It turned out he was a ‘mo. Those yo-bro’s were his mo-bro’s.”
- “My boyfriend is kind of kinky. I call him a ‘BOB’. A ‘bend-over boyfriend.'”
- (A leather queen patiently correcting me): “The phrase ‘ass-less chaps’ is redundant, Will.”
- (On a Skype session with a client in Japan) “I feel like I’m having an earthquake.” “You mean, from the session?” “No, the house is shaking.” (Indeed, she’d been experiencing an earthquake during our call.)
- “When I was 11 years old, a bully beat me up and I refused to go to school the next day. My mother told me we were immigrants, and I had to be brave. She gave me a $10 bill and said, find a big kid and pay him to beat up the bully.”
- “He wasn’t really hot. He was “lawyer-hot” – as in, I was stuck at work and horny.”
“My friends have a party game – match the most unlikely Asian surname to a Western given name. My personal favorite is ‘Tyrone Ramachandran.'”- “So he came on her back while she was sleeping and stuck the sheet on it. That’s called ‘superman-ing the bitch.'”
- “He rolled his foreskin over my foreskin – that’s called ‘docking.'”
- Told by a woman with a particularly wicked sense of humor: “What do 9 out of 10 people enjoy? Gang rape.”
- “He tried to omelet me. That’s when he comes in my ear and folds it over.”
- Told by an attractive young blonde: “This cab driver in Rome asked me the time. He was about 70 years old, four feet tall and didn’t speak English. I shook my head. So he gestured like this (facing the palms of his hands over one another like two people in bed) and said ‘meesh-meesh?’ Now I say “meesh-meesh” instead of ‘have sex.’ (So, eventually, did the rest of her therapy group, after hearing that story.)
- “I’m Filipino. I don’t talk about sex. But we did stuff. That’s all I’ll say – we did stuff.” (…which is how “did stuff” became the official euphemism for sex in my other therapy group.)
- (Asian client) “Once you’ve had Asian – there’s no more Caucasian.”
- (Black client) “Once you’ve had white – you go white back to black.”
- Client in my HIV+ gay men’s group: “My thing is low-hangers. I love low-hangers.” (This brought the group to a stand-still.)
- “I went to a meeting of a nudist book club, but it was movie night.”
- “She DIH-n’t!” (Said by a gay Latin client.) “Yuh-huh she did!” (I was coached to say this precisely in sync with him.)
- (A Cameroonian client) “My mother’s family tried to bury my aunt on our property, so they could build their house there – but we chased them off. It is our land still.”
- (A drag queen) “A sidecar, in a wine glass, with three cherries. That’s a drag queen drink.”
- (A young woman experimenting with swinging and group sex.) “He ‘Houdini-ed’ her. That’s when you do a girl from behind, against a big window. Then you pull out, and your buddy takes over, while you run around the front of the window and wave at them.”
- “I suppose my boyfriend might have been more aware of my feelings if he weren’t FUCK-TARDED.”
- (A plus size woman making light of her predicament) How is a moped like a fat girl? They’re both fun to ride until your friends see you.
That’s enough for now. You get the idea. Enjoy your summer and good luck on the bar!
The People's Therapist 
These are hysterical!!
Much as I love my clients, I think yours get the prize for being the funniest. Must be because we’re corn-fed midwesterners.
I greatly enjoy your blog!
THAT is some funny shit! I actually had a client (I’m a lawyer turned legal educator) who said to me in typical B-movie fashion:
“My mother is spending MY inheritance. How can I stop her?”
Damn…I might need a tele-session with you afterall…:)
Redundant chaps = LOL, but I’m surprised at all the racism and sexism and touches of homophobia. And rape as a punchline? Is Lisa Lampanelli one of the clients?
Well…I didn’t make this stuff up, it’s just crazy, silly stuff I’ve heard from clients over the years. I’m merely reporting. As for the homophobia – it was gay people telling this stuff to me – a gay person – so I wouldn’t worry too much. As for the racism and sexism…I guess I just have to say hey, lighten up. It was, in fact, a woman who told the rape joke, and she knew – and I knew – that it was in terrible taste – but if she’d told me a “dead baby” joke that wouldn’t have made her a baby killer any more than telling me this bit of tasteless humor made her a rapist. These were just jokes. It’s summer, and I thought I’d share some of this stuff – simply for the fun of it.
If this is what you’re hearing, i think you need to be paying me
I don’t care the gender of the person who told the rape jokes. You have multiple rape jokes on here and I hope you aren’t actually a therapist because rape isn’t fucking funny, and isn’t something to joke about regardless of how funny the joke part of it is.
This was a long time ago, but yeah, I’m actually a therapist, and I think the young woman who told me the “Houdini” joke was actually processing some stuff by using humor. She was also into group sex – consensual, of course. I’m not sure censoring free expression is a therapist’s job. In any case, my purpose in this post was simply to report some of the odd stuff therapists listen to over the years from their patients. No, rape isn’t funny, and yes, of course I’ve worked with survivors of rape over the years. But I’m also struck by how much anger gets directed at me randomly in online comments and so forth, just because I’m a therapist. There’s a strong parental transference to therapists and so sometimes I feel like I’m either being unrealistically drowned in love – or the object of random rancor and resentment. In fact, I’m just a therapist, and yeah, this is the sort of stuff we sometimes hear during our work, and some of it is amusing, or at least weird and offbeat, and so…I posted it. I was fortunate to have known Joan Rivers before she died, and she was always heckling her audiences right back when they objected to her scandalous sense of humor. “Oh, get over it! It’s a joke!” Joan’s point (and she was a brilliant woman who survived a lot of trauma in her life) was that the worse things are, the more we need humor to make light of them and put them behind us. That “9 out of 10” joke is funny (or some people find it funny) in part because it points out why rape isn’t funny…because it victimizes someone. Joan Rivers told Holocaust jokes, and they were funny, but they also taught a lesson in the same way, and I admired Joan’s tough determination that that’s a comedian’s job. So, yeah, I’m really a therapist, and (amazingly enough) I also have a sense of humor and I’m an adult and I respect my clients enough to report the stuff they say uncensored, and respect why people are complicated and they might benefit from saying stuff that’s shocking, and funny, and not always ready for prime time. That’s real life, which is a therapist’s bread and butter.
Ugh this is the first online argument of my life and it does not appeal to me. It’s not just becuase you are a therapist that I’m offended but i think that’s very relevant. There is a huge movement right now against comedians joking about rape, and that movement is led by survivors. You are a therapist, you are Supposedly one of the most informed professionals about the harm of sexual assault, and you are undermining that movement.
I have told my share of rape jokes in the therapy room. It helps me process my trauma, I totally agree. There’s a big difference between that, and joking in public and out of context, jokes that don’t clearly demonize and rip on rapists. I would be horrified if my therapist anonymously shared one of the rape jokes I made on her office.
Well, for the record, this woman wasn’t horrified – she read the blog entry and thought it was funny (no, no one’s confidentiality was compromised in any way, shape or form, so you can drop that line of attack.) Generally, speaking, I’m not a fan of censorship or hardline rules around communication. I agree with Joan Rivers that humor thrives on risk-taking and the speaking of forbidden truths. Inhibiting the free sharing of ideas and feelings certainly isn’t conducive to psychotherapy. I suppose you were horrified by “Springtime for Hitler,” too (and Mel Brooks calls himself a Jew!) I guess when you listen to as much human pain as I do for a living, you start to value the odd moment of levity, even the unexpected ones that might not click with every audience.