Title: The doctor vs the engineer

General Information about Item:

• verbal folklore, joke/Riddle
• Language: English
• Country of Origin: United States
• Informant: Eric Krivitzki
• Date Collected: 5-11-19

Informant Data:

Professor Eric is an Aerospace engineer who have worked in the field for 15 years and decided to get a new challenge in Academia. So he decided to pursue his phd at Dartmouth. As a Phd, he is the instructor for the fluid lab. Before each lab meeting, he asks his students to come with an engineering related joke.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context: Engineers love this joke and always laughs at it however, doctors usually takes offense even though the jokes depicts worse because of the amount of people they can harm at once.
• Cultural context: Doctors suffer pressure that engineers don’t. The life of patients depend on the doctor in the moment. When the patient dies, the doctor usually takes it personally because he couldn’t save a life that he felt responsible for.  For engineers, the idea that someone could die is abstract because it will be in the future. Even if it happens, engineers usually work in teams so they don’t usually feel responsible for the deaths.

Item 

what’s the difference between an engineer and a doctor?

A doctor kills one person at a time.

Informant’s Comments:

• it’s one of his favorite jokes even tho he says: “it’s not appropriate”

Collector’s Comments:

As a potential/future engineer, I like the joke.

Collector’s name: Pierre Desvallons