No jokes about sociologists

I’ve been writing an essay about sociology of the arts this week. I just got past the four main strands of sociological thinking: positivist, interpretivist, marxist and postmodern (according to V.D. Alexander).

Flipping through what feels like hundreds of books today, I found some funny thoughts on why sociologists are never made fun of, in Peter L. Berger’s book Invitation to sociology. Briefly put, in the US psychologists are usually the butt of many jokes, but no one seems to find anything funny about sociologists, even though both groups concern themselves with human behaviour, although in different ways. This of course can be explained by the general confusion about what sociologists actually do.

He also found it very amusing that so many new sociology students actually think they are going to “work with people” when they study sociology, that the education is about social services and human resources or humanitarian aid and so on, and that the disappointment that they must experience when they realize how academic sociology is – and that even a misantropic attitude is possible within sociological research – must be huge (could be the subject of a great american novel, in Berger’s own words).

Now I’m going to pick up a T-shirt that I had printed with the image of Peter Falk as Columbo. It’s for my partner, for his birthday next week. He’s been watching old Columbo episodes for weeks. My biggest problem will be to contain myself and not give him his gift right when I get home. I’m really bad at keeping gifts for a long time. It’s so satisfying to give them right away…