You can’t use mother-in-law jokes as an indicator, because it depends on who’s telling the joke.
Here’s one from Joan Rivers.
I knew my mother-in-law didn’t like me when they wheeled in the wedding cake and she bit the head off the bride
Compare it with one often attributed to Fred Allen.
“Behind every successful man stands a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.”
Premise not True.
See the documentary, Everybody Loves Raymond.
Mussolini in knickers was another of Les Dawson’s.
(His relationship with his real-life MIL was much better than that, I believe)
In UK culture, most of the stereotypes are about the wife’s mother, though there is a less frequent recognised trope (more dramatic than comedic?) about bad relationships between a wife and her husband’s mother. It might simply be that stand-up comedians from the music-hall years onwards were almost all men.
Then again, it was quite common among working-class families for a newly-married couple to start out in the parental home, with all the resultant stresses and strains, though whether it was more common for that to be the wife’s parents rather than the husband’s, I don’t know.
The other comic strand is the relationship between the wife and her own mother (particularly once there’s a baby).
“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Les Dawson: I haven’t said a word to my mother-in-law in almost twenty years. It’s not that I’ve got nothing to say, I’m just not quick enough to interrupt her.
In that this thread is about a stereotype, then I would say that in the 50s stereotype, the woman runs the household, and probably runs it like her mother did. The groom’s mother is used to a household running a different way and complains. Also, in the 50’s stereotype, it’s the woman’s job to make the man happy at home, her mother will think the wife is doing fine, but his mother will never think her son can be too well-taken care of.
That’s my two cents.
To the extent that the premise is true, for a long time, families needed to “marry off” their daughters so they didn’t become a burden, since women supporting themselves just wasn’t done, and in many countries, women couldn’t even inherit from their parents in the absence of brothers-- everything went to the closest male relative.
When that was happening, parents participated in choosing their sons-in-law, but men chose their wives often with little input from their parents.
Therefore, mothers-in-law on the wife’s side, first of all, saw their sons-in-law as the guy who made sure they didn’t have to support a spinster daughter, and also, he was someone they favored prior to the marriage.
The husband’s mother had to establish a relationship with whomever their son chose, and it might not be the woman who was first on mom’s list. So sometimes the wife became the target of resentment, as well as bearing the burden of not being their mother-in-law’s ideal.
Not to mention, some parents saw finding a daughter’s husband a chore that had finally ended, while for the husband’s mother, the chore began with the marriage.
Other.
The era in which mother in law jokes were fairly common was an era dominated by male comics.
And I suspect that the few female comics had bigger fish to fry than attacking mothers.
ETA upon them reading other replies. But Joan Rivers did!
Still bias based mostly on n of gender of the comics.
I’ll add that those make comics also made fun of their mothers, not just their mother-in-laws. And given that a disproportionate number of these comics the Jewish mother joke was popularized. Not sure if they made fun of MILs quite as much but still so many male comics compared to women and volume volume volume.
Not stand-up, but if I go back to Till Death Us Do Part, much humor was derived from the (hostile) relationship between father-in-law and son-in-law. I guess few US Dopers will know Till Dear Us Do Part, but you’ll know the US version, All In The Family - was the spiky relationship not retained in that?
(Sorry, I have never seen All In The Family - I don’t think it was ever shown in the UK. I am aware of its huge significance in the US, though, hence my question.)
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Oh yeah. The irascible leading character father hated the loser his daughter wanted to marry then later did marry. The younger man more pitied his fool of a FIL, but no love lost there either. Meantime the younger man got along fine with his new MIL.
Yes, All in the Family had a tense relationship between father and son-in-law, although they became more comfortable with each other when the daughter and son-in-law moved into their own home.
To the point of this thread, though, the mother/mother-in-law in AITF was the one character that everyone loved.
For fathers-in-law there is the “no good son in law, no one’s good enough for my princess” trope for the father of the bride. I can’t think of any tropes involving fathers of grooms/husbands.
Mothers-in-law are seen as more interested in intervening in long term family politics, but I’ve seen them about split between mother of bride and mother of groom.
Well the TV show that I find closest to real life is as always Bewitched. Both mothers in law tried to intervene to various extents. As did the wife’s father in law. The husband’s father in law (played by two different actors, nothing special for Bewitched) was a non-entity.
I’d be interested in a story where the father of the groom played a disruptive role, where he was still married to the mother and the mother was around as well. I can’t think of any.
Ah yes, me too. I assume you have a very clean house, among other nice benefits of TV-style witchcraft, so long as your husband doesn’t catch you.
I don’t know; I’ve heard of it, but haven’t watched it. There is a whole lot of stuff most people have watched that I haven’t.
There is that; but often when I’ve seen it it’s been more about preventing the marriage or controlling dating than about anything after the marriage has been acknowledged to have occured.
Yeah, that was kind of a double-take for me as well. Bewitched, the grittily realistic documentary about a spell-casting enchantress from a magic-enabled family and her ordinary-mortal husband. Uh-huh.
My MIL &FIL had only beloved sons, so when the DIL’s started showing up they sometimes played them against each other, or tried too. And there were attempts at long distance coercion regarding matters that were none of their business. Career- come back and join the family biz, religion- find a church preferably protestant, politics- if you’re not an R shut up.
And other overblown drama like trying to use the grandkids to inflict guilt.
Then they got old mellow and nostalgic, my MIL actually apologized for a few things from the past. We assured her it was under the bridge, and it was - never did we retaliate in any way But we accepted her apology.
They didn’t get along but I think there was an aspect of mother-in-law jokes that was missing. Maybe just because it wasn’t a single joke or series of jokes , but on AITF it seemed to be specific to that particular husband - maybe Archie would have been fine if Gloria had married a guy who worked on the loading dock or as a bartender who supported her rather than the college student who moved into Archie’s house and didn’t have a job. On the other hand, the mothers-in-law of jokes seem to be more of the opinion that no one is good enough for their child - even in the ones where the wife’s mother brings up her ex-boyfriend the surgeon, it seems like if she had married the surgeon , mom would have found a different ex to compare him to unfavorably.