Humor & Life Quote by Victoria Wood

Victoria Wood’s joke lands with that deceptively mild, office-kettle tone she perfected, then twists the blade. “Sexual harassment at work... is it a problem for the self-employed?” is built on a sly bit of grammar: the ellipsis mimics the careful throat-clearing of workplace “awareness” talk, the kind that treats harassment as a policy memo rather than a lived threat. Then she flips the frame. If you’re self-employed, who’s the harasser? The answer, implied and mortifying, is: you. Or at least, your own mind, habits, loneliness, and blurred boundaries.

The intent isn’t to minimize harassment; it’s to expose how institutions like to contain it. In a company, harassment is filed under HR, risk management, trainings with laminated badges. Wood punctures that bureaucratic containment by pushing the question into a place where the formal machinery collapses. It’s comedy as a stress test: remove the office hierarchy and you still have power, desire, entitlement, self-deception. The joke forces a recognition that harassment isn’t only a “bad apple” problem; it’s also a culture-of-permission problem, one that can live inside a person even when there’s no boss, no watercooler, no corridor with a too-close hand.

Context matters: Wood came up in a Britain where “a bit of a laugh” routinely served as camouflage for sexism, and where women were expected to be good sports about it. Her genius is to sound like she’s asking a practical question while actually staging an indictment of how workplaces sanitize harm, and how easily society treats women’s discomfort as an administrative detail.