A lesbian walks into a bar...
Probably with a suitcase if she's on a second date. She'll order some liquor... but will only hook up once a month if she's a vampire (the rest of the time she'll be at home with the adopted cats).
Lesbian comedy is a funny old thing. I recently went to a female comedy night where two of the three performers were lesbians. Whilst noticing which performers were inducing snorts of laughter and which were producing toe-curling tumbleweed, I started thinking about what we collectively deem to be funny, and why. My initial explanation was the age-old one - that we laugh in recognition. But there's more to it than that. We don't laugh in recognition of serious things (arguably collective recognition of the serious belongs more to support groups than comedy nights, even if humour can be used as a coping mechanism). We only really laugh (out loud) in recognition of the ridiculous.
I think this is because humour allows us to objectify ourselves and see how ridiculous a lot of human behaviour is. In laughing collectively, we don't need to feel criticism or anxiety about being ridiculous - it is presented as inevitable and safe if we're all ridiculous together.
However, with lesbian comedy we are laughing at the recognition of stereotypes themselves and how ridiculous they are, as much as recognising any truth within these stereotypes. This is partly why it's only really ok for a lesbian to make a lesbian joke. It's because however subtly, the humour is coming from a different place to a straight person making the same joke, which is always going to have an element of laughing 'at' not 'with', regardless of whether any party thinks there is actually any truth in the joke or whether the joke itself is designed to be satirical.
I do wonder, though, if we fuel stereotypes by joking about them, even when we are ridiculing their absurdity? Satire has a political and cultural power to challenge opinion that can sometimes have more impact than rhetoric, and there is a place for it. But if more of the humour of lesbian comedy comes from everyday scenarios and observations than specifically lesbian stereotypes, then I think more of us will be laughing and more stereotypes will be debunked, as *gasp* when we're not packing the suitcase or feeding the cats, we are really just dealing with the same kind of ridiculous stuff as anyone else. Don't get me wrong, I love a good lesbian pun as much as the next person, but if we can intersperse these with more everyday humour then I think the joke will be on us in the right way.