the butt of the joke

the butt of the joke

Someone or something at whose expense an insulting or mocking joke is made. I like hanging out with my brother and his friends, even though he likes to make me the butt of his jokes. Due to their disastrous advertising campaign last month, the company has been the butt of many jokes on the Internet lately.
See also: butt, joke, of
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • be the butt of something
  • be the butt of the joke
  • jest at
  • jest at (someone or something)
  • take a dig at
  • take a dig at (someone or something)
  • take a dig at someone
  • have a dig at (someone or something)
  • take a jab at (someone or something)
  • take a jab at someone
References in periodicals archive
I'm the butt of the joke in my family, just because the ten minutes I had in international football was ruined by one man.
WHAT A LOO-SER The stunned man tries to save his dignity only to end up the butt of the joke for the entire advert
"It's great to see Wolverhampton in a comedy where it's not the butt of the joke.
There's a butt of the joke, and in Jewish humor, the Jew in the joke is the butt of the joke. He's not the victim.
SAXONDALE 2006 "If you compare ex-roadie Tom Saxondale with Alan Partridge, he wasn't always the butt of the joke."
It's a joke that agents at the Postal Inspection Service probably chuckled over, even though they were the butt of the joke. The truth is, that's about as much recognition as the Postal Inspection Service might ever receive.
Some people's ears prick up the minute they hear the word, 'wheelchair' or 'handicapped', but he wasn't the butt of the joke and neither was his disability.
The butt of the joke replies dos chalindas, 'two ties.' The final s is pronounced as an h sound, an almost imperceptible breathing.
This time the Englishman is the butt of the joke - the victim of a weak if not broken Reid who is failing to introduce a comprehensive ban on smoking in public places in England.
Of course, if you can't speak the language, you won't know when you're the butt of the joke. Things heat up later on in Leipzig at the annual Euro-Scene Festival, where the theme this year is "Die Liebe = Chance der Unmoglichkeit" ("Love = Chance of Impossibility").
He's constantly the butt of the joke and the fall guy I suppose.''
Cartoonist Bernard Parkin has resisted the temptation to make any one person the butt of the joke, but with a dinosaur saying to another, "This could be the end of the world as we know it," the finger is clearly being pointed at owners failing to support the sponsorship scheme.
At first glance, the themes of heroic virtue and comic infidelity might not seem to be complementary, but as the papers of Jeffrey Persels, Gary Ferguson, Paula Sommers, and Jerry Nash demonstrate, under Marguerite's feminist pen, representations of heroic virtue are more frequently comic than exemplary, and while calling male honor into question, frequently make men the butt of the joke. Stories of comic infidelity also provoke laughter at the expense of men, though infidelity is comic only in certain specific circumstances as the papers of Judy Kem and Sommers show.
Further, the data reveal examples of humor in which the out-group is the butt of the joke and some in which the in-group is the principal subject.
Research suggests men are more likely to use humour aggressively by making others the butt of the joke.