Forum: ell.stackexchange.com
Tags: <word-meaning><phrase-meaning><jokes>
Title: Should "cooking" and "cleaning" be taken literally in "...two men at once. One cooking. One cleaning."
Question: Just read a tweet,   My fantasy is having two men at once. One cooking. One cleaning.   Is it a word play in which 'cleaning' refers to a sexual intercourse or, actually, 'cleaning' is there intended having its literal meaning?

Answers:
sents: text: Here's how I interpret it:
text: My fantasy is having two men at once.
text: This has a very obvious sexual meaning.
text: One cooking.
text: One cleaning.
text: This makes you reinterpret the earlier sentence with a non-sexual meaning:
text: My fantasy is having [one man cooking for me while another man cleans for me].
text: This subverts your expectations, which may be funny to you (depending on your sense of humor).
text: I think it retains some of the overtones of the original sentence, however.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/230/snailplane
score: 50
sents: text: Neither of the words "cooking" nor "cleaning" have any sexual connotation whatsoever.
text: That's the joke.
text: By attaching such mundane activities to a fantasy , one that starts with such an obvious sexual tone, it becomes a turn of phrase meant to make you laugh.
text: It's a PG-rated joke.
text: I'd like to add one small thing.
text: Even though it is becoming less so, cooking and cleaning are still considered tasks that fall to women.
text: So in this case, a woman fantasizing about two men performing those tasks is a play on gender-roles and her wish to escape them.
text: I'm a heterosexual woman, but I often joke that what I really need is a wife.
text: The joke in question has a similar play on traditional gender roles.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/4686/Jolenealaska
score: 26
sents: text: It's a joke.
text: When you read the first sentence -- "My fantasy is having two men" -- you immediately think that she's talking about sex.
text: Then when she says "one cooking, one cleaning", she is saying that it's not about sex at all, it's about housework.
text: That's why it's a joke.
text: She starts out making you think she's talking about sex, then pulls the rug out from under you when she makes it apparent that she's NOT talking about sex.
text: (I think this joke is originally from Rita Rudner.
text: Personally I thought it was pretty funny.)
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/803/Jay
score: 9
sents: text: Jay is 100% correct.
text: The humor lies in the overturning of expectations in the set-up line from the word “having,” which, in English, has a clearly sexual connotation.
text: This joke works well in English because the language is compact — in this case, all the punch-line words are Anglo-Saxon, rather than Latinate, and therefore more efficient from a timing and syllabic perspective.
text: Think how awkward this would be in French, in which language you can’t just say “having two men,” without violating the grammatical rules of L’Académie Francaise: J'ai deux hommes.
text: L’un qui fait la cuisine et l’autre qui fait le ménage .
text: Somehow, this lacks the punch (by the way, French perfection is not guaranteed).
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/4923/Red Howler
score: 4
sents: text: Despite how ruined I've become thanks to the internet, I don't think this one is a sexual joke, but a common joke that is not limited to English language only.
text: In my interpretation, the tweet describes a situation where a woman has two lovers who do some of her housework.
text: As a male, let me tell you that cooking a full course meal for even a small family and washing all the dishes afterwards takes a lot of time and is very exhausting.
text: You could swap the sexes and get a joke about how a man wishes he could have all his house work done by two women.
text: And in some countries this isn't a fantasy or even an uncommon scenario.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/2558/user1306322
score: 1
sents: text: I don't think that it's meant to be sexual in this instance - it's a fairly straightforward joke.
text: Some alternatively-minded people might read it as sexual, though: 'cleaning' is one word used to refer to a person giving oral to a female (can be male, but more often female) after she has had sex without a condom.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/4902/Macheleon
score: 0
sents: text: While just about any word can be given a tone of sexual innuendo in the right sentence,
text: e.g. I took the guy I met at the bar home with me and he really cleaned my clock!
text: the whole point of this joke is that the meaning is not sexual after an opening that implies something sexual will follow.
text: It's a common enough interpretation of gender stereotypes that men fantasize about sex and women fantasize about having a man to take his share of the domestic burdens.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/30533/arp
score: 0

Summary of the answers:
It's a joke. By attaching such mundane activities to a  fantasy , one that starts with such an obvious sexual tone, it becomes a turn of phrase meant to make you laugh. Neither of the words "cooking" nor "cleaning" have any sexual connotation whatsoever.
This is a joke. Neither of the words have sexual connotations.