12 Dark Humor Jokes From Chloé Hilliard

12 On Protesting

“I’ma be honest with you — I don’t go out there and march. I’m too tall to march. I’m 6-foot-1. I’m head and shoulders above most people, and that’s just two rubber bullets to the dome. I don’t want that. No, thank you. Then they start throwing tear gas, and it’s gonna rise up to my nostrils. I’m lactose intolerant. I can’t even put milk in my eyes. No, thank you.”

11 On Bad Dates

“Ladies, we’ve all been on a date with a guy and thought, ‘He might kill me…’ Because he’s just that weird. And what do we do? We go to the bathroom; we text our best friend: ‘If you don’t hear from me in four hours, here’s the password to my Facebook…’ Because you don’t want to die and your last status be ‘Face down ass up in the club!’ But see, we women, we’re smart. We go back to the table with the possible killer and we say, ‘I’m going to get out of this. In order for me to get home safe, I might have to sleep with them. I might have to take one for the team.’ But listen, ladies: You’re not a ho if your life is on the line.”

10 On Other People’s Kids

“When you don’t have children, you can see the flaws in other people’s kids, because that’s how nature tricks us women. Because as soon as a woman has a baby she forgives all the problems of the world. You could be in the middle of a war zone, she’s like, ‘My baby’s the best gift that ever happened. All my hopes and dreams…’ Bombs going off. ‘My baby is the future, I love it so much.’

“I don’t have those rose-colored glasses, and so I can look at y’all kids and tell you someone fucked up. I don’t have that, that “mom thing.” Let me tell you something, if you have a little child in your life and they can’t have their food touch each other? They’re gonna be carving somebody up in 20 years, I’m just letting you know right now. Just slow cuts, like thin prosciutto cuts — while they listen to Bach in the background, in a shed, humming classical notes.”

9 On Student Debt

“I graduated 20 years ago, and I still have student loan debt. And my thing is like, I don’t ever want to pay it off. That’s my FU to college. I hope this Earth burns down before I get a zero balance on my student loans. I want to see an asteroid coming. I’ll be like, ‘FUCK YOU BURSAR’S OFFICE!’ I’m never paying that debt off to the last dime. I want the balance on my tombstone.”

8 On Therapy

“The only thing I knew about therapy as a kid was that it was the thing the bad kid in class did on Thursdays. The guidance counselor/social worker would come knocking on that little tiny glass window — ‘Come on, James!’ And you’d just see James freaking out going, ‘I DON’T WANNA GO!’ He’d start knocking over papers, kicking over chairs, breaking crayons — ‘I DON’T WANNA GO!’ You’d be sitting in class: ‘How come James gets to miss math? We wanna miss math, too!’ The teachers were like, ‘Shut up, his parents don’t love him. C’mon, two plus two, let’s go…”

7 On History

“Every region in America has something embedded in it from its origin that we don’t realize still impacts how we live today. Like New York is really rugged and gritty because New York was about survival. When the first settlers got there, they didn’t know how to do anything. The Native Americans gave them cornbread, and then they survived the first winter. And then they killed the Native Americans because they were like, ‘We don’t want to share this cornbread.’ And that’s the essence of New York: ‘Who do I have to kill today to make it till tomorrow?’

“L.A.’s origin story is the Gold Rush. Everybody came out here to find gold. They were like, ‘I’m going to be the one to find a nugget of gold and change my family’s life forever!’ And that’s why everybody in Los Angeles is delusional today.”

6 On Terror Threats

“I kinda miss ISIS. ‘Cause remember when they were doing their damage, we used to get up every morning, and there’d be a color grid on the news to let us know the terror threat and how to function — like, yellow, orange, red, purple, stay inside. We were all seeing something, saying something. I miss that. Because now we have more domestic acts of terror — more shootings, more bombings — than when ISIS was the big bad guy. And we don’t get a color grid. I don’t know how to prepare myself for the day. I want a color grid. I mean, it ain’t gonna be no colors, it’ll be different shades of white, ‘cause that’s who’s doing it.”

5 On Parenting

“Kids today don’t have any limitations, there’s no ceiling. I knew what my limits were. My parents sat me down and they said, ‘Chloé you’re gonna get a piece of the pie. Not the whole pie, a piece. Take this crumb and live your life.’ And I was fat, so I was like, ‘What kind of pie is it?’

“So I can’t wait till I have my own kids. I’m gonna kill their dreams once a week. I’ma creep into their bedroom right when they’re about to doze off, I’ma lean in real low and say, ‘Psst... You’re not gonna make it.’”

4 On Sexual Assault

“I remember when I was reading about #MeToo, this one woman was like, ‘My boss, he put his dick in my mouth…’ I’m reading this, and I’m getting upset. I’m like, ‘Why didn’t you bite that dick off?’ 

“I’m just saying, if it’s survival mode, why are you thinking about his feelings? No, bite that dick off. Save yourself! Ladies, the time has come — we gotta start biting dicks off. Think about it. Whenever you hear about a situation of sexual harassment or assault, it’s always he said versus she said. But if we’re biting dicks off, there’s no question. The police are gonna show up, and they know you’re the victim because you got a receipt.”

3 On Getting Older

“I moved here because I was turning 40. It was my midlife crisis. People don’t like to hear that right? They don’t like to hear, ‘Oh, 40 is not old!’ Yes, it is! Forty times two is 80. Have you met an 80-year-old? They don’t want to be here. Did you know that in nursing homes they have the highest cases of STIs? Because they’re like, ‘If I got to go, I’ll go any way I want to go!’ You can’t tell somebody who went through something like the Great Depression to wear a condom. They’re like, ‘Listen, I ain’t got no teeth. It is what it is.”

2 On Plants

“My mom wants me to have kids really bad. She’s really pushing for it. She’s very passive, so she buys me house plants. Because if I can keep a plant alive, I can keep a child alive. It’s the same thing, right? It’s not. I call it Plant Parenthood. They all don’t make it. It’s very stressful. It’s hard to keep a plant alive — you gotta talk to it, you gotta put it in the sun, you gotta rotate the pot, you gotta put it in a bigger pot so it can go to college. It’s a lot of work! So now I gotta get in my car and go to a Home Depot. I gotta buy a 10-pound bag of dirt because they don’t sell a 1-pound bag of dirt. Now I look like a suspicious killer ‘cause you know that’s how every crime show starts — with you buying shit that don’t match up in Home Depot. Like, ‘Why do you have bubble gum and a zip tie?’ ‘I like to pop and kill, okay!’”

1 On Tradition

“My grandmother is very, very old-fashioned. She’s 80 years old, very Southern and very traditional, and sometimes we don’t see eye-to-eye. I’m a modern woman. My grandmother tried to teach me how to pick cotton. She thought it was a fun thing to do. I’m sitting in her house in South Carolina, and she calls me: ‘Chloé, I want to show you something!’

“I go into the kitchen — mind you, it’s already 150 degrees in the house because for some reason, old people don’t put the air on until they start decomposing. So I’m sweating profusely, looking at cotton, and I knew there was no way I was going to touch this cotton; because I watched too much sci-fi, and I know if I touched that cotton, I’d be transported to a plantation. It wasn’t going to happen. I had to tell her, ‘Grandma, listen, it’s 2013. We have a Black President, and there are kids in Malaysia that do this for us. I’m not picking no goddamn cotton.’

“She was like, ‘That’s your problem. That’s why you’re single, and you don’t have kids — because you don’t respect tradition.’

“I don’t really think that’s why I’m single. Like there’s a man somewhere that’s like, ‘I want a woman whose delicate fingers could pick 10 to 15 bales of cotton a day.’”