Sheena’s Dirty Joke

Sheena Easton taught me something I never knew. Musicians tell each other tons of musician jokes.

“Tons and tons and tons,” says Sheena (who sings Friday and Saturday at South Point).

As a single mom living in Summerlin, Sheena doesn’t hit the Vegas nightlife much. Instead, she hangs with a close circle of friends.

“We tend to just have these little dinners together where we tell dirty jokes and laugh and rag on each other and tell each other what a bunch of losers we are,” Sheena says.

“That, to me, is a great night out. You come home in your car and you start laughing out loud about something somebody said two hours ago. That’s the perfect night.”

Anyway, I asked for her dirty jokes but she only told me one as she diverted me to musician jokes.

1. “How many country musicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three. One to screw in the lightbulb, and two to sing sad songs about the old one.”

2. “How many bluegrass musicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Three. One to screw in the lightbulb, and two to bitch about the fact that it’s electricity."

3. “A musician comes home from work unexpectedly. He goes upstairs. He hears a noise in his bedroom, and he walks in, and his wife is in there, and you can imagine what she’s doin’. She’s doin’ the nasty with this guy’s best friend, who happens to be a musician. And so the guy looks at his best friend and he goes, ‘What are you doing?’ And he goes, ‘Ah, you know, a few gigs here and there, pickin’ up some casuals.’”

If you don’t fully get the punchline to that third joke, it just means you’re not familiar with the lingo of a musician. Sheena explains:

“Every musician who hears that falls apart, because when you talk to a musician, the first thing they want to talk to you about is: ‘What work you got? What have you got on the calendar? You gotta gig I can get on?”

And musicians answer, ‘You know, a couple of gigs here and there, a few casuals.’”

I tell Sheena she should author a coffee table book on musician jokes.

“It’d be a very specialized market, though, wouldn’t it?”

For the rest of my interview with Sheena, check out Friday's Neon section in the Review-Journal.