Suppose it turns out that pianists are a bit more likely to be criminals than the general population; would that make the pianist version funny? Nope.
Eh… I can imagine that happening, if, say, there’s a group of criminologists, one of whom presents a report about crime associations by profession, and one of the results mentioned is “Turns out pianists commit 20% more crime, at least based on this sample! Huh!” Then I can imagine, a while later (when half of them had started to forget), one of them making that joke about pianists, and that producing a real ”...Hmm? Oh, ho ho ho, very nice” response. It does depend on shared awareness of the statistic rather than directly on the truth of the statistic.
I can also imagine making a similar joke about cardiologists, for an audience who’s read Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers (where cardiologists were completely arbitrarily chosen to make the point “With large n, you can pick lots of individual bad examples even if they’re per capita no more likely to be criminal”, and you lean into acting like cardiologists are a known scourge of humanity).
I actually considered writing “cardiologists” instead of “pianists” :-).
I think what’s needed is some sort of context in which the thought “group X are all criminals” is salient (even if only as a deliberate exaggeration). For someone who has strongly anti-black attitudes, that thought may be salient all the time when X = black people. For someone who’s just heard about some statistics saying that pianists commit a bit more crime, it’s probably salient enough because they’ve specifically been thinking about pianists and crime. But e.g. a few years after that criminologists’ conference, when everyone’s aware that pianists commit a bit more crime but no one particularly hates pianists as a result or anything, I don’t think they’d find the joke funny.
Eh… I can imagine that happening, if, say, there’s a group of criminologists, one of whom presents a report about crime associations by profession, and one of the results mentioned is “Turns out pianists commit 20% more crime, at least based on this sample! Huh!” Then I can imagine, a while later (when half of them had started to forget), one of them making that joke about pianists, and that producing a real ”...Hmm? Oh, ho ho ho, very nice” response. It does depend on shared awareness of the statistic rather than directly on the truth of the statistic.
I can also imagine making a similar joke about cardiologists, for an audience who’s read Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers (where cardiologists were completely arbitrarily chosen to make the point “With large n, you can pick lots of individual bad examples even if they’re per capita no more likely to be criminal”, and you lean into acting like cardiologists are a known scourge of humanity).
I actually considered writing “cardiologists” instead of “pianists” :-).
I think what’s needed is some sort of context in which the thought “group X are all criminals” is salient (even if only as a deliberate exaggeration). For someone who has strongly anti-black attitudes, that thought may be salient all the time when X = black people. For someone who’s just heard about some statistics saying that pianists commit a bit more crime, it’s probably salient enough because they’ve specifically been thinking about pianists and crime. But e.g. a few years after that criminologists’ conference, when everyone’s aware that pianists commit a bit more crime but no one particularly hates pianists as a result or anything, I don’t think they’d find the joke funny.