Indeed not. Perhaps that's the reason the joke is funny?
We could sanitise the joke to become "Germany's defence minister had more fingers than working fighter aircraft" I suppose. Would that be better?
The real issue is VdL's history of failure, not the jokes about it.
Jokes are not "just jokes". Jokes play off culture and reinforce or challenge it. People having a low number of fingers doesn't do either of those things so at that point it stops being a joke and becomes a dry empirical claim ("they have at most ten working aircraft"). Stand up comedy is an art form and takes considerable effort, creativity and repetition. Dismissing jokes as "just jokes" as if they are shallow brain farts is like saying poetry is "just words". Jokes are worth analysing and being dissected just like any other artform and even if they're genuinely created by "amateurs" they're informed by the culture that surrounds them.
VdL is a terrible politician, I strongly oppose her value system and I think she does indeed have a history of failure. But that's not how the jokes are framed, that's merely the setup to the jokes. The jokes wouldn't work with a male politician because the punchline is that she's a woman and mother.
You can agree with the punchline but denying that it's sexist or misogynist (in the sense of "women and mothers are unfit as politicians") is silly even if you don't like those labels being applied to your sense of humor. Jokes are inherently political because culture is political. It's why reactionaries will say progressives aren't funny and why progressives will roll their eyes at jokes about trans people and say "that's just the one joke".
Clever comedians will actually use this and drop off-color jokes on audiences in the middle of a show to reveal their own hidden biases when they "accidentally" laugh about a joke they'd normally claim to be appalled by. But there's a fine line between doing that to lampshade dishonesty and just telling those jokes. And even then it requires a cooperative audience. As an example you can look at Chris Rock who felt he had to retire his routines that used the n-word because it emboldened racists rather than making fun of them.
Opinions differ on this. There are women who find the joke funny and who don't think it's sexist, and FWIW my wife is one of them.
> VdL is a terrible politician
At least we agree on that :)
> I strongly oppose her value system
Does she have a value system?
"it’s hard to imagine a more telling example of the EU’s complete lack of transparency, disregard for democracy and unsavoury cosiness with big business — and of the cronyism and corruption that has characterised the entire Covid management, and the vaccine rollout in particular — than a Commission president personally making a deal worth tens of billions of euros with a Big Pharma CEO. Then add to that the refusal to disclose the texts in question, or even the contracts related to the purchase, despite multiple requests by some of the highest EU bodies [..] What are they so afraid of?"
https://unherd.com/thepost/pfizer-and-ursula-von-der-leyen-t...
EDIT: to add, it's not the first time VdL has done this kind of thing:
'The German Defense Ministry has been accused of sabotaging parliament's attempts to investigate a defense consultancy affair, after data from the official phone of former Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen was deleted "for security reasons," according to the ministry.
Bundestag MPs have described "annoying stalling tactics" and "a real scandal" after the Defense Ministry revealed, after months of uncertainty, that von der Leyen's old phone was wiped in August, well after the parliamentarians had applied to have it classified as evidence. German daily Die Welt reported that the admission, made by a government official during a hearing on Thursday, sparked a heated row between MPs of different parties in the Bundestag hallways.
Von der Leyen [..] spent millions of euros of the German defense budget on consultancy contracts, as part of efforts to re-equip the German military during her six-year tenure.
Germany's official Federal Audit Office reported that the ministry had given massive contracts to consultancy firms without first opening a competition or assessing the offers for economic value.'
https://www.dw.com/en/german-defense-ministry-illegally-wipe...
Women can be misogynist. What is your point? We live in a culture still filled with everyday misogyny and sexism (and racism and other forms of bigotry). Misogyny or sexism isn't some innate character trait like a gene deficiency or something you get from exposure to gamma rays. It's something you do and behavior is specifically influenced by the culture around you.
There are still comedians "the ol' ball and chain" routines and how they hate their wife, basically, and there are still women and men who laugh at it (usually for different reasons).
There's a well-known phenomenon where women in positions of power will actively sabotage women under their authority and "kick the ladder down", often to avoid risking their position by being seen as "another woman" rather than "not like the other women". Even the "girl boss" trope liberals seem to enjoy so much is usually based on superficiality and suppressing womanhood. It's very much about "carving out a space" for some women who do the part and try to fit in with the men without challenging the need to fit in with the men in the first place.
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove by citing more reasons to dislike VdL when I literally already told you I strongly dislike her. My disdain for her goes all the way back to when she was the figurehead for Internet censorship (i.e. DNS and IP blacklisting) and tried to justify the extension to government power with "fighting CSAM" and implying anyone opposing her project was a pedophile.
When your joke only works because she is a woman and mother, it's extremely likely that your joke is sexist or misogynist because it relies on sexist or misogynist subtext to work. "She has more children than working fighter jets" only works because she is a woman and a mother. You could make that joke about a man but it would have very different subtext, i.e. a man having a lot of children implies being an irresponsible womanizer: you could have made that joke about Berlusconi for example to build on his reputation for promiscuity and irresponsibility. It would be a very different joke.
> Does she have a value system?
Yes. She's a "liberal conservative". I realize this sounds nonsensical in the more widely used American sense of those words but it's a thing. I think the US equivalent would be something akin to neocons, expanding state authority while simultaneously reducing social services and deregulating markets. She luckily hasn't been very successful or coherent in practice, though.
