I from the US, just learned about these today, and had a chuckle.
an essex girl was driving down the A13 when her car phone rang. it was her boyfriend, urgently warning her "treacle, i just heard on the news that theres a car going the wrong way on the A13. please be careful!"
"its not just one car!" said the essex girl "theres hundreds of them!"
American here: when I read that in my own accent I didn’t get it, so I backed up and read the punchline in an English accent and I laughed. Funny how that works
Hell, that's going back a way. I don't think that I have heard one of those since the 90s. They really haven't aged well - not that they were exactly the height of PC humour back then.
What's the difference between a shopping trolley and an Essex girl?
I had a thought about finding similarly themed jokes about men, but haven’t had any luck yet. It’s true that a good number of blond jokes could be gender agnostic so long as they are just about intelligence.
Many probably are adaptations of old jokes. I've heard that one in a neutral version, in my native language, and now here. But yeah, not nice to target women.
From the UK, actually born in Essex. Yes, 20-30 years ago people laughed at these, me included. These days you wouldn't tell them in public, if at all. Same as for 'Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman' jokes.
Anytime you're picking on someone for a characteristic that:
They didn't choose
They can't change
That's a bad look. These days if you tell a joke like this at work you're likely to get bad looks and your sudden employment will look bad.
This is probably true in your little social circle but crude jokes are still told most everywhere and they will by and large still get a good knee slap.
It's tricky to define but it has to do with proximity to London (Capital city) and the developing existence of influencers or (it girls) as they were known, combined with poor education and you had a generation of glamorous idiots, that were identified as being from Essex early. Think early Kim Kardashian such as Jordan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Price