English Art/Literary General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters

I'm editing an author who writes:

Women often bore the brunt of the joke as the object of “funny” silences and misunderstandings.

I looked the phrase up using Google, and I got 5K hits, yet it sounds to me as if she is mixing two idiomatic expressions--"bore the brunt of X" (as in carrying the weight of or feeling the impact of) and "were the butt of the joke".

For the latter, one writer on-line explained: "In every form of humor . . . , there's always a target or a victim. The butt of the joke, as we popularly called it, can be a person, an object, an animal, a place or even an idea or a view."

I'm interested in hearing people's opinions of whether "bore the brunt of the joke" should be changed. TIA!