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Solnit writes: "In 2012 US comedian Daniel Tosh made a series of jokes about rape at a comedy club in Hollywood. An audience member reportedly interrupted him: 'Rape jokes are never funny.' Tosh allegedly responded: 'Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys right now?' The woman blogged about it, and her blog and the incident got a lot of attention."

Rebecca Solnit. (photo: FlynetPictures.com)
Rebecca Solnit. (photo: FlynetPictures.com)


If Rape Jokes Are Finally Funny It's Because They're Targeting Rape Culture

By Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK

11 August 15

 

The rape joke used to all be about punching down. Now, that’s changing

n 2012 US comedian Daniel Tosh made a series of jokes about rape at a comedy club in Hollywood. An audience member reportedly interrupted him: “Rape jokes are never funny.” Tosh allegedly responded: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys right now?” The woman blogged about it, and her blog and the incident got a lot of attention.

Comedian Louis CK remarked that the Tosh incident was part of a larger “fight between comedians and feminists, which are natural enemies. Because stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke.” That was three years ago this summer by the calendar, but an epoch ago by what’s happened since, with feminism and comedy. And rape jokes.

Rape jokes are what an evolutionary biologist might call an indicator species. One small part of the ecosystem, such an organism can indicate the larger health or illness of the whole or a system in transition. The culture itself has changed, for the better, in the past three years, in regards to women and consciousness about sexual violence. The evolution of the rape joke marks that change. In 2015, the high-profile jokes are on rapists, the mindsets of rapists, and on rape culture.

That rape jokes aren’t funny was an axiom assuming that rape jokes are at the expense of the victim. Something horrible happened to you, hahhahha! I’m going to violate and degrade a woman and deny her humanity hohohoho! It’s funny to me and you don’t matter! People then drew a distinction between punching down (mocking the less powerful) and punching up (aiming at the privileged, the status quo, maybe even striking blows against the empire). The rape joke as it then existed was all about punching down.

Sam Morril, who I guess I have to call a comedian, told the kind of joke that many take issue with: “My ex-girlfriend never made me wear a condom. That’s huge. She was on the pill.” Pause. “Ambien.” Sex with unconscious victims was apparently just so inherently hilarious that America’s most celebrated stand-up comic had allegedly been doing it for decades – but we weren’t talking about Bill Cosby yet in 2012.

Funny women – Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Cameron Esposito, Margaret Cho – have been achieving more and more prominence in comedy in recent years. But it was a man who, in 2014, got to deliver the coup de grace to comedy patriarchy. Hannibal Buress called out Bill Cosby, mocking the elderly star for his “I can talk down to black people because I have a successful sitcom” stance. To which Buress added: “Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby.” Women had been accusing Cosby of sexual assault for decades, but the allegations had been settled out of court or never made in court in the first place, and the victims had mostly found few willing listeners and not much recourse. Finally the time was right to depose “America’s dad”— who a tabloid recently called “America’s rapist.”

Once Buress opened the gate, it was open season on Cosby. At the Golden Globes in January, Fey and Poehler ripped Cosby apart. Describing the fairy-tale movie Into the Woods, Poehler remarked “and Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Fey then did a parody of Cosby’s sputtering vocal affectations as she raised the drugging charges another way. “I put the pills in the people. The people did not want the pills.” Poehler joined in the mockery, and the cameras panned an audience in which some of the celebrities seemed to think that the anti-rape jokes were funny and some of them looked like deer in headlights.

And Cosby went down, because serious journalists and survivors’ testimony followed in the wake of Buress’s opening. In January 2015, comedy’s august great-uncle, Jay Leno, remarked: “I don’t know why it’s so hard to believe women. I mean, you know, you go to Saudi Arabia, you need two women to testify against a man. Here you need 25.”

There is a special irony in a major stand-up comic becoming the butt of jokes based on allegations of misogynist behavior. It marks the rise of feminist comedy in the mainstream and the weakening of rape culture. There is no more clear changing of the guard than this.

Amy Schumer’s show on Comedy Central has featured a Cosby skit or two – one in which she’s his defense attorney trying to convince the jurors they love “America’s dad” and pudding and the rest of it more than they love truth and justice. It ends with a twist: an offstage Cosby sends Schumer a drink in thanks and she looks at it in consternation – and then tosses it over her shoulder.

But the pinnacle of all rape jokes at the rapists’ expense has to be the Amy Schumer show’s Football Town Nights parody of Friday Night Lights (the TV show about high-school football in Texas) an even more scathing parody of the logic of rape culture. The late April skit features a new coach trying to teach his boys not to rape, to their incomprehension and the resentment of the community. Schumer just plays a good wife to the coach, showing up mutely with larger and larger glasses of white wine as things go from bad to worse at his new job.

At the outset the football team in the locker room tries to find loopholes in the coach’s “no rape’ rule. “Can we rape at away games?” No. “What if it’s Halloween and she’s dressed like a sexy cat?” No. “What if she thinks it’s rape and I don’t?” Still no. “What if my mom is the DA” – district attorney – “and won’t prosecute, can I rape?” “If the girl said yes to me the other day, but it was about something else?” “What if the girl says yes and then changes her mind out of nowhere, like a crazy person?”

These arguments are exactly the kind you get on college campuses and comments sections too, the refusal to recognize the limits to men’s rights or the existence of women’s. It’s followed by an excellent, appalling scene in which middle-aged ladies spit at the coach for not letting “our boys” have their rightful rapes. The whole skit is a funny rape joke – about what irrational, any-excuse jerks would-be rapists are and how much communities support some of those jerks. It’s about, in short, not a joke about rape (no rapes take place in the skit) but rape culture. The tables have turned.

Feminism hasn’t won, and the war for everyone to have their basic human rights respected isn’t over, but we’re on a winning streak right now. And it’s kind of funny, at times – as well as deadly serious.

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