I recently spent a wonderful week in France with my son and his wife (yup, #HilaryRowland). Wanting to watch television one night, and finding – surprise, surprise- that most of the programs were in French, we started watching some stand-up comedians on Netflix. All good – talk of relationships and their challenges, presented with lots of humor and insight. And then we happened on a comedian (Jim Jefferies) whose act veered quickly into jokes about rape. Trying not to be an “uptight” female, I found myself struggling to laugh at the jokes until it hit me that my struggle wasn’t because I was uptight, but because rape is just not funny.
Really, “rape joke” is an oxymoron, and making light of such a serious issue just serves to normalize rape in our culture. Rape jokes aren’t funny. They’re traumatizing.
Harvey Weinstein is not a lone wolf. Sexual aggression against women has been around for a long time in a culture that winks at “boys being boys” and laughs about “locker room talk.” Repeated scandals, and the public’s response to them, makes clear why we should push back against male comedians making jokes about rape. When a man can joke about sexually assaulting a women, get caught on tape, and subsequently be elected president, you know there’s something seriously wrong.
And who can forget when Daniel Tosh, during a standup comedy set about rape, told a woman in the audience that it’d be “hilarious” if she was gang raped right then and there. Yes, he really said that. Out loud. Seems he assumed his fans might also find watching a women get held down and gang raped in front of an audience would be “hilarious”. (I can neither confirm nor deny whether they did.)
She walked out when he said that, of course, and asked for a refund, which she was refused because — well, shut up, feminist! Now, this is the guy who’s famous for saying stupid sh*t on TV, but in the fantasy world in my head, this would have been a “Who’s with me?” Jerry Maguire moment where the entire audience exited and left Tosh.O just standing there with his (ahem) mic in his hand.
Hopefully the floodgates are opening and societal exclamations of horror and condemnation will mark the beginning of a more enlightened understanding of how harmful unwanted sexual assaults are to individuals and to society as a whole. Such assaults are not ever, ever funny, and comedians who use rape jokes to get a quick easy laugh from the “bros” should be told clearly by everyone, but especially by those “bros”, to STOP. #notfunny
“Cavalier jokes about domestic violence and rape (jokes that target victims, not perpetrators) feed that aura of feeling unsafe and unwelcome—not just in the comedy club, but in the world.” – Comedian Lindy West
There is no “social value” in sexism or jokes about sexual assault. Jim Jefferies uses this material because it sells, makes him seem cool to a certain demographic, and it puts money in his pocket. It offers no insights, no solutions, no empathy. He peddles this material like a drug dealer peddling drugs, rationalizing that he is simply giving people what they want. But some topics are simply not funny — especially to the victims. It can be incredibly triggering for a survivor to hear a rape joke.
I know that men get raped in prisons and institutions, and children get raped in convents and families, and it is an awful, sickening thing to know. But that wasn’t the subject of this man’s jokes. He was joking about men raping women, insinuating that rape isn’t a big deal, and encouraging his audience to laugh along with him. I assume this man’s audience is predominantly young males whose minds are very susceptible to hints about what is masculine and what is funny. Telling them that rape is funny is not just obnoxious, it is actually dangerous. It encourages less sophisticated male minds to think that rape is really not that big of a deal. In this way, the comedian who promotes this attitude bears some similarity to a rapist himself, and responsibility for rape culture.
Having been attacked myself many decades ago on a London street when walking home at around 1:00 AM from a jazz club, I was shocked by what my attacker said as he covered my mouth, lifted me like a bunch of twigs and threw me on the ground. “I don’t want to hurt you, I just want a bit of the other.” As though that wasn’t a big deal, and I should just go along with it so he could relieve himself.
When I was rescued by some folks who heard me screaming, and the police were called, they in turn suggested that walking home alone in the wee hours would make any juror think that I was “asking for it”, so I should probably not ask them to go looking for the guy who had run off into the night. I still think about their casual indifference to my distress. I was too young and unworldly to challenge them then, but I would have a very different response today.
Why does so much comedy (and specifically the comedy promoted by young male comedians) have to be so ugly? When Jerry Springer came on the scene back in the early 90’s, he didn’t present his show as comedy, but we were actually invited to laugh at people (most often young black people) who were encouraged to attack each other with profanity and sometimes physical abuse. It represented one of the lowest forms of entertainment and yet continues to be successful to this day. I think that’s when many people who wanted to make a living making jokes saw the light – that vicious, ugly material had a big audience and could bring fame and lots of money.
We all understand why the “N” word belongs exclusively to black people to use if and when they choose. After years of having the word hurled like a weapon loaded with humiliation, contempt, casual cruelty, subjugation, insult, they have earned the right to own it, and to use it in some strange way to take the sting out a word that has trapped them in the past as surely as slavery did. Any white person with any intelligence, understanding, class or discretion knows the word is off limits for them. The same should be true of rape – that the subject cannot be used by men in a casual, misguided, sophomoric attempt to look cool or to mock women for being uptight.
I understand freedom of speech, and sometimes it is helpful to joke about dark subjects to bring them into the light and into people’s consciousness. That’s not true with rape. We already know what rape is, and how it damages women for decades, maybe for life. Freedom of speech is a valued ideal, but is making jokes about the physical and mental devastation of women the best we can do with that right?
I can’t believe we’re still arguing about rape jokes. Perhaps I’m someone who gives humanity more credit than it deserves! But, of course, I can’t believe men still rape women, and men still rape men, because that happens, too, so perhaps I shouldn’t be shocked that moderately funny people still scratch their dirty fingernails across the bottom of the shitty comedy barrel and rely on lame, offensive humor to get cheap laughs from people who don’t like to think critically in any way about how we as a culture deal with the problems of sexual assault.
It’s always a little baffling and disheartening to see an audience not only refuse to recognize the irony in responding to suggestions of a culture of violence and sexual assault by then perpetrating the very same offensive and shameful worldview.
I don’t know why so many men do this. It would be as if I sat with a bunch of black people and made jokes about getting lynched. Or if I sat with some jews and joked about the Holocaust. And rape is going on right now, too many, many people, the overwhelming majority of them women. One of my male friends just wouldn’t understand this, even when he knew several of our friends had been raped. The old ‘women rape too, some men are victims too’ line was reeled out. To a decent person, wouldn’t this be even MORE of a reason not to joke about it? We’re no longer friends.
That’s a good decision that you’re no longer friends with him.
I suppose the biggest problem with most rape jokes and dead baby jokes, and AIDS jokes, and cancer jokes, and pretty much any joke about a societal taboo, is that they’re lazy. They piggyback off a serious and controversial subject without considering its deeper implications. They don’t require much thought, because they’re not inspiring any insight, either. Anyone can make a rape joke, just like anyone can make any sort of inoffensive joke.
Perhaps I’m asking too much from comedians, as well as comedy audiences. Sure, not everyone wants to hear a stand-up comedian say something thoughtful, because thinking is not for the comedy clubs.
An example of a horrible rape joke I heard recently was provided by an obnoxious stand-up ‘comedian’ that I had the misfortune of having to hear before Jo Brand came on at a festival. Throughout his set this person was clearly just addressing men, repeatedly saying lines like, ‘you know when women do…’ or ‘you know what it’s like when your wife…’ Infuriating. His oh-so-hilarious rape joke was basically that when he gets to have sex with his wife during his kids’ nap time ‘it kind of feels like he’s raping her’ because he has to tell her to be quiet etc. ho ho ho. I can’t really convey the repugnant way in which he performed this ‘joke’. I haven’t done it justice…
I have only one thing to say. If you say that rape jokes aren’t funny because they’re a trigger, then why is there no one complaining about a Drama movie about rape? Why this double standard? They would have the same triggering effect, but yet when it’s drama no one complains. But there’s a different standard for comedy. Why?
I object to most rape scenes in dramas, because they’re acted like porn. I object to rape jokes, especially ones where the joke IS rape, such as in a recent episode of Family Guy I saw (a program I usually like) or Observe and Report, because, you know, rape is singularly unfunny.
One comedian I’ve never heard tell a rape joke, although he’s known for his controversial topics, is Billy Connolly. He is a survivor, so he probably isn’t ignorant of the effect such jokes can have on an audience.
What I’m finding of late is that I notice more and more comedy that relies on describing situations of non-consensual sex. By “more” I mean I am picking up on it more, not that there is necessarily more of it around, and by “non consensual sex” I mean that this isn’t even comedy that most people would even identify as being about rape because the situations employed in the joke aren’t situations that are widely always identified as rape. I can’t think of specific examples right now, but very often it’s jokes about “having sex” with someone who is drunk or unconscious, or otherwise vulnerable. Often it’s jokes that threaten men with forced sex, the ubiquitous prison rape jokes being the prime examples of course, and all part of the kind of “humor” that relies on cruel and awful things happening to other people.
I agree with many of the points made here. Comedy is a very powerful medium and the ideas conveyed through it are transmitted very directly into the public psyche.