All right, if you do the math, the percent is closer to zero than one, but they still exist
I did a presentation on rape jokes, once. It was for a women and comedy English seminar, and I think most of my class was horrified, but using Freud’s criteria for a dirty joke (there’s a man and a woman, and the woman is always the brunt of the joke) women telling rape jokes upsets that standard, which from an analytical stand point I could appreciate. Suddenly, Sarah Silverman’s rendition of the Aristocrats went from plainly disturbing to some kind of bizarre, feminist, re-appropriative performance art. Rape jokes went from being always terrible to something that could, if done well, challenge rape culture.
But not everyone is Sarah Silverman. There are a lot of crappy comics out there, and whoever made the joke(s) on the Overheard at SFU Facebook page last week can join the club. They all revolved around a comparison of rape to something else through simile or metaphor. Calling them “jokes” is insulting to jokes everywhere. Whoever posted them are the Facebook version of the guys who answer “there are situations in which someone would owe me sex” or “no is just a yes in disguise” on their Okcupid profiles, and are getting publicly shamed for it. If an offensive comparison is your idea of a joke worth defending, you’re wrong. It’s not funny. You’re not funny, and you’re casually defending rape.
When some idiot gets on stage and says something like “wouldn’t it be hilarious if, like, x-amount of guys just raped her, right now?” I wince because there’s nothing funny about that. It’s not impossible, it’s not even improbable, it’s horrifically real because it does happen and rape in itself is never funny. But, like The Peak’s Humourist Emeritus Colin Sharp said, “people seem to misconstrue when something is the topic of a joke and when something is being made fun of. Those two things are entirely different.” This I agree with, and it’s the basis on which I justify my stance that a joke in which rape is the topic, not the punchline, can be funny.
Of all the stand up I’ve watched, there are four bits that effectively deal with the idea of rape culture without reaffirming it. For space’s sake, I’m only going to speak of Louis CK, but watch Ever Meinard’s “Here’s Your Rape”, Jaime Kilstein’s “Rape Culture and Glenn Beck Doesn’t Like Me”, and Wanda Sykes’ “Detachable Vagina” if you’re interested.
In his, CK talks about this waitress he was fooling around with but never had sex with because she kept brushing off his advances. When she tells him later that she wanted him to just go for it because she wanted it to feel dangerous, he responds “What are you, out of your fucking mind? You think I’m going to rape you on the off-chance that maybe you’re into that shit?” I love this because of how horrified he is by the notion of raping someone. A 2010 study found that individuals whose social groups reaffirmed rape myths (through things like rape jokes) showed higher proclivity to rape. This means jokes like the ones made on
Overheard at SFU work kind of like casual homophobia: you might not have any proclivity towards rape yourself, but when you make a joke that normalizes rape, you justify actual rapists’ actions to them, making them more likely to reoffend. Therein lies the Beauty of CK’s bit. The stance he takes makes it impossible for these rapists to find justification.
The punchline of his joke is literally “what kind of an idiot would do this?” the takeaway being “get consent.” No one is laughing at rape victims or the idea of raping someone. They’re laughing at someone thinking it’s ever OK to have sex without consent. Humour doesn’t have to reaffirm all of the negative things in the world, but it will have to reference the bad to change it. A few twits who think they know what’s funny shouldn’t stop the rest of us from enjoying things that makes us laugh and think. But you don’t have to agree. To quote CK again, “To me, all dialogue is positive . . . If someone has the opposite feeling from me, I want to hear it so I can add to mine.” If you interpret CK’s bit differently, let me know. If you think I’m wrong in general, that’s fine too. If you don’t think the bits I referenced should be called rape jokes, tell me what you’d call them instead. If you know other good jokes, awesome!
Write a letter, write an article, or whatever, but let’s have a dialogue and not just passively or aggressively talk at one another.
