blastingas10

Are rape jokes funny? It depends. Was tosh out of line with his response? Yes. Should it be expected of him? Yes.

As someone already mentioned, you really should just shut up at a comedy show, you should already know that some offensive jokes will be told, especially if it's someone like Daniel tosh.

On the other hand, maybe this audience member had a love one who is a rape victim. Maybe his mother was raped and killed. If that's the case, it's certainly understandable that the joke wouldnt sit over well with this person.

Is it completely unacceptable to make a rape joke? No, it's going to be done. But I think his response was just out of line and uneccessary

Sometime it's not just the audience member who needs to shut up, it's the comedian. This reminds me of seeing people o Facebook posting pictures that were cracking jokes about the incident at the batman movie in colorado. And this was like a day after it happened. Some things just shouldn't be a joke.

Kaimon

You just said it isn't the norm, so why should that invalidate someone else's very real experiences? And what and what would you consider as a "bad decision"? I mean ****, you even hear people argue "well, what do you expect to happen to her dressed like that?". How is it their fault then? Someone shouldn't experience sexual trauma just because their clothing was "just a bit too short".

Not saying that's how you view it. It's just that what might be viewed as a "bad decision" to some is really not justified in the slightest.

joy_circumcision

That's exactly how I feel. Every woman I've talked to about this is pretty offended at it, but that's not an intrinsic response, as others have noted, so here it goes:

Rape jokes are neither never funny nor inherently funny. "It's humor and she should get over it" is just as much of a cop-out as "I'm offended, so they shouldn't do it." Rape jokes (along with genocide jokes and such) are funny when they have a couple factors going for them:

• they attack the assailant, not the victim
• they generate some sort of worthwhile discourse on the subject or at least make a singular point on the topic of rape that, though not necessarily unique, is at least "moral" (from the Sam Harris perspective of "does nothing to generate suffering")

In my mind, Tosh is blatantly faulty on the first criterion (a subjective one, I concede) and I would argue that the second goes beyond "funniness" and into why this is a topic at all. I wish I could find articles that expressed this sentiment more impactfully and intelligently than I can muster, but essentially the debate in my mind isn't "Can a comic make a rape joke and silence a heckler?" but "Do these kinds of jokes do anything constructive / Should these kinds of jokes be expected to do something constructive?"

Across the boards, I think we can all agree pretty conclusively that Daniel Tosh's specific joke did NOTHING constructive. It caused distress in one (or possibly more) people in the audience, whether you want to say that she's justified in her distress or not (which, **** you, besides the point - if spiders make you uncomfortable and you went somewhere without knowing there would be spiders and when they came out you screamed and someone attacked you directly for it, you wouldn't be a happy camper. Regardless of the appropriateness of her response, a lot of people on the Internet are trying to make her distress itself a subject of discussion, and that is so entirely subjective that to attack her for having a response that is natural from her own values is a disgusting encroachment on others' ability to construct their own morals.). Tosh did nothing to really contribute to a dialog on rape culture; he just said something shocking to shock.

Now, the big question: should we expect comedians to be constructive at all times? Well, no. BUT! BUT! The big BUT! If comedians are non-constructive and others want to have a constructive discourse based on the act in question, and they don't seek legislation to censor him, guess what? The free speech that lets Tosh say piggish things like "get raped, bitch!" also lets feminists and allies say that that's a ****ing horrible perspective on the world.

tl;dr: No one is pushing for legislative censorship of Tosh or comedy, so let's evaluate this as merely a discussion of "should." Comedians "should" try to do as little to harm people as possible, because art at the end of the day is supposed to be a way to provide relief from the horrors of a meaningless existence, and if they just add more suffering, they're failing in some way.

Now I'm gonna go re-learn syntax and making myself clear, since I'm sure this is a mess.

EDIT: ****ing THIS.

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Neapolitan

Exactly!

I'm of the opposite opinion, If you're going to a comedy show to take things too seriously and you get offended, and you cause a ruckus, hey thanks for providing some drama to break up the monotony of what would be an otherwise routine (possibly boring) show.

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Wayfarer

Hey, if rape victims can't take a joke, f**k 'em.

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