But in that moment at Bridgetown, it dawned on me: Who made that rule? Who drew up that contract? I don’t remember signing anything, and anyway, it seems less like a universal accord and more like a booby trap that powerful men set up to protect their “right” to squeeze cheap laughs out of life-ruining horrors—sometimes including literal torture—that they will never experience. Why should I have to sit and cheer through hours of “edgy” misogyny, “edgy” racism, “edgy” rape jokes, just to be included in an industry that belongs to me as much as anyone else?
When I looked at the pantheon of comedy gods (Bill Hicks, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld), the alt-comedy demigods (Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, David Cross, Marc Maron, Dave Attell, Bill Burr), and even that little roster of 2005 Seattle comics I rattled off in the previous chapter, I couldn’t escape the question: If that’s who drafted our comedy constitution, why should I assume that my best interests are represented? That is a bunch of dudes. Of course there are exceptions—maybe Joan Rivers got to propose a bylaw or two—but you can’t tell me there’s no gender bias in an industry where “women aren’t funny” is widely accepted as conventional wisdom. I can name hundreds of white male comedians. But how about this: Name twenty female comics. Name twenty black comics. Name twenty gay comics. If you’re a comedy nerd, you probably can. That’s cool. Now ask your mom to do it.
In the summer of 2012, a comedian named Daniel Tosh was onstage at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. Tosh is a bro-comedy hero, specializing in “ironic” bigotry—AIDS, retards, the Holocaust, all with a cherubic, frat-boy smile—the kind of jokes worshiped by teenagers and lazy comics who still think it’s cool to fetishize “offensiveness.” Here’s one of Tosh’s signature I’m-just-a-bad-baby wape jokes, about playing a prank on his sister: “I got her so good a few weeks ago—I replaced her pepper spray with silly string. Anyway, that night she got raped, and she called me the next day going, ‘You son of a bitch! You got me so good! As soon as I started spraying him in the face, I’m like, “Daniel! This is going to really hurt!”’” See, it’s a good one, because being raped really hurts.
This particular night at the Laugh Factory, Tosh was working a bit more meta: according to an audience member who later posted her account anonymously online, he was “making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc.” Uncomfortable, the woman heckled: “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”
Tosh paused, then addressed the packed house. “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?”
Horrified and frightened, the woman gathered her things and rushed out. She wrote later: “Having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophobic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place.”
After the predictable viral backlash, Tosh offered a predictably tepid non-apology, and comedians lined up to support him: Patton Oswalt, Jim Norton, Anthony Jeselnik, Doug Stanhope. Oswalt wrote, “Wow, @danieltosh had to apologize to a self-aggrandizing, idiotic blogger. Hope I never have to do that (again).” Stanhope tweeted, “#FuckThatPig.” They were standing up for free speech, for their art. These crazy bitches just didn’t get it.
It was a few months into my time at Jezebel, and I was tapped to write a response. I felt confident, like I was a good fit for the assignment. I knew I had a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanics and history of comedy than your average feminist blogger. I’d been writing straight-ahead humor since the beginning of my career—you couldn’t say I didn’t get jokes. I had enough cred on both sides to bridge the gap between the club and the coven, to produce something constructive. The piece was called “How to Make a Rape Joke.”
“I actually agree with Daniel Tosh’s sentiment in his shitty backpedaling tweet (‘The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them #deadbabies’),” I wrote. “The world is full of terrible things, including rape, and it is okay to joke about them. But the best comics use their art to call bullshit on those terrible parts of life and make them better, not worse.”
Then: “This fetishization of not censoring yourself, of being an ‘equal-opportunity offender,’ is bizarre and bad for comedy. When did ‘not censoring yourself’ become a good thing? We censor ourselves all the time, because we are not entitled, sociopathic fucks… In a way, comedy is censoring yourself—comedy is picking the right words to say to make people laugh. A comic who doesn’t censor himself is just a dude yelling. And being an ‘equal-opportunity offender’—as in, ‘It’s okay, because Daniel Tosh makes fun of ALL people: women, men, AIDS victims, dead babies, gay guys, blah blah blah’—falls apart when you remember (as so many of us are forced to all the time) that all people are not in equal positions of power. ‘Oh, don’t worry—I punch everyone in the face! People, baby ducks, a lion, this Easter Island statue, the ocean…’ Okay, well, that baby duck is dead now.”
I analyzed four rape jokes that I thought “worked”—that targeted rape culture instead of rape victims (in retrospect, I should have been harder on Louis CK, whom I basically let off on a technicality)—and then I explained, “I’m not saying all of this because I hate comedy—I’m saying it because I love comedy and I want comedy to be accessible to everyone. And right now, comedy as a whole is overtly hostile toward women.”
My point was that what we say affects the world we live in, that words are both a reflection of and a catalyst for the way our society operates. Comedy, in particular, is a tremendously powerful lever of social change. Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression may have tipped the 2008 election for Obama. Plenty of my peers cite The Daily Show as their primary news source. When you talk about rape, I said, you get to decide where you aim: Are you making fun of rapists? Or their victims? Are you making the world better? Or worse? It’s not about censorship, it’s not about obligation, it’s not about forcibly limiting anyone’s speech—it’s about choice. Who are you? Choose.
I do get it. Tosh plays a character in his act—the charming psychopath. He can say things like “rape is hilarious” because, according to his defenders, it’s obviously not. Because “everyone hates rape.” It’s not an uncommon strain in comedy: Anthony Jeselnik, Jeff Ross, Lisa Lampanelli, Cartman. The problem is, for those of us who actually work in anti-rape activism, who move through the world in vulnerable bodies, who spend time online with female avatars, the idea that “everyone hates rape” is anything but a given. The reason “ironically” brutal, victim-targeting rape jokes don’t work the way Tosh defenders claim they do is because, in the real world, most sexual assault isn’t even reported, let alone taken seriously.
Feminists don’t single out rape jokes because rape is “worse” than other crimes—we single them out because we live in a culture that actively strives to shrink the definition of sexual assault; that casts stalking behaviors as romance; blames victims for wearing the wrong clothes, walking through the wrong neighborhood, or flirting with the wrong person; bends over backwards to excuse boys-will-be-boys misogyny; makes the emotional and social costs of reporting a rape prohibitively high; pretends that false accusations are a more dire problem than actual assaults; elects officials who tell rape victims that their sexual violation was “god’s plan”; and convicts in less than 5 percent of rape cases that go to trial. Comedians regularly retort that no one complains when they joke about murder or other crimes in their acts, citing that as a double standard. Well, fortunately, there is no cultural narrative casting doubt on the existence and prevalence of murder and pressuring people not to report it.