Maybe we’ll start treating rape like other crimes when the justice system does.
No, no one thought that a spontaneous gang rape was going to take place just then on the stage of the Laugh Factory. But the threat of sexual violence never fully leaves women’s peripheral vision. The point of Tosh’s “joke” was to remind that woman that she is vulnerable. More importantly, it reinforces the idea that comedy belongs to men. Therefore, men must be correct when they tell us what comedy is.
There are two competing narratives here. One is the “Women Aren’t Funny” narrative, which posits that women are leading the charge against rape jokes because we are uptight and humorless, we don’t understand the mechanics of comedy, and we can’t handle being the butt of a joke. Then there’s the narrative that I subscribe to, which is “Holy Shit Women Are Getting Fucking Raped All the Fucking Time, Help Us, Please Help Us, Why Are You All Laughing, for God’s Sake, Do Something.” As a woman, I sincerely wish it were the first one.
“How to Make a Rape Joke” wasn’t perfect, but it accomplished what I’d hoped: It bridged the gap between feminists and shock comics in a definitive, reasoned way. It went viral like nothing I’d ever written before, the response overwhelmingly supportive from both sides. Many female comedy fans, who’d long been told their voice wasn’t welcome in this “debate,” expressed relief. A lot of people said I’d finally shut the lid on the conversation. Even Patton Oswalt retweeted it. The reception was positive enough that I was able to shrug off the relatively small amount of snide abuse from the Tosh faithful:
“Shut the fuck up Lindy West (who?)”
“Just read @thelindywest’s article about Tosh on Jezebel. Two things: 1) Rape is hilarious. 2) I have no idea who she is. Shut the fuck up.”
“I hope Lindy and all the people who commented on this article are raped”
A few characterized my critiques of Tosh as a “witch hunt,” calling me a “fascist” who was trying to destroy his career and the career of any man who challenged the feminazi orthodoxy. Contrary to their dire warnings, Tosh’s popularity soared. As of the writing of this book, he’s still on the air.
Overall, I was pleased. It felt like we’d made progress.
A year passed. The following summer, 2013, a feminist writer named Sady Doyle published an open letter to a young comic named Sam Morril. She recently saw him in a show and found his jokes about raping and brutalizing women questionable. Like me the previous year, she hoped to engage him in a constructive dialogue rather than just throwing the same old talking points back and forth.
“One in five women reports being sexually assaulted,” Doyle wrote. “For women of color, that number is much higher; one study says that over 50% of young black women are sexually assaulted. (One of your jokes: ‘I’m attracted to black women. I had sex with one once. The whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the n-word. Yeah, the whole time, she was yelling NO!’) On your Twitter, you warned people that they shouldn’t attend one particular set of yours if they’d recently had a miscarriage or been raped. So, like: Are you comfortable excluding that big a chunk of the population from your set?”
Reasonable questions, in my opinion. If you’re leveraging people’s trauma for laughs, the least you can do is look them in the face. Why make art if you don’t have a point of view?
The same week, feminist writer and comedian Molly Knefel published an impassioned essay about the contrast between Patton Oswalt’s brutal dismissal of rape joke critiques and his “too soon” reverence for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Aurora theater shooting: “The suffering in Boston, as horrifying as it is, is largely abstract to a nation that has, for the most part, never experienced such a thing. On the other hand, in every room Oswalt performs comedy in, there will be a rape survivor. Statistically speaking, there will be many. There will be even more if he is performing at a university. If exceptional violence illuminates our human capacity for empathy, then structural violence shows the darkness of indifference.”
Both pieces are eminently reasonable and fair—they read beautifully, even years later. The response from comedy fans, however, was horrific. Doyle and Knefel were interlopers, frauds, unfunny cunts, Nazis. Oswalt fans harangued Knefel for days until she took a break from the Internet. Sam Morril eventually replied to Doyle’s letter with a lengthy blog post. The key quote? “Stand-up comedy is a performance, not a discourse.” A dead end. A wall. You are not welcome. Women, it seemed, were obliged to be thick-skinned about their own rapes, while comics remained too thin-skinned to handle even mild criticism.
I was done. I wrote an essay in defense of Knefel and Doyle. It was plainer than “How to Make a Rape Joke,” less affectionately fraternal, less pliant. “Comedy clubs are an overtly hostile space for women,” I said. “Even just presuming we can talk about comedy gets women ripped to shreds by territorial dudes desperate to defend their authority over what’s funny. ‘Jokes’ about rape and gendered violence are treated like an inevitability instead of a choice; like they’re beyond questioning; like they’re somehow equally sacred alongside women’s actual humanity and physical sanctity. When women complain, however civilly, they’re met with condescension, dismissal, and the tacit (or, often, explicit) message that this is not yours, you are not welcome here.”
To my surprise, Oswalt tweeted a link to my post, saying that THIS was feminist discourse he could respect—not like Molly’s hit piece. It was a savvy move, to use me for some feminist cred while discrediting the piece that called him out most damningly by name. I replied that if he agreed with me, he agreed with Knefel; our views were not at odds. As we volleyed back and forth, I thought about a night at M Bar in 2003 or 2004, when I’d shyly approached him after a show and told him he was my favorite comic. He was kind and generous with his time. We talked about Seattle; neither of us could remember the name of the movie theater on the Ave that wasn’t the Neptune. Later, when I remembered, I e-mailed him: the Varsity. He thanked me, warm and sincere.
Fighting about rape on the Internet was not how I envisioned our next encounter.
I was in a cab to JFK, heading home from a New York business trip, when my friend W. Kamau Bell called my cell. Kamau, at the time, had a weekly show on FX, produced by Chris Rock, called Totally Biased—a sort of news-of-the-day talk show structured vaguely like The Daily Show, but with a social justice bent. Hari wrote for the show; so did Guy Branum. It was a rare writers’ room—straight white men were a minority. It was a rare show.
“I want to talk to you about a crazy idea,” Kamau said. “We want to do a debate about rape jokes, on the show. You versus a comic—it looks like it’ll be Jim Norton.”
“Oh, god,” I laughed. “Do I have to?” Norton is a darling of dark comedy, a prince of the Opie & Anthony set—a scene that makes Howard Stern look like Terry Gross.
“Jim’s not like a lot of those guys, I promise,” Kamau assured me. “He’s not just like, ‘Ugh, feminists.’ You can actually have a conversation with him. We tried to get Colin Quinn, but honestly I think you’ll be better off with Jim.”
“Is this a trap?” I said.