It was such a transparently irrelevant tangent that I was momentarily speechless. Rape jokes couldn’t possibly contribute to the trivialization of rape, because Columbine? It was the rhetorical equivalent of distracting the audience with a squeaky toy. My speechlessness didn’t matter, though, because Jim was forging ahead:
“I think the next time somebody walks through a museum and sees a painting that they find highlights or perpetuates a thought that they find objectionable—even a thought that they should find objectionable—then they should take a towel and throw it over the painting. Or I think the next time that person goes to a movie and there’s a rape in a movie, they should stand up and hold a board in front of a screen so nobody else can see it. Now, if you did that, people would—what happened to Giuliani when he went after the Brooklyn Museum of Art! People were like, ‘You fascist! You’re going after art for something you don’t like!’ But if you get mad at a comedian for telling a joke you don’t like, people are like, ‘You go girl.’ It’s either all okay or none of it’s okay. I understand why rape is an offensive, awful thing. No one is saying it’s not. But sometimes comedy does trivialize what is truly horrible. The roughest set I ever saw a comedian do is Joan Rivers—I saw her at the Cutting Room a few years ago—and I think she’s one of the most underrated comics ever [applause] and she did a brutal set. She talked about 9/11, she talked about AIDS, and I mean it was rough. And she had zero respect for the boundaries of society. And we all knew why we were there, and we all knew why she was taking everything that hurts us and everything that’s sad, and everything that’s miserable, and just turning it upside down and looking at it, and we all walked out of there the same as when we walked in. Nobody walked out thinking, ‘Hey, AIDS is hilarious! AIDS isn’t sad and terrible! 9/11 is irrelevant!’ We all walked out feeling the same about those subjects, but the relief of comedy is it takes things that aren’t funny and it allows us to laugh about them for an hour, and then we have the rest of the day to look at them like they’re as horrible and sad as they really are.”
At this point, I had genuinely lost the plot. I stammered and grasped for words. What does Giuliani have to do with rape jokes? How was criticizing comedians on Twitter the same as throwing towels over paintings? Isn’t a towel kind of small? Wouldn’t a bedsheet do the job better? Also, how many art museums traffic in explicit rape apologia and then brush off any criticism by scoffing, “Calm down, it’s just art”? Again, context matters. Hanging a giant swastika flag in a Holocaust museum, as a historical artifact, is not the same as painting a giant swastika on the wall of the Brooklyn Museum and titling it, “Kill All Jews.” Culturally, we’ve evolved to the point where that second piece would never make it into a museum, because we, as a society, have made a decision about which ideas are good and which ideas are bad. We don’t have to convene a panel of Holocaust deniers to sign off on that fact in the name of “free speech.” That’s the difference between commenting on rape culture and perpetuating rape culture; choosing to be better, collectively, and caving to the howls of misogynists who insist that sexist abuse is a fair and equal counterpoint to women asking not to be abused.
As for Jim’s Joan Rivers anecdote, I’m glad he saw Joan do a great, dark set once. But it’s bafflingly presumptuous (and, I’d wager, deliberately disingenuous) to assume that he knew what everyone’s opinion on AIDS was when they walked into and out of that theater. There are plenty of people who consider themselves compassionate, moral, and kind—who have a gay friend and support same-sex marriage—who still, on some level, think of AIDS as a deviant’s disease that gay men deserve because of their promiscuity. No, a few off-color AIDS jokes aren’t going to implant prejudice in anyone’s brain, but they can damn sure validate and stoke any prejudices that are already lurking.
People like Jim desperately want to believe that the engines of injustice run on outsized hate—stranger rapes in dark alleys, burning crosses and white hoods—but the reality is that indifference, bureaucracy, and closed-door snickers are far more plentiful fuels.
At the time, the Steubenville rape case had a monopoly on the news—at a high school party in Ohio, two popular football players digitally penetrated an unconscious sixteen-year-old classmate; one also exposed her breasts and put his penis in her mouth. Multiple teenage partygoers took photos and videos of the rape, which they then shared gleefully on social media, accompanied by a proliferation of rape jokes. In another video, friends of the boys reflect on the rape, joking about how “dead” the victim was. “She is so raped right now,” one kid says. “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl.” The boys’ coaches and school administrators attempted to cover up the crime. Media coverage of the investigation and trial repeatedly lamented the loss of the rapists’ “bright futures.” The victim’s identity was leaked and her character flayed on live TV.
I practically begged Jim to understand. “Maybe there’s a woman [in the audience] who’s wondering whether she should report her rape,” I said, “and she’s sitting there, and everyone’s laughing at the idea of how funny rape is, not in a way that is releasing any tension, but in a way that is causing tension, tangibly. Tension that filters out into the world, where we now live in a country where teenage boys think it’s totally cool and hilarious to just put their fingers in the vagina of a passed-out child and then videotape it and put it on the Internet.”
Jim cut me off. “And people reacted appropriately.”
“Really?”
“People who saw that were disgusted by that. I’m not talking about the school that covered it up, but the fact that society looked at that and all of us were repulsed by it.”
“All of us were not repulsed by it. No. A lot of people supported those boys.”
Kamau backed me up. “Have you been on Twitter lately?”
There was the crux. It’s easy for Jim and his fans and all the young comedy dudes to pretend like rape culture doesn’t exist, because they have the luxury of actively ignoring it. Confronted with a case like Steubenville, he only bothers to look at the parts that reinforce his worldview. He brushed it off with a shrug, because he can, and barreled on:
“Your Twitter picture is Jeff Goldblum. Jeff Goldblum’s first role was a brutal rapist in Death Wish. Now I’m not saying anything against Jeff Goldblum, but—”
At this point a producer brought up a screen grab of my Twitter profile—featuring a sweaty Jeff Goldblum in repose, erotically dying from dinosaur bites, in Jurassic Park—on the screen behind us. They knew this “point” was coming. Jim must have told them in his pre-interview. They were prepared.