LOL Rape

The controversy after Daniel Tosh joked about rape in his stand-up act has made me think several things about comedy and art.

Of course I don’t think rape is funny and I don’t think a lot of tragic things are funny but we do joke about them. But I think the essence of black comedy is distancing ourselves from the subject. You could make a tasteless joke about the concept of rape or the rape of a faceless person.

However, I think it crosses more of a line when you joke about a specific person getting raped. So I think it was awful when Tosh pointed out a specific woman in the audience, heckler or not, and said it would be funny if she got raped. Correction: Gang raped. Because it would be funny if like five guys raped her. LOL.

If I’d been at the club, even if I’d left my sense of taste behind and laughed at rape jokes, I think it would shut me up to hear Tosh tell a real live woman it would be funny if she got raped. I don’t think it’s funny to link an awful crime to a specific person standing in front of you. For stand-up comedians, heckling is a cardinal sin but isn’t there a better way to deal with it than saying, “Your rape would amuse me”?

I try making an equivalence between rape jokes and jokes about other awful things. Tosh signed one of his tweets with “dead baby jokes.” If a heckler called him out on a dead baby joke, would anyone find it acceptable if Tosh pointed out a baby in the audience and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that baby died?” If a heckler objected to a joke about cancer, would anyone find it acceptable if Tosh told the heckler, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you got cancer?”

Is heckling so beyond a pale that it merits the most awful of insults, the modern equivalents to “a pox on your house”?

I understand that audience member should know the style of the comedian they see and in Tosh’s case, the humor can push the line. But accepting any tasteless thing with “That’s just Tosh” can be like the old Onion headline, “Lighten Up, I’m Just Being a Total Asshole.”