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Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years. Welcome to the first installment of I DON’T BELONG HERE. Each week, I will take one of your sacred cows, slaughter it, cut it into delicious beef jerky and lay the strips of meat over this blog to dry. When I run out of cows, you’re next.
This week: IN DEFENSE OF RAPE JOKES:
There seems, in this culture, to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how humor works, and why we have humor in the first place. And this misunderstanding is this: that there could possibly be a situation or circumstance that, blanketly, is never funny.
This is simply not true.
Even blankets can be funny!
Tied to this misunderstanding is the judgment that there is something wrong with finding things funny. Especially, horrible, awful things that are so horrible and awful that they can’t really be thought about with a clear and rational mind. These things are supposed to be not funny.
Case in point, rape.
I have heard numerous times from numerous people that rape is something that is never, can never, be funny. Mostly from women. They say that it is not funny.
"IT'S NOT FUNNY!"
(Also, before anyone makes this a gender thing: Men get raped too. It happens all the time, if you’re to believe all the jokes about prison rape that are perfectly acceptable in this same culture. And it’s not even just men raping women vs men raping men. There are women rapists too. Read the statistics before you climb up on your soapbox.)
And of course, rape is not funny. Rape is horrible. To have to go through an experience like that, and all the awful emotions of guilt and shame and rage and helplessness that stick to your soul like toilet tissue, that’s not funny. It’s awful.
Sole? Soul? See what I just did there?
Or rather, it’s the fact that it’s so awful that makes it fucking hilarious.
The function of humor is to deal with things the psyche encounters that are so awful, so incomprehensibly terrible, that the only recourse is to either run and hide and deny, or to laugh about it. It is a healthy way of processing trauma. The ability to laugh at one’s most awful experiences is a sign of….
No, you know what? Screw these justifications. Rape is funny because it’s funny to me. Period.
People say, “Well, you’ve never been raped.” And I haven’t. I also have never had an anvil drop on me, but when it happens to Wile E. Coyote I am in hysterics. I have slipped and fallen, and it is scary and it hurts, but when someone else slips and falls I find it to be funny. Sometimes. If the context and situation are right. I’m not a sociopath.
Oh Wile E., will you ever learn?
And it’s entirely about context, same as any awful thing that we joke about. Physical violence, awkward social situations, marital infidelities, taboo bodily functions, pain and suffering — if you actually look at the basis of just about every basic building block of humor, you see that anguish — physical, social, emotional — is the key to it. In the right context, any of these can be hilarious.
Look. Here’s a rape joke that I think is funny. “Did I tell you about the time I saved a girl from being raped? (pause) Yeah, I changed my mind.” It’s funny because it’s awful; the bait-and-switch; it sounds like the setup for a good samaritan story before veering off into broad social commentary and taboo-busting black humor. Maybe you don’t think it’s funny. Well, different strokes for different folks, I suppose. It’s hard to argue with an opinion.
And before this turns into a whole thing just about rape (too late) it’s not just rape either. It’s everything taboo that we’re not supposed to joke about because someone suffered somewhere. Can’t make fun of 9/11! Someone might know someone who died. Can’t make Holocaust jokes… it belittles a tragedy.
"Did someone here order two large plains?"
Fuck that. I hope it belittles tragedy. I hope it belittles it and belittles it until it’s all gone. The world needs a lot less tragedy in it and a lot more comedy. In that vein I leave you with this, from George Carlin:
People will say “you can’t joke about rape. Rape’s not funny.” I say “fuck you, I think it’s hilarious!” How do you like that? I can prove to you that rape is funny. Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd.
this is some great stuff love it