Jamieson Webster. Studies in Gender & Sexuality. Volume 18, Issue 4. 2017.
I’m going to argue that the rape joke is the joke par excellence. The ur-joke.
Jokes speak the truth like dreams and symptoms and errors. The rape joke, as the ur-joke, does not simply speak a truth—the truth about rape, or rapists—its truth is oddly the truth of joking itself. It is at this almost unbearable hinge, between the highly personal tragedy of rape and rape culture, and something beyond this, more universal, that I would like to steer this investigation. Although I do not want to gloss the problem of rape in its singular and historical dimension as tragedy, its other, perhaps neglected, face deserves some reflection, in particular as something common to us all and something that I think comes to light in this controversial work by Vanessa Place.
Rape jokes are problematic, intolerable even. Reactionary, in the sense of what you cannot get outside of, what provokes you, and provokes in you the temptation to both identification and disidentification: horror, outrage, dismissal, secret identification, or its reverse, identification, omnipotent laughter, and split-off horror, disavowed vulnerability. One means out of this deadlock, I will wager, is through a close structural reading. Structurally, rape jokes labor on the power of the transgressive, the essence of toomuch-ness and the temptation to cross this line; a dark spot in the achievements of so-called humanity and civilization of which comedy is one of the greatest. Rape jokes take the liberation undergirding the force of humor and turn this liberation on its head. Rape is the essence of unfreedom, the vicissitudes of force, so how can we be free to joke about this? What limit does this provoke us to try and impose, inviting, against our conscious will, a new mode of transgression? Another round of tragedy?
As a psychoanalyst, I deal with trauma and the problems of pleasure on a day-to-day basis. Sexual violence is serious, and yet my job is often to transmute some of this pain into something lighter and livable, as if the very subversion of jokes is part of the psychoanalytic cure. It is this structure that led the theorist Alenka Zupancic (2008) to say that, for her, comedy is more radical than tragedy. In classical tragedy an unbearable truth is revealed, but it is not lived with. The person dies but gains a name—Oedipus, Hamlet, Ophelia, Jocasta, King Lear, Cordelia. Comedy, on the other hand, shows us how we live with our symptoms. What is funny is this symptomatic life, a life of what she calls living with jouissance, finding a way to bear ethically a sexuality that can grow violent, and a violence that is often deeply sexual. Comedy shows that we do not have to die from it, or kill, or cause harm, but that we can live with it, and that this living is precisely communal. Comedies involve many people. A whole world! Comedy deindividuates, whereas tragedy subjectivizes. Tragedy is the truth of our ultimate solitude, the weight of personal history, whereas comedy is social and oriented not to the past but the future. Comedy, in this categorization, is reminiscent of Freud’s (1905) statement—one that he was so fond of—that we can’t laugh at our own jokes; that jokes are made for the other. It is to the ethics of this living well with jouissance that I think Vanessa Place’s work aims.
The joke about the therapist being “the rapist” must have some truth to it? Of course it plays on the idea of the safety of the consulting room, two people meeting alone with a bed and talking about intimate things, often sexual. The joke is cognizant of the fact that this can only happen if there is no sex. It touches on the rule of abstinence, perhaps more critical in psychoanalysis than in other places where this rule exists—in the workplace, in universities. It also touches on the importance for the analyst of not bringing his or her jouissance into the work. Our personal analyses are supposed to take care of that. All this is certainly there in the joke—and how many patients fail to mention this joke!—but still, I think there is something more.
There are times in treatment when we have to assume the position of an authority as analyst, times when we have to speak categorically in some way, when what we say has to have the character of an act from the outside, something that intends to act upon our patients, often at a critical moment, emphasizing an asymmetry between partners. When doing this, we have to know that this Otherness in our words is not synonymous with ourselves, with any imputed personal power. That power belongs to the Other that we are not. It is a moment of ventriloquism. It takes root in the unconscious, something that is between or beyond both the analyst and the patient. We must have the humility of allowing our patients to hold us accountable for an act that breaks into the dyad and that we assume with very little ease. Even if we do not identify with it, we have to allow our patients to identify us with it and act accordingly
Often, later, these intense moments—enactments, repetitions, interpretations—are wrestled with and play at the boundary of what is tragicomic in one’s life as repeated in an analysis. The way one’s psychoanalysis looks retrospectively often turns on these critical junctures: “One time my analyst said …” or “Can you believe my analyst …” But patient and analyst are hopefully aware that this “something” came from elsewhere, changing the fate of the analysis. If lived with, these moments often give the analysis its more comedic tone—the communal struggle of patient and analyst. Psychoanalysis has always faced twin dangers here: one, obsessionalizing the terrain by avoiding these moments, never acting or letting oneself be a conduit for the act; the second, believing that that the power granted by a patient’s transference, and the essence of the unconscious, is the truth of who we are, leaving the analyst free to act as he or she likes. With these twin obstacles, the therapist must find the narrow strait between doing and being nothing and being “the rapist”— the failure to do so being the way most boundary violations take place from the small and negligent to the significant and violating. So the joke bears intimately on the question of maintaining an ethical psychoanalytic practice. Vanessa Place’s work on rape jokes may speak to the question of holding to this path.
Let’s turn to Freud and the question of rape jokes.
In Freud’s (1905) “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious” there are four categories of jokes: (a) sexual, obscene, exposing jokes; (b) aggressive, hostile jokes; (c) cynical, critical, blasphemous jokes; and (d) skeptical jokes. The rape joke is every one of these, which I will demonstrate, repeating some of the jokes from Place’s performance in order to reveal their structural dynamics.
Rape jokes are sexual, obscene, and exposing. Obscenity, Freud (1905) said, compels the assailed (his word) to imagine the part of the body undergoing the procedure in question. Sex is exposed in a joke on the exposure of sexuality. This is brought to an obscene metalevel in the case of rape jokes that involve the exhibitionism of presenting a scene to a third-party witness at the same time that this third party identifies, in a flash, both with the rapist (this is what is most transgressive) and with the body as object (this is what is the cause of discomfort and which can be hidden). The body is exposed but can be obscured by the act of rape and the presence of the rapist. The joke therefore follows “the grammar of fantasy,” which involves three parties—the subject of the sexual or violent act, the person objectified and undergoing the act as body, and the witness. In Freud, to be a subject in the position of object is the most hidden layer of fantasy and the layer that identification seeks to obscure in playing with the subject positions of witness or perpetrator. Jokes also involve three parties: the joker, the listener, and the object of the joke—What’s the difference between a joke and three cocks? The girl last night couldn’t take a joke.
Sexual jokes, Freud (1905) pointed out, are a form of seduction. In fact, sexual jokes originate in the seduction of exciting, wooing speech. This speech, speculated Freud, was met with an obstacle, twisting the sexual in the direction of hostility. The obstacle forces the speech to make an end in itself, in the form of smut; a pickup scene where the joker ends up picking himself up, attempting to undo his rejection—favorite pickup line—Hey, does this rag smell like chloroform, or is it just me?; favorite pickup line—Get in the van. Smut, said Freud, is the first sexual joke. We engage in smut because the woman is not open to our seductions. “The woman’s inflexibility is therefore the first condition for the development of smut,” wrote Freud (1905), p. 99. Furthermore, Freud pointed out that smut is often done in the presence of a woman, even the rejecting woman, as if at the origin the third-party object of smut literally needed to be present. To mock her, to degrade her, to continue to try to seduce her, to conquer her, to gross her out, maybe all at once—Rape. Just like regular sex, but with a winner. Only later, claimed Freud, is it done without her, which is a development of civilization and part of the rules of decorum—I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking then waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name, or how you met, or why they are dead. The final twist in this tale is that the men who talk smut are allied against the female and united in their pleasurable joking with one another. Freud (1927) wrote, “The course of events may thus be described. When the first person finds his libidinal impulse inhibited by the woman, he develops a hostile trend against that person and calls on the originally interfering third person as his ally. Through the first person’s smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido” (p. 100)—Gang rape, because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
This is the scene of the origin of the sexual joke: smut, bribery, woman’s inflexibility, her no, circumventing it, bringing in an ally, sexual desire turned aggressive, aggression turned back into sexual pleasure—Rape: Because I’m a lover AND a fighter. At the core of the joke is the woman as obstacle—I once shagged a woman into unconsciousness. Just joking— she was unconscious when I found her. “And here at last,” said Freud (1905), “we can understand what it is that jokes achieve in the service of their purpose. They make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way. They circumvent this obstacle and that way draw pleasure from a source which the obstacle had made inaccessible” (pp. 100–101). At this point, one might be led to say that jokes, in particular sexual ones, are essentially a sublimated form of rape or the attempt to sublimate sexual violence, the critical difference between these two being structural, for one contains within itself the structure of rape while attempting to redirect the impulse from reality to ideation, whereas the other, more sublimated, perhaps has the potential to lead to other forms.
Hostile jokes, Freud (1905) said, are about the evasion of the restrictions on hostility. The joke is a rebellion against authority and liberation from its pressures. It is the release from pretense. If we think about this in light of what we just understood about the sexual joke … it is a rebellion, a hostility, a liberation from the pressures and pretenses of sexual relationships, courting rituals, the demand for commitment—all that the woman has come to represent as obstacle. What Freud called her “intimidation” of men. So she must be ridiculed, attacked, negated, especially at the level of this imagined power—There’s only one thing worse than raping a feminist. Not raping a feminist.
This is where hostile jokes bleed into cynical jokes. Critical, blasphemous jokes are leveled at institutions, most commonly for Freud (1905) the institutions of marriage and religion, to which I would also add money or economy and class. Those institutions are designed to restrict or channel sexuality and aggression and the rape joke reverses and upends this effort—I raped a Pakistani girl. Her parents arranged it; If God doesn’t need a woman’s consent to get a woman pregnant, why the fuck should I? This is especially true of jokes about priests and pedophilia—How did the priest find the boy in the forest? Very nice indeed. This criticism or attack on the institution is why Freud (1905) said jokes are fundamentally rebellious. They circumvent the censor and level a critique. They lift repression or inhibition. They attack authority. The trouble with rape jokes is that in undermining one authority (and most often it is the authority of women), another authority is asserted in its place, namely, the vindication of the perpetrator of sexual assault. The question one must ask is whether there is a rape joke that simply undoes the authority of the rapist. Perhaps this is where the subversion of the joke is context dependent
Freud (1905) went on to state that the lifting of inhibition in jokes releases a surplus of energy, which comes in the form of a laugh. You don’t know why it’s funny. It takes you by surprise—I call rape surprise sex. But even stranger still, the work against repression that goes into creating a joke is only discharged in another by making someone else laugh, by forcing it to be their pleasure. We can’t laugh at our own jokes. When we listen to a joke we consent in advance to an attack on our cherished institutions, our inhibitions in the form of the barriers of shame, disgust, morality. The joke desacralizes. It is an attack on speech itself as an attack on what is sacred—What’s the difference between a pedophile and a terrorist? A pedophile actually gets his virgins. One begins to wonder whether we ought to consent to a joke at all.
Finally, on the topic of skeptical jokes, Freud stated that they play with lying speech as such, with the difference between the speech act that brings a subject into being and always takes the hearer into account, as opposed to what Freud (1905) called Jesuitical speech or true discourse, that attempt to describe things without taking into consideration the person who hears it. In other words, speech that says “‘I,” and speech that says “that”—I was raping a woman the other night and she cried, “Please think of my children!” Kinky bitch. Lacan, in his 1953 paper “Variations on the Standard Treatment”, called this bipolarity the interaccusation of speech, meaning one form of speech always accuses the other of lying. It is for this reason that I think Place has said, “An accusation always arrives at its destination.”
What is attacked then in skeptical jokes is not a person or institution, but “certainty of our knowledge” (Freud, 1905 p. 115). Speech as always potentially lying. Rape jokes know this perhaps better than any other. They show that yes and no are difficult to hold—They say the only effective contraception is just to say no; unfortunately it’s not effective 100% of the time, that consent leaves out surprise—Girls like surprises. Girls like sex. So why is it that when they’re combined, they don’t love it nearly as much?, that what we want, what gives us pleasure, always escapes us, so that we simply cannot be certain in the realm of sex—They say all women have rape fantasies, so they aren’t so different from men after all. Rape jokes know that there is no “No” in the unconscious—If you don’t want to hear rape jokes, why did you dress like you want to hear rape jokes. Sexuality is the point of uncertainty in knowledge from the get-go, which leaves one vulnerable in the most human fashion, and to push this, vulnerable then also to its reversal, which is the rape joke par excellence.
I would like to end with the difference between comedy and humor in relation to the question of the rape joke.
The comic, Freud (1905) pointed out, has a close link with the infantile. Not only is it about the arousal of childish pleasures, childish play, but also it touches on the nature of children in general, and on childish suffering. In comedy we rediscover the child’s helplessness, the child’s incomplete control over his bodily functions, his fascination with excrement, the pleasure of constant repetition, exaggeration as linked with a child’s peculiar sense of proportion, the child’s lack of moderation, child’s pleasure in mimicking grown-ups or having a grown-up “come down to their level,” and finally the child as gullible and credulous. The rape joke bears this link with the infantile, especially in the dimension of helplessness, placing sexuality and helplessness in proximity, putting sexuality where it doesn’t belong, where a No is supposed to operate but cannot operate seamlessly, all the time. Rape jokes play on this confusion of tongues—What do spinach and anal sex have in common? If you were forced to have it as a kid, you’ll hate it as an adult; They call my dick a broken toy because it makes children cry, and less obvious, What’s small, shiny, and makes a woman want to have sex? A penknife. If rape is so wrong, why did God make men stronger than women? Perhaps what is present and most disavowed in the rape joke is not simply the subject as object of sexual violence, or the attack on the institution, or the vulnerability of the institution being attack, but the entire domain of the infantile itself—universal in its pleasures, confusions, helplessness, vulnerability, pain; its consistent force of undoing in the human psyche.
If comedy is a question of small, with humor it is a question of big. In Freud’s (1927) late essay “Humor,” humor plays with grandeur and elevation. It usurps the mechanisms of the superego, the over I, and sees the self from this perspective. Humor plays with narcissism and the refusal to be distressed, invulnerable to trauma, which is just one more occasion to gain pleasure. It plays with the position of the father, looking at the child. Humor is parental. Humor is a contribution made to the comic through the position of the superego. It makes the world seem less dangerous. “Look! Here is the world that seems so dangerous. It is nothing but a game for children” (Freud, 1927, p. 166).
The parental function of humor is to take what is dangerous and find in it a source of humor and play, taking away some of its power, mastering it through shifting perspective, turning the world upside down, but—and this is the important part—in looking at oneself from above, we ultimately find ourselves ridiculous. The critique or attack isn’t directed at the other but is rather aimed at ourselves. In humor, we take humor at our desires and intentions, our impotence and helplessness. It is in this light that I argue that rape jokes do not fit with this depiction of humor. So what then, must we ask, is a joke without humor? A rape joke.
Rape jokes violate this parental function of humor. Rapists do not laugh at themselves. The rape jokes instead show us the failure of this humorousness in the obscenity of the superego—My daughter has started to become interested in sex. Finally! She used to just lie there and cry. Losing my virginity was like learning to ride a bicycle. My dad was behind me all the way. Rape jokes are a distortion of our humane ways of alleviating pain stretched between pleasure, humor, and intimacy—Some men give women nights they’ll never forget. I give women nights they’ll never remember. Rape jokes eject the possibility of self-criticism, doubt, and guilt. The humorlessness of the rape joke is embodied in the rapist’s literal humor with himself, his isolated pleasure. It is a refusal to be distressed, taking a position of invulnerability, negating trauma, using trauma as a gain, as a seductive call to others to join them there, but all of this from a solitary unified position, without ever looking ridiculous. The question is—do we simply identify with this obscene superego?
To end, joking without humor is close to what Beckett (1976) in Watt called the mirthless laugh, “the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs—silence please—at that which is unhappy” (p. 47). Perhaps this is precisely why we need Vanessa Place’s work. For in collecting these jokes, reading them to us en masse, in her mirthless voice, with her female body, giving back to us this joke of jokes a second time, she shows us the laugh of laughs, the rape joke as mirthless laughter, the rapist as the one who is most unhappy, laughable. And if we laugh, it is because we are not amused while willfully, joyfully even, retaining our sense of humor.