Lara Cox. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society. Volume 40, Issue 4. Summer 2015.
This article explores the presence of the rape joke in contemporary American stand-up comedy. It propounds that irony is a key ingredient in comics’ legitimation of their jokes in a world where feminism has made rape a serious issue. While comics might insist that their ironic endeavors have a role to play in sociopolitical critique, irony provides the author with a critical tool to explore the fuller implications of the rape joke. Dividing analysis into male-comic- and female-comic-authored rape jokes, the article links irony to both the promotion of conservative ideologies of rape and possible destabilizations of rape culture.
The year 2012 proved to be an infamous one for stand-up comedy, having been crowned the industry’s “Year of the Rape Joke” by The Daily Beast (Romano). Prompting this nomenclature was the scandal swarming around stand-up comic Daniel Tosh’s blunder in July of that year, which resulted from his performance at the Hollywood Laugh Factory. The minutiae of the story remain unknown, but it is believed that Tosh declared something to the effect of “Rape jokes are always funny.” A woman in the audience, outraged, voiced her disagreement. Tosh rejoined, much to the amusement of his audience at the time: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” (in Cookies for Breakfast). The anonymous woman fled the establishment, later detailing her experience on her friend’s Cookies for Breakfast Tumblr: “Even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place … the suggestion of it was violent enough and was meant to put me in my place” (Cookies for Breakfast). The Tosh scandal went viral, and defenders of the comic found themselves far outnumbered by outraged attackers. However, the recurring question in the aftermath was: Can a rape joke ever be “funny” in a way that is subversive of the common misconceptions surrounding rape? Comics are not necessarily concerned with sociopolitical critique when they tell their jokes. Their prerogative is to get laughs from audiences, sometimes regardless of how or why. Nevertheless, stand-up comedy purports to push the envelope on taboo topics (a phallic metaphor that pervades critical literature on the subject), often in the name of denouncing injustice. And what the plethora of online, often self-avowedly feminist forums debated was precisely how the genre’s commitment to cultural critique could effectively be used in the service of challenging the many misunderstandings of rape. Railing against Tosh, Jessica Valenti, third-wave feminist and coeditor of Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape (Friedman and Valenti), ventured: “Jokes about rape that work—those that subvert rather than terrify—do exist” (Valenti).
This article reunites a selected number of comics’ rape jokes that contemporary feminist bloggers reexamined in the wake of the Tosh scandal, and it offers a fresh analytical arc to deconstruct them more fully. Specifically, I center on the presence of irony in these quips, the “mode of discourse where you say something you don’t actually mean and expect people to understand not only what you actually do mean but also your attitude toward it” (Hutcheon). Broad and notoriously difficult to pin down to one definition, irony can enlist various other rhetorical subgenres (parody, paradox, contradiction, satire), and it can assume various guises (situational or observable, “cosmic,” verbal, stable, unstable, Socratic, dramatic, or tragic). It is, however, best defined in contradistinction to what it isn’t: direct, literal expression. In a world where feminist consciousness-raising has made it common knowledge that rape is “a crime of violence by men against women, no longer as deserved behavior for women’s sinful ways” (Moses), a crucial rhetorical ingredient in joking about the matter must be nonliterality. With a focus on the ways in which irony operates in these jokes, I contribute a new methodology to an existing body of literature, which, be it from legal, historical, psychoanalytic, social psychological, social anthropological, or artistic perspectives, has tended to understand rape-related humor as irrevocably tied to patriarchal preconceptions. While I do not entirely disagree with this view, my conceptual framework provides a nuanced way to respond to the question that the 2012 Tosh debacle demanded that feminists answer: Can a rape joke ever work subversively?
I emphasize “nuanced” here because irony is, as Linda Hutcheon observes, “transideological” (Hutcheon). Either its nonliterality can bring about “a healthy suspension of certainty” (Hutcheon) or it “may be one more way for [the] subject of domination to sustain itself … [since] violence is presented, with the critique of this violence already anticipated and silenced” (Colebrook). My task in this article will be to examine some key variables in the subversive reception of irony, such as what it is exactly in comics’ rape quips that is being ironized and who is entreated to “get” the joke. At its most disruptive, ironic destabilization could potentially work against what has become known in feminist parlance as our contemporary “rape culture”—the second term that assumes an overarching place in this article. Ever since Susan Brownmiller’s foundational treatise on the history of rape throughout two millennia of Western culture, Against Our Will, feminists have understood rape as a systemic problem—hence a rape culture—not merely confined to a few cases involving psychologically disturbed men. Nonconsensual sex has a normalized presence in our society, and it owes this to gender stereotypes. As Jill Filipovic starkly puts it: “Sexual assault simply cannot be removed from its broader context … and as long as that view is bolstered … by social codes that render women passive and men aggressive—women will not be safe”. Rape culture is informed by this deep-seated double premise of feminine passivity and masculine aggressivity, misreading or downplaying a number of other scenarios that constitute forced sex in the process, as we shall see.
In what follows, I analyze the potential that comics’ irony contains to disrupt or shore up the fixed gender stereotypes on which rape culture is founded. I divide the article into two parts: men’s stand-up and a women’s counterpart. More specifically, the former category focuses on jokes told by white, heterosexual, middle-class men. My reason for dividing stand-up’s rape joke by gender lies in the complexities of the medium’s history. It was and remains a white-male-dominated profession, flourishing in its earliest guise in the nineteenth-century United States as an interlude in the burlesque show. It first achieved success in its modern-day format in the postwar period, with Jewish comics, such as Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, and Carl Reiner, leading the way to national acclaim and popularity (Limon). Despite this, over the past two decades, the comic cast has diversified. An increasing presence of female comics in the industry has given rise to a flurry of women-authored rape jokes. As I will demonstrate, female comics’ ironic utterance of the rape joke, coupled with their performance of their marginality in the industry (or “rhetorical marginality” as Joanne Gilbert), have a role to play in troubling rape culture.
Male Stand-up
I begin my analysis with a well-known influence on the modern-day rape joke phenomenon (Kramer): New York comic George Carlin’s ten-minute segment in his 1990 comedy album, Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics. As the album title indicates, Carlin was determined to humorously push the envelope with regard to various controversial subjects—not only rape but offensive language, cancer, feminist politics, “things you don’t wanna hear,” and so on. His “rape jokes can be funny” bit runs through three main scenarios: cartoon rape (Porky Pig aggressing Elmer Fudd), a robber’s rape of an octogenarian, and rape at the North Pole versus a counterpart at the Equator. The comic enlists the ironic signal as a prefatory legitimation to tell his jokes: “[Some] guys think women oughta go to prison for being cock-teasers. Don’t seem fair to me. Don’t seem right. But you can joke about it. … It all depends on … what the exaggeration is” (Carlin).
After giving the ironic marker, Carlin launches into a plethora of sexist stereotypes that he had abjured in his preface. On the robber raping an eighty-one-year-old woman, he issues: “And I’m thinking to myself: Why? What the fuck kind of a social life does this guy have? … I say: ‘Jesus Christ, be a little fucking selective next time, will you?'” (Carlin). Carlin ironizes a cultural prioritization of the young “beautiful” rape survivor and the downplayed cases of sexual aggression against older women (Brownmiller). In his third joke, Carlin muses: “I wonder, is there more rape at the Equator or the North Pole?” Then he answers his own question: “People think it’s the Equator, because it’s hot down there. … That’s exactly why there’s less rape at the Equator—’cause there’s a lot of fucking going on! … Take a look at the population figures: billions of people live near the Equator!” (Carlin). The comic makes an association between pregnancy (high population figures at the Equator) and the impossibility of rape (there is more “fucking” than raping there). His remarks possibly target the myth of the infertile rape victim. They prefigure Todd Akin’s nonironic public relations gaffe in 2012 (one that may have cost the Republicans the election that year), in which the senator propounded the biologically false statement that pregnancy is an unlikely outcome of “legitimate rape.”
As Valenti opines, Carlin’s “jokes point out absurdity, they shed light on what’s wrong with rape—what they don’t do is threaten,” in the way Tosh’s quips do. For this reason, they are subversive of a culture that tacitly accepts rape through the perpetuation of gender norms. Valenti may be justified in her assessment of the intention behind Carlin’s jokes (to point out the absurdity of a world that normalizes rape), but let us look more closely at the components and potential effects of his irony to trouble this a little. As Hutcheon observes, irony depends on “discursive communities”—those who are already cognizant of the falsity of the discourse being articulated—who “enable the irony to happen” (Hutcheon). Contextualizing Carlin’s jokes in an awareness of his performance strategy, it can be asserted that the comic’s legion of fans, his discursive communities, will readily understand the nonliteral value of what is being told to them. As Prakash Kona glosses, “Carlinesque” habitually hinges on exaggeration (“We are not supposed to take the words literally”), and this, for many, is considered part of Carlin’s resistant form of performance.
However, the issue is more vexed than this. The notion of discursive communities also turns us to the quality of irony that makes it singularly fraught in polemical contexts such as joking about rape. Irony excludes people from understanding by its very definition; any humor that contains ironic inflection depends on the idea that there is someone out there who won’t “get” the nonliteral nature of the utterance: namely, the joke’s “butts” or “targets” (Hutcheon). Even in ancient Greece, irony tended toward elitism, denoting “an urbane and elevated personality,” and was reserved for use in sites of political power (Colebrook). Ironic exclusionism carries a heavy price for those not already in the know, especially in the context we are considering. Carlin’s routine, premised on the articulation of sexist tenets, could prove an incitement for a certain subsection of the population, since, as sociologists Kathryn Ryan and Jeanne Kanjorsky found, “a significant relationship” obtains “between the enjoyment of sexist humor in men and their self-reported likelihood of forcing sex”. We might question how much the comic’s jokes are to be welcomed, given the risks involved in irony, in particular in relation to those who enjoy sexist humor, who won’t “get” the ironic framing of his misogyny.
While it could be argued that this is not problematic in and of itself, since the die-hard sexist is the ultimate object of ridicule in Carlin’s humor, complicating the matter is a peripheral target. Carlin sets up, in his afterword, the figure of the irate feminist as irony’s enabling butt: “Now I’ve probably got the feminists all pissed off because I’m jokin’ about rape” (Carlin). In Parental Advisory the comic explicitly stakes out his disdain for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the body that had tried to censor him for obscenity previously, and his retroactive quip ostensibly aims to position the “humorless feminist” alongside the FCC. As Sara Ahmed argues, when feminist protest is dismissed as oversensitivity (the “feminist killjoy”), “situations of conflict, violence, and power are read as about the unhappiness of feminists, rather than being what feminists are unhappy about” (Ahmed). Accordingly, what I want to suggest is that where the butt of Carlin’s humor is understood, ultimately, as this enraged feminist (and this depends on how the listener interprets the joke), feminist insight is simultaneously stymied—that is, rape as a structural issue stemming from pernicious gender stereotypes risks being eclipsed. Fueling this possibility is an element of rape culture that remains resolutely untouched by ironic destabilization: the hapless victim in this type of humor, the survivor of rape. Notably, in two out of the three instances imagined by Carlin, the survivor is a female (the octogenarian and the infertile woman at the North Pole) who is placed at the mercy of the (albeit mocked) male aggressor’s desires. Considered from this angle, Parental Advisory does not disturb a central tenet of rape culture: “the inevitability of male triumph” (Brownmiller). Unpacking this further, it is noteworthy that “Carlinesque,” as Kona observes, typically follows the conventions of parody (straightforward exaggeration). This diverges from the role of irony in the more fruitful genre of satire. While a satirical “ironic ethos” operates as “a vehicle for ridiculing vices or follies of humanity, with an eye to their correction” (Hutcheon), Carlin’s parody provides no corrective—at least in terms of the clichés of female capitulation and passivity, which the comic merely repeats verbatim. This is in spite of numerous studies revealing that the threat of rape can be effectively counteracted via physical or verbal defense on the part of women (e.g., Brecklin and Ullman). A glance at the comments found on the YouTube post of Carlin’s bit confirms the limited interrogation of rape as a pandemic problem that is inextricable from the norms of gender: they range from the repetition of Carlin’s discursive violence (“fuck you! I think it’s hilarious, how do you like that?”) to the alienation of a “feminist bitch” who would take offense at the glorification of rape in daily phrases (e.g., “I’m gonna rape the other team at tomorrow’s game”) but who apparently wouldn’t “bat an eye” at the replacement of this with the word “murder.”
One of Carlin’s contemporary rape joke inheritors is Louis C.K. In his 2007 Shameless routine, C.K. begins: “I wouldn’t have killed Hitler. I would have raped him.” The comic considers that that “would have been enough,” delighting in Hitler’s subsequent “low self-esteem” and plaintive “No, I’m just gonna take a shower. I don’t feel good” (C.K.) when he proposes, in his imaginary dealings with the dictator, that they invade Poland. Like Carlin, C.K. clarifies his ironic articulation of a discourse of masculine aggressivion and rape as a punitive measure: “I’m not condoning rape, obviously. You should never, er, rape anyone.” For extra comedic effect, C.K. adds a closing comment: “Er, unless you have a reason, like you wanna fuck someone and they won’t let you, in which case, er, what other option do you have?” (C.K.). Another instance of C.K.’s fascination with rape as comedic material figures in his 2008 Chewed Up album. He describes his advances on a woman who persistently rejects him. C.K. does not push the matter. When the rhetorical woman comes to him the next day and expresses her confusion and disappointment that they did not have sex, C.K. is bemused: “I’m getting kind of a rapey vibe from this girl. I suspect she might enjoy being raped. Maybe that’s her thing.” Again, C.K. carefully issues the ironic marker of not really meaning it, staking out his awareness that rape is a serious matter in reality: “Just take a shot and rape ‘er. What the hell. … What’s the worst that could happen, after all?” (C.K.).
C.K.’s posturing differs somewhat from Carlin’s overt aggression and vitriol against feminism inasmuch as he “has spent 20 years making it very publicly clear that he is on the side of making things better” and “the oppressors never win at the end of his jokes,” as Lindy West, writing for the feminist website Jezebel, remarks. More specifically, both of C.K.’s rape jokes fit into a pattern of docile or sensitive masculinity that has flourished with the ascendancy of “postfeminism” (I understand the latter term as a celebration of feminism as outdated and irrelevant to current-day culture). Sarah Projansky, analyzing the integration of the postfeminist ideological zeitgeist in filmic representations of rape, identifies the rise of white male leads who “embrace both masculinity and femininity” and stand resolutely apart from the “monstrous” men who are deemed capable of committing rape on unsuspecting women. Similarly, C.K. allies himself with women’s grievances, saying “no” to sex with a woman where it is potentially nonconsensual; he also asserts his masculinity only in the most extreme of circumstances and when need be—that is, to avenge fascism.
However, knowledge of C.K.’s prowoman self-positioning does not exempt him from critical scrutiny. Notably, rape as a culture predicated on gender norms receives little interrogation. Let us take a look at the butt of his irony in the second scenario: his partner. The onus of consenting to sex is entirely on C.K.’s partner as the “gatekeeper” to masculine desire. He ridicules her when she asks why they did not have intercourse, saying: “Because you didn’t want to.” On a broader social level, it has been repeatedly reported that the majority of rapes and sexual aggressions involve someone known to the survivor (an estimated 78 percent of cases in the United States between 2005 and 2010 [Planty et al.), leading us to conclude that refusing consent is often immeasurably more complex than a question of individual and unadulterated masculine violence. In conjuring a scenario that would seem to speak precisely to this complex question of consent in nonviolent contexts, C.K.’s joke shows potential. However, what is ironized here is not the norms of masculinity, something that is emphasized by his articulation that rape is a serious crime, as in his sarcastic concluding statement: “What’s the worst that could happen, after all?” YouTube responses to C.K.’s bit confirm the fact that people largely interpreted C.K.’s commentary on masculinity nonironically; they range from hailing C.K. for having “made the right decision here” to pitting him as radically separate from the monstrous men who are “whacked out sociopaths who hump whoever they fancy.”
Instead, C.K. aims his ironic destabilization at the norms of femininity. One way of forcing irony’s “suspension of certainty” (Hutcheon), as Donna Haraway argues, is by way of contradiction: “Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve themselves into larger wholes … about the tension of holding two incompatible things together”. Similarly, C.K.’s partner’s purported wish for sex is held in tension with her repeated rejections of the comic’s advances. However, C.K.’s rhetoric ultimately persuades listeners, or at least risks persuading them, to reconstruct the joke as a matter of women “secretly” wanting to be raped: “I suspect she might enjoy being raped.” This motif, notwithstanding the fact that it is intended to be taken nonliterally, speaks directly to the origins of the rape joke. The latter can be noted in texts from as early as three centuries ago, with the aim of discrediting women’s claims of having been wronged in the eyes of the law. Other YouTube responses demonstrate that C.K.’s humor leaves listeners not that far afield of this three-hundred-year-old motif; it is the rhetorical partner of the joke who is most resoundingly punished in online commentary (“Prime example of female logic here”; “These girls are fucked in the head”). In sum, C.K. may remain the nice guy who falters in his ability to “score” with women, and who chooses to accept his partner’s silence as “no,” but his joke reneges on criticizing “a culture that [also] accepts silence as consent” (Jacobs Riggs) or the limited language that women have to articulate their sexual wishes in a full and empowered manner in Western patriarchy.
A broader flaw in the use of irony in these male-authored rape jokes centers on the fact that these comics’ strategy relies on imputing to audiences the sense that they are performing a macho front, which Lawrence Mintz dubs the “negative exemplar” role of stand-up. Communicating this nonserious front, I contend, has one of two effects. The first impugns rape culture’s tenet of masculine aggression, showing it to be a pretension that is “enacted … to be ridiculed, laughed at, repudiated and, finally, symbolically punished” (Mintz). The second, however, plays into a postfeminist ideal: these comics posture their masculinity as incommensurable with that of the rapist, who remains exceptional. C.K.’s joke about the one time he was tempted to rape, to punish Hitler, whether he means it or not, explicitly betrays his alignment of the practice with aberration. Elsewhere comic John Mulaney recounts an anecdote in which a woman runs from him in the New York borough of Queens: “Then it dawns on me: she’s running from me, because, in her eyes, I’m an adult, and adults rape each other … kind of a lot. … Whoa, I’m not like a … I’m not a ‘man'” (Mulaney). Both C.K. and Mulaney equate the figure of the rapist with what Brownmiller labeled “the heroic rapist”. Brownmiller signals the problematic nature of separating “the heroic rapist” from quotidian masculinity, a tendency exemplified by C.K.’s and Mulaney’s jokes, positing that this divorce “offer[s] men, in particular, impressionable, adolescent males, who form the potential raping population, the … psycholo[gical] encouragement to commit their acts of aggression without awareness, for the most part, that they have committed a punishable crime“. When they rely on (and simultaneously distance their “true selves” from) the ironic performance of a barbarous, rape-prone masculinity, these male comics risk contributing to the preconception that rapists are psychologically exceptional beings.
Tosh’s 2012 gang rape gaffe does differ from the jokes just outlined. The victim and the butt of his crass remark coincided in the real-life figure of the heckler (“Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now?”), unlike the distancing rhetorical situations conjured by Carlin, C.K., and Mulaney, and this is the much-cited reason that feminist and profeminist camps railed against the comic. However, what I want to suggest is that, despite this difference, Tosh’s faux pas is not entirely separable from the scenarios cited above, and this makes us reflect on the risks incurred by all male-authored rape jokes in stand-up. Tosh’s actions turn us to the question of the immediate reception of rape jokes in a comedy club. It is important to remember that Tosh’s live audience laughed at his response, which indicates that he must have been interpreted in a nonserious manner, no matter how brutal the statement appeared in the aftermath. Indeed, his joke offended a posteriori precisely because of the irony cloaking it foundered. What was exposed, in the process, were the powers of persuasion that male comics wield under irony’s aegis. Any comic, regardless of gender, seeks to prevail by means of prompting audience laughter, having been deemed (in industry slang) to “kill” or to have “murder[ed] the audience” (Horowitz) when a night at the comedy club is successful. But what Tosh’s maladroit remarks unwittingly revealed was that in the context of the rape joke, this power dynamic cannot be severed from a culture that depends in part on assumptions of male aggression and triumph. It is a factor that plays a role in fueling rape-supportive attitudes even if irony succeeds in impugning the paradigm of masculinity via the negative exemplar (Mintz) for an audience within the appropriate (necessarily limited) discursive community (Hutcheon) who “gets” the joke.
In brief, Tosh’s gaffe, with the key ingredient of irony prized from him in the aftermath of his comment, highlighted two things. First, male comics are not as distant as they would have their audiences believe from the power allotted to and enjoyed by the figure of the rapist in our culture. Musing on the broader implications of the Tosh scandal, comic Kate Clinton similarly argued that “so-called ‘rape jokes’ are part of the takebacks. It’s about taking freedom—of assembly at a comedy club, in this case—away from women” (Clinton). Sexual assault, though not an experience that afflicts women exclusively, is constructed in highly gendered terms in Western patriarchy. A rape joke (especially, but not solely, when it is threatening) will pose a disempowering affront to the women in the audience in a way that men are unlikely to experience. Second, Tosh’s actions unwittingly underscored the implication that laughing at a rape joke in a comedy club cannot be divorced from the broader social practice of downplaying a real-life survivor’s experience of violation. Tosh apologist Jim Norton indicated as much when he countered that the heckler was “asking for it,” a vulgarism that also informs rape culture: “When you heckle someone in a comedy club, the gloves come off, and you have begged someone to attack you, verbally” (Norton). Although he qualifies this with “verbally” at the end of his statement, Norton seems unaware of the full implications of a tolerance of discursive violence in stand-up—and unaware, with his use of a lexicon that is strikingly similar to the clichés surrounding rape, of the way his statement is situated in a culture that condones nonconsensual sex. When the anonymous heckler circulated Tosh’s words in the blogosphere and spelled out the comic’s verbal aggression (“the suggestion of it was violent enough and was meant to put me in my place”), she dismantled the (ironic) barrier that cloaks these two factors.
Stand-up Feminism(?)
The Tosh incident hinted that gender plays a role in the utterance (jocular or otherwise) of discourses of rape, since the latter always already presages male privilege. It is with this in mind that this second part studies how women in stand-up ironize the subject. During the same watershed era when Carlin commented cuttingly on oversensitive feminists (the 1990s)—a period of antifeminist backlash following the Reagan years and the rise of the new Right (Faludi)—Norine Dworkin observed a new “stand-up feminism” and an increasing “subversive potential of female comics” who began “to shatter the patriarchal definition of ‘Woman’ simply and solely as the receptacle for the penis” (Dworkin). Simply by dint of being onstage, female comics trouble a form of domination historically confined to men in stand-up, performing, as Gilbert propounds, a “rhetorical marginality” that, unlike “sociological marginality,” “may actually empower”. In the context of my argument, it could be argued that female comics have a head start on subversion when they tell their rape jokes. Like their male counterparts, they seek to “kill” or “murder” their audience in a successful set. However, by doing so, they automatically begin to counter the quality of feminine passivity that underwrites both the history of stand-up and rape culture.
However, it would be naive to state that female-identified rhetorical positionalities are the sole ingredient needed for a subversive rape joke. Not unlike our consideration of the male comics above, it behooves us to analyze where these comics target irony in each joke. One of the jokes resurrected as a result of the Tosh scandal was told by Elayne Boosler in the Comic Relief III album. Self-declared feminist, Jezebel contributor, and author of Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture, and What We Can Do about It, Kate Harding praised Boosler’s scenario of the “detachable vagina,” which runs as follows: “I’m walkin’ in New York with my boyfriend last week. He says: ‘Gee, it’s a beautiful night. Let’s go down by the river.’ I said: ‘What are you, nuts?! I’m not goin’ down by “the river.” It’s midnight; I’m wearing jewelry; I’m carryin’ money; I have a vagina with me. … Tomorrow I’ll leave it in my other pants. Then we’ll go down'” (Boosler). For Harding, Boosler’s quip comes under the rubric of “15 Rape Jokes That Work” (Harding). As a survivor of rape, Harding argues that such jokes “work” because she and others like her are not the butt. Indeed, the target of Boosler’s discourse is masculine domination. The comic holds the romantic notions of her boyfriend in tension with the threat of rape by another man. This tension potentially unites the figure of rapist with her boyfriend in a manner that breaks down a separation that male comics in the postfeminist era are keen to embed: between a “nice guy” form of masculinity and the aberrant men who commit rape. Boosler thus conjures irony by way of an irresolvable contradiction (recalling Haraway’s definition, cited above). Additionally, Boosler’s rejection of a late-night riverside walk corresponds to what sociologist Carol Mitchell argues is the purpose of rape jokes for women: “a kind of ‘whistling in the dark’ … an easing of the tension they feel because of the fear of rape”. As Mitchell continues (based on her data), men, who do not experience the threat to the same degree, tend to be debarred from understanding this type of humor, finding it instead “just silly”, something that is confirmed by the dearth of male-authored commentary on the quip after Harding revived it. In this sense, Boosler’s discourse rescues the rape joke from its male-dominated origins, conjuring a scenario that is likely to appeal to individuals who sense the same danger because of their gender; the comic reverses a history that has tended to exclude women from getting the joke, drawing up the parameters of a discursive community (Hutcheon) that excludes men from appreciating the irony.
A note of caution must be sounded here nonetheless. Boosler, together with Carol Leifer and Jerry Seinfeld, adopts a “reporter” persona in much of her humor that, though constituting an “ironic commentary on external realities” (Gilbert), does not do much to envision these realities otherwise. The detachable vagina, in this vein, is conceived as an impossible, potentially self-defeating, “cosmic irony” or “irony of fate” (Colebrook). Boosler uses the detachable vagina to pithily reject her boyfriend’s proposal of a romantic late-night stroll, never imagining it as anything more than a hypothetical (“I have a vagina with me. … Tomorrow I’ll leave it in my other pants. Then we’ll go down”). Concomitantly, though a tenet of masculine aggression receives ironic critique here, what is not ironized (just as in Carlin’s bit) is the rape-culture trope that jostles alongside it—that of feminine powerlessness or passivity. The latter is made all the more irrevocable via the essentialist and cis-sexist suggestion that it is the possession of a vagina that condemns certain subjects to rape, a point on which I will elaborate in my reflection on comic Wanda Sykes’s joke below.
I do not mean to discount the value that Boosler’s quip holds for a survivor of rape, or for any person who finds that this type of humor offers a cathartic release. Rather, I want to place emphasis on what eludes interrogation, so as to preempt the conservative context in which irony is “gotten,” and conceive of ways out of this bind. Indeed, I have dwelt on the problematic trappings of Boosler’s “reporter” guise as a precursor to turning attention to a meaner, tougher category of female comic “bitches” (Gilbert), who have begun to hold increasing sway in the stand-up industry. This persona is “strong, assertive, even overtly aggressive and intimidating” (Gilbert). For instance, Roseanne Barr leveled her jokes squarely at men, feminizing the trait of aggression, which is precisely where Boosler’s more neutral “reporter” stance falls short. In the following, taken from her first special for HBO in 1987, Barr subverts male hegemony both in and outside of stand-up: “Like a lot of people come up to me all the time. … They go ‘Roseanne, you’re not very feminine. …’ So I say, ‘Well, suck my dick!'” (in Gilbert). The comic performs a feminized version of the ubiquitous (overtly aggressive) “dick joke” that marks much of stand-up comedy. Her acerbic rejoinder “suck my dick!” rhetorically troubles her detractors’ attempts to punish her for failing to conform to the norms of (a white, slim-bodied, passive) femininity.
In short, the aggression of the bitch persona holds the advantage of disturbing a priori the assumption of feminine passivity that underpins rape culture. However, subversion is still contingent on the precise nature of these comics’ rhetoric. It is with this in mind that I turn to a person who both fits the bitch mold and who favors the rape joke genre: Sarah Silverman. On the same night (ironically) as Tosh committed his unforgettable blunder, Silverman took issue with the rape joke itself. Her discourse was later reposted and debated in light of the Tosh affair. As she began: “We need more rape jokes. … Needless to say: rape, the most heinous crime imaginable. Seems it’s a comic’s dream, though, because … the material is so dangerous and edgy.” She counters: “The truth is … it’s the safest area in comedy … ’cause who’s gonna complain … about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape” (Silverman). Silverman here conflates two facts that ostensibly are unrelated: comics’ persistent legitimation of their rape jokes as “edgy” or challenging, and the fact that in an estimated 65 percent of US cases, survivors do not report rape (Langton et al). Providing an insightful short-circuit between these two realities, Silverman underscores a situational irony and the hypocrisy of a culture that insists that rape is a serious crime while laughing at the topic in stand-up. Her irony hints at the rape-endorsing practices of “edgy” jokesters. Reposted on Gawker.com, this interpretation of her joke prevailed for a number of commentators. One individual, for instance, summarized her quip as “a pointed statement … about the kind of person who would write and tell a rape joke, not rape victims,” while another deemed it to be “so obviously on the side of rape victims and against the vast majority of stand-ups who do rape jokes.” This demonstrates the mileage of the rhetorical bitch posture, as Silverman harnesses her power to unite her audience against comics partial to rape jokes.
However, the reception of Silverman’s joke was not limited to praise, and the continuation of the bit reveals why. While the butt of the comic’s irony is initially the rape jokester, the targets multiply immediately thereafter. The survivor of rape and the feminist are added to the mix. On the former, Silverman persists: “I would feel terrible if, after the show, maybe someone comes up to you and is like ‘Look, I’m a victim of rape. … I just want to say that I thought that joke was inappropriate and insensitive and totally my fault and I am so sorry'” (Silverman). On the latter, she declares “Let’s take back the night back!,” signaling a wish to return to the feminist antirape marches that began in the 1970s. Considering the humorous context in which she utters this last line, Silverman may also be interpreted as poking fun at the marches for not having been successful in the first place. Given that this is the second time that Silverman has invoked the survivor’s reticence to speak out, the comic’s intended irony is probably directed at exposing the absurdity of a world where those who are assaulted are made to feel that rape is their fault. However, supplementing the equation with the much-mocked voice of the enraged feminist (“Let’s take back the night back!”), the comic simultaneously risks reenergizing a discourse supplied to her by those such as Carlin. As I suggest above, this discourse serves to silence and undo feminist advances in an understanding of rape as a social problem that permeates all levels of culture. Silverman’s bit propelled an antifeminist tirade in exactly this vein for some YouTube commentators: “Rape culture is a bullshit argument from feminists so they don’t sound so selfish when complaining that their issues are being joked about.” Indeed, much like Carlin’s, Silverman’s discourse naturalizes a stereotype of feminine passivity as the joke’s victim (the survivor) risks becoming the butt because of her self-blame—a notion that will, at least for some people, make this same survivor appear risible and deserving of her fate. A majority of individuals reacting to Silverman’s joke on the liberal profeminist site Gawker favored this understanding. Outraged comments included: “Sarah Silverman’s joke pokes fun at the victims, so it made me cringe, not laugh,” and “Rape is not funny, stereotypes about rape victims are. not. funny.” Perhaps most seriously, a number of rape survivors in this forum dismissed Silverman’s bit as both unhumorous and unhelpful, signaling that her joke missed out on the cathartic relief provided by Boosler’s “detachable vagina.” This reflects a problematic aspect of the bitch posture of stand-up, in which comics frequently “mak[e] jabs at … other women” (Gilbert). Silverman, belittling the feminist and the survivor in equal measure, reinforces—and ultimately omits from ironic interrogation—a rape-culture notion of feminine passivity for women other than herself.
Our final example turns us to another performatively invulnerable bitch persona, black lesbian comic Wanda Sykes, who in her rape joke challenges the cliché of feminine passivity in broad brushstrokes, eliciting solidarity with other women and countering where Silverman’s quip falls short. In her 2006 comedy album Sick and Tired, Sykes muses on the possibility of a “detachable pussy.” As she begins: “There’s just so much pressure on us. Guys, you don’t understand. … Even as little girls, we’re taught we have something that everybody wants.” She disputes the notion that the vagina must be “cherish[ed]” and muses: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our pussies were detachable? … Just think of the freedom that you’ll have.” Sykes rejoices in the possibility of going out for a jog after dark. When approached by an aggressor, she delights at the thought of stopping him in his tracks with: “Uh! I left it at home. Sorry, I have absolutely nothing of value on me. I’m pussy-less” (Sykes). Possibly inspired by, but differentiating itself from, Boosler’s concept of the “detachable vagina,” Sykes’s “detachable pussy” bit has no truck with a futile cosmic irony. Instead, her brand of irony “continu[ues] to speak” the dominant discourse while also “recognis[ing] the violent and local figures through which these discourses are sustained” (Colebrook) by both repurposing the misogynistic slur “pussy” (and elsewhere in Sick and Tired “titties”) and highlighting its monetary, objectified value in Western patriarchy (“I have absolutely nothing of value on me”). Meanwhile, in hypothesizing her renunciation of this same pussy, Sykes conceives of something that would empower women and stymie the act of rape. This rhetorical move resembles what Sharon Marcus strategizes as “a feminist discourse on rape,” which would work “by displacing the emphasis on what the rape script promotes—male violence against women—and putting into place what the rape script stultifies and excludes—women’s will, agency, and capacity for violence”. Sykes’s bit reveals the potential of the ironic ethos when it is positioned in a broader genre of corrective satire, which I have suggested was missing from Carlin’s parodic performances.
However, from one perspective, Sykes’s further thoughts on the detachable pussy and her use of irony risk nourishing certain racist tenets of rape culture, and this is where a bitch-inflected comic persona, “lampooning and lambasting individuals and groups” (Gilbert), becomes fraught, as in the case of Silverman. After deciding to leave her vagina at home at the behest of her partner, Sykes returns to find it “all bent out of shape.” Her partner shiftily responds: “Uh, some of the fellas came by …” (Sykes). The discourse that Sykes ironizes here is masculine sexual rapacity, which she characterizes as opportunistic. She insists that the detachable pussy would give “guys” “some perks too” and holds it in ironic contradiction (Haraway) with insinuations of abuse that occurs unbeknownst to her while she is out with her girlfriends. Thus, Sykes’s irony explicitly demands audiences’ attack on masculinity: “Ladies, you know you can’t trust them!” Implicitly, however, the comic invites listeners’ union against a black male contingent. She affects a black man’s voice when uttering the statement “Uh, some of the fellas came by…” and additionally refers to the black-male-dominated sport of basketball in the previous part of the joke, which aligns the scenario, as Megan Carpentier points out, with the 2003 Kobe Bryant case in which the sportsman was accused of raping a nineteen-year-old hotel clerk (Carpentier). Sykes captures, problematically, the double meaning of irony here. Etymologically deriving from eironeia, irony is “dissimulation and interrogation,” “antiphrasis,” and “evaluative attitude,” as Hutcheon signals. Or, in other words, “irony judges” (Hutcheon) at the same time that it connotes contrary meaning. In conjuring audiences’ judgmental stance, Sykes risks reinforcing a prejudice in American culture that holds that black men “inexorably” rape (see, e.g., Davis). The premise stems from white patriarchal postbellum discourses that sought to legitimate the lynching of black men by insisting that they were a violent threat to white women.
The latter interpretation, however, is not borne out in the online reception of Sykes’s joke, which was also reexamined in light of the Tosh affair. The capacity of irony to prompt nonunilateral modes of understanding is worth considering in dialogue with racialized divides within feminist discourse. While white feminist Carpentier took issue with the second half of the joke for its allusion to the Bryant case, assessing it in different terms than the ones I just proposed—”Wanda Sykes is poking fun of the victim for being … stupid enough to get raped” (Carpentier)—a majority of commenters came out in favor of Sykes. The conservative implications of the “detachable pussy” were no doubt nuanced by both the comic’s identity at the margins of white heteropatriarchy and her habitual use of humor to target racist, homophobic, and misogynistic beliefs. As Hana Maru signals in response to Carpentier, Sykes’s was “a pretty awesome feminist statement” because “she’s saying imagine if we could be alone with a man and know that we were safe from rape? … It’s a dark joke about how great it would be if we could act as freely as men do.” Seen from the angle proposed by Maru, Carpentier passes over the indictment of gang rape, which the second half of Sykes’s joke targets for ironic destabilization. Caution, in short, must be exercised against the appropriation of Sykes’s discourse, and a failure (or refusal), on the part of certain feminists, to “get” the comic’s intended irony could be symptomatic of white privilege. Meanwhile, much more hopefully on Tumblr, the avatar “highmaintenancewhitegirl” owned that she has “had this fantasy so many times” and praised Sykes’s joke because “the victim isn’t the butt of the joke, the ridiculous idea that our society makes it dangerous just to have a vagina is the butt of the joke.” In response, “Amadi,” a genderqueer person of color and self-declared “proven feminist,” enriched highmaintenancewhitegirl’s assessment, arguing that “we need a better way to describe this than a ‘rape joke’ as if it’s the equivalent of the crap spewed by Tosh and his merry band of fools and supporters. Rape culture joke, maybe?” (Amadi). Sykes’s acerbic, bitch-inflected quip demonstrates the capacity to unite women across racial divides. This holds considerable promise as one of irony’s discursive communities that works for, not against, a feminist destabilization of rape culture.
Taking Back the Mic
No one has ever worked through an injury without repeating it: its repetition is both the continuation of the trauma and that which marks a self-distance within the very structure of trauma, its constitutive possibility of being otherwise. There is no possibility of not repeating. The only question that remains is: How will that repetition occur, at what site … and with what pain and promise? — Judith Butler
Discursive communities notwithstanding, how can a rape joke ever avoid the reinscription of rape culture when the irony that it engages is dependent on two sets of people: one always already in the know and another that is excluded from understanding? Does this two-pronged conditioning mean that, ultimately, we are locked into a bind that dictates that feminists “can’t take a joke”? The answer to the latter, I would argue, has to be no. If, in order to “frighten rape culture to death,” we need, as Marcus insists, to alter the “grammar of violence” that makes victims out of women and triumphant aggressors out of men, then the rape joke must be deemed a critical terrain where this battle is waged. This article has suggested that who utters the joke and where irony is targeted make a difference in the degree to which rape culture is affirmed or assailed. Female comics have already begun to question the subjugated status of women in the “rape script” (Marcus’s term) when they stand on stage and enlist a “rhetorical marginality” (Gilbert) for the purposes of empowerment. Jokes that make explicit butts out of survivors (Louis C.K., Tosh, Silverman) and that fail to question the inevitability of feminine passivity (everyone apart from Sykes) are fraught from the outset.
But a final thought that I want to propound is that the Tosh scandal does present us with hope, because Tosh’s heckler demonstrated that irony can be powerfully reappropriated so that its discursive communities are made more inclusive and just. Let us take another definition of irony to appreciate this: it is simply “saying what is contrary to what is meant” (Colebrook). Let us further remember Tosh’s prefatory “Rape jokes are always funny.” When the anonymous heckler reported Tosh’s quip to the online community, she stoked the fires of a debate in the mainstream social media about why rape jokes are not always funny, and, even more encouragingly, when it is appropriate to tell them and how to go about doing it in a subversive manner. A number of positive things resulted from this: the quip by Boosler (and the cathartic relief it affords certain survivors) might well have been lost from the stand-up archive otherwise, the exchange between “high maintenance white girl” and “Amadi” about the satirical disruption of rape culture in Sykes’s bit was reposted and/or “liked” by over 140 thousand sympathizers, and even some die-hard rape jokesters switched allegiances to play for the feminists, constructing more thoughtful and cautious jokes as a corollary. C.K., appearing on the Daily Show, sheepishly admitted to being “enlightened” about a threat of sexual assault that “polices women’s lives” in light of the Tosh affair (Stewart). His conversion culminated in a joke on his HBO special Oh My God, which many took to be a backlash against the culture bred by Tosh and his ilk: “How do women still go out with men, when you consider that there is no greater threat to women than men? … Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women” (Stoeffel). C.K.’s post-Tosh bit is far removed from the self-victimization and mockery of his “mixed-signals” partner that, as we have seen, he conjures in Chewed Up.
I would argue, then, that while the rape joke will always be bound to the risks of differentiated reception and can never replace straightforward education about the issues surrounding our modern-day rape culture, Tosh’s faux pas galvanized a debate that is reassuring to say the least. The singled-out heckler turned the comic’s discursive community on its head, fostering her own much more sizable one disproving his claim that “rape jokes are always funny” in the weeks and months that followed. The supreme irony of this turn of events is not to be underestimated. “The Year of the Rape Joke,” I would venture, bore witness to an energy in our culture to stand up against the rape joke on its own deliciously ironic terms.