Gayle Salamon. Studies in Gender & Sexuality. Volume 18, Issue 4, 2017.
This piece takes as its subject rape jokes in which the rape joke itself is thematized. Taking up the functions of condensation, pleasure, and consent in Vanessa Place’s performance piece Rape Joke and Patricia Lockwood’s poem Rape Joke, I consider the proximity of rape to joke in contemporary culture as well as the shifts in address through which joke can become critique.
The rape jokes in Vanessa Place’s performance piece Rape Joke are grouped with a number of different kinds of jokes, not all of which are about rape. Rape is proximate to other acts in a continuum of depravity: rape, sadomasochism, incest, kidnapping, bestiality, pedophilia, murder. The continuum also slides the other way, toward the banal:
Tickling is rape for beginners.
Tickling, Adam Philips (1993) says, is “the only sensuous contact that makes one laugh” (p. 11). Such contact attempts to elicit pleasure through challenging or violating the will of the one tickled. The pleasure elicited is a pleasure intertwined with being rendered helpless. When tickling elicits pleasure it is pleasure that is always poised on the edge of discomfort, and in this it resembles the kind of response that the rape joke wants to elicit: pleasure laced with discomfort.
Who wants to play a rape game? No? That’s the spirit.
Who wants to hear a rape joke? No? That’s the spirit.
Here we can observe the condensation that, according to Freud, characterizes all jokes. Do you want to play the game? Do you want to hear the joke? You do not want to hear the joke. So you or I or we who do not want to hear the rape joke are analogized to the one who is raped, the one whose refusal of consent is what makes the sexual act rape. But we are already in the midst of it when the possibility of refusal emerges. This joke is structured like a rape because the refusal—no?—comes as the joke is already in process. You may not want it, but that doesn’t matter. It is already happening.
The response of the addressee of the joke, we who are listening, is central to both of these jokes. We who hear the joke are solicited by the teller, and our response is echoed by the one telling the joke: no? even though a response is not ever heard from the one to whom the joke is told. Because the joke cites and echoes a “no” from the listener that is never actually heard, the refusal cannot function as such. The “no” is assumed; it is repeated without being uttered, a repetition that turns a withholding of consent to a report of that withholding, and in its repetition and echo, the “no” shifts from the imperative to the interrogative. The function of the question mark with which the teller punctuates and returns the “no” is not entirely clear; it may indicate assent or doubt, may intend clarification or affirmation. The joke’s humor and its discomfort resides in its holding the no in abeyance. Holding the “no” in abeyance can also be done by turning it into a yes:
Do you find rape jokes funny? Never mind, I know you mean yes.
In this joke, the unheard “no” is discarded altogether, revised into its opposite. In each joke, it is the presence of the “no” that is not heard that marks the joke as a rape joke. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud (1976) calls the hearer of the joke “the assailed.” The assailed inhabits the proper spirit of the rape joke or rape game or rape by offering resistance, by offering a no. “Never mind” turns that no into a yes, which turns the assailant from one who is fixated on the no, eroticizing the resistance of the assailant, to one who is merely acting as if that “no” were not there, as if any no must mean yes, as if no matter what she says, really she wants it. We might reflect on how remarkable this structure is that the assailant, either the joke teller or the rapist, can hear either a no or a yes from the assailed, and the character of the rape or the rape joke is unaltered, either way.
Rape jokes fall into the category of what Freud (1976) calls tendentious jokes. Some but not all rape jokes are smutty jokes. These, according to Freud, are jokes that are characterized by aggression, an aggression that is specifically sexual: “A person who laughs at smut that he hears is laughing as though he were the spectator of an act of sexual aggression. Smut is like an exposure of the sexually different person to whom it is directed. By the utterance of the obscene word it compels the person who is assailed to imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows her that the assailant is himself imagining it” (p. 116). For Freud the smutty joke is an assault, and it is important that the listener is female; he emphasizes that the joke, assumed to be told by a man, requires sexual difference, or at least the “sexually different,” in order to complete its circuit. But it is also, just as significantly, a staging of a response to an assault. On Freud’s telling of the telling, the hearer is assaulted with the image of the assailant, or joke teller, imagining a body part or procedure. In the rape joke, the assailed is confronted with the assailant, imagining rape.
In contemporary culture, we can see examples in all directions of the frequency of the proximity of rape to joke. The media eruption around allegations of rape against Bill Cosby was launched by a joke in comedian Hannibal Burress’s stand-up routine. Bill Cosby, in turn, responded to the allegations of rape by calling them “a joke.” The haunting of rape discourse by rape jokes can also be seen in more local cultures. The University of Virginia “Rugby Road” song, made infamous in the Rolling Stone article that was later retracted by that magazine, is a string of rape jokes in the form of an anthem. Is it possible for rape jokes to work otherwise? Can a rape joke be funny? Can a rape joke be feminist? Can a joke be both of those things at the same time? Or does the conflation of feminism with humorlessness make that impossible? How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? That’s not funny. What, then, distinguishes the rape joke as misogynist from the rape joke that is feminist or that offers critique? Consider another example of a rape joke about rape jokes: If you don’t want to hear a rape joke, maybe you shouldn’t have dressed like you want to hear a rape joke. This is another joke that turns on the analogy of rape to joke. The absurdity of its premise offers a critique of the notion that some rape victims are responsible for their rapes, that there are ways of dressing that “ask for” rape.
While hosting the Golden Globe awards in 2015, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler made a joke about the rape allegations against Bill Cosby. Tina Fey performed a Cosby impression in which she had him admit to drugging his victims (though, significantly, not to raping them). Fey spoke the confession out loud—I put the pills in the people. They did not want the pills in them—in the voice of Bill Cosby, exaggerating his characteristic emphases and plosives. The joke landed uneasily in the room. The discomfort in the live audience could be heard by the broadcast audience. No, Tina, hey that’s not right, Amy Poehler replied, in a response that seemed to be addressing and aligned with the discomfort in the audience, a discomfort that seemed to suggest, emphatically if inarticulately, It’s not right to joke about that. Poehler was not, however, echoing the discomfort of the audience back to them but rather wrapping the joke inside another joke. That’s not right, it’s more like: And Poehler launched into her own, even broader, impression of Cosby, confessing, I got the pills in my bathrobe and I put them in the people.
In these instances, we might understand the joke to be performing a kind of critique that cannot be achieved through other means. If a tendentious joke expresses something that is otherwise unutterable, and if such an utterance is accompanied by the rush of pleasure that attends the lifting of repression, then we can see how something that would not seem to be a joke at all can behave like one. Hannibal Burress’s stand-up routine juxtaposed Cosby’s public image with the accusations against him. He said, Cosby is a smug old man, a moral scold haranguing young black men. But you rape women, Bill Cosby. Fey and Poehler’s joke works similarly, challenging those reluctant to believe the accusations because of the incommensurability of Cosby’s wholesome image with the image of a rapist. The assumption undergirding such reluctance is that rape is what terrible, monstrous men do. Not familiar, beloved ones. Fey and Poehler ‘s joke, and also Burress’s, insist that that, yes, he can be Bill Cosby and also be a rapist. It is worth mentioning that Fey made a nearly identical joke in 2005 on the television show 30 Rock. Like the one at the Golden Globes, that Cosby joke was nested inside another joke about rape jokes, a joke about the unspeakability of those allegations in particular and in general the ease with which powerful men can neutralize accusations of sexual assault. That it was a joke about rape and also about how powerful men can get away with rape may be part of why the joke failed to ignite public discourse a decade ago. It may be that the unspeakable has to spend some time teetering on the edge of speakability in order to become speakable.
If we think about the location of the discomfort that accompanies the pleasure of the rape joke, we begin to see what differentiates jokes about rape and jokes about rape culture. In many of the former, it is the assailed who is laid bare as a victim and as hearer. In the latter, it is the assailant who is laid bare; it is an exposure of the conditions under which rape is normalized.
Freud (1976), in understanding the joke as a staging of a response to assault, offers us the teller and the listener. The response of the listener, for Freud, is as significant as the offering of the teller. Recall that the listener, in laughing at the rape joke, is “laughing as though he were the spectator of an act of sexual aggression” (p. 116). Thus the choreography of the joke contains two people but three positions: assaulter, assaulted, and spectator. The discomfort elicited by the rape joke can revolve around the uncertainty of that triangulation divided by two bodies. Vanessa Place’s recitation of rape jokes in her piece—one after the other after the other, deadpan, relentless, grueling—is clearly meant to evoke discomfort in an audience. If according to Freud we are laughing at aggression when we laugh at the rape joke, are we necessarily positioning ourselves on the side of violence if we laugh? And where are we attempting to place ourselves when we do not?
Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.
This is a line from Patricia Lockwood’s poem Rape Joke (2013). The question of whether or not the rape joke can be funny announces itself in the first and last words of the line, then negates itself as a question with the period at the line’s end. The poem begins as follows:
The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
The voice of the poem tells the story of her rape, in which each detail is offered under the sign of “rape joke.”
The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.
The rape joke is the form that insists the inseparability of rape and joke. Lockwood turns the joke into the form through which the rape is felt, documented, becomes thinkable, becomes speakable. She turns the rape joke into the rape. But then the poem itself turns, and through the act of her laughter—a laughter of dissociation, perhaps, or refusal—she turns the rape into the rape joke:
The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.
The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.
The poet ends where she begins. What is the rape joke? Can the rape joke be funny?
The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.