The “Context” of Daniel Tosh’s Rape Joke

Miss Representation » Blog Archive » The “Context” of Daniel Tosh’s Rape Joke:

'via Blog this'Beyond this, though, there’s a fundamental flaw in the “context” argument. Because the fact is, comedy shows are not of an alternate universe – when you walk into a dimly-lit room with a performer on stage mumbling into a microphone, you are not stepping out of time. You are still in a city, in this country. And that’s a real live human being on stage.

Similarly, everyone else in that room is real too. They are, unfortunately for comics, not mindless robots. They are men and women who live in the real world. A world in which 1 out of 6 American women is the survivor of an attempted or completed rape. Meaning if you have 20 women in your audience, there are probably at least three or four women in the room who have first-hand experience with rape. And because of this truth, there are many more women in the room who feel unsafe walking alone at night – the real night that exists on the street outside the comedy club.

We can say comedians exist against a very specific backdrop where crossing societal taboos has the potential to expand minds, but shouldn’t we also consider the specific audience for whom these comedians are performing?

Imagine you’re in a country where people are still consistently assaulted for having dark skin. In this context you suggest that the lighter skinned people in the room whip a brown man into submission after he complains that jokes about darker people being persecuted aren’t funny. Might this make us uncomfortable? Probably, because when the brown man steps out into the real night outside the comedy club, there is a good chance he could actually get beaten and murdered. There’s also a history of this kind of violence actually happening around the world.

Does the “right” to joke about anything trump the realities of the place in which those jokes are being made?