Is Daniel Tosh Ever Funny?

I know this bucks the internet trend, but I actually took some time to think about the whole Tosh/rape-joke flap before responding to it.  So hopefully this is at least a semi-reasoned response instead of a knee-jerk yelp at the whole issue.

First, why am I even posting about this instead of continuing our light-hearted romp through the land of street theatre?  Well, it's right there in our mission statement: "There is no topic that we deem sacred, because once you put something above laughter, it stops being a human experience."  And it certainly seems that the entire Daniel Tosh situation would put that statement to the test.  Do we actually believe what we say?  Are certain topics taboo?

I don't want to really deal with Tosh and his comments, because he's already suffering the wrath of the public on that, and because what he said was pretty obviously out of line.  Should he have said what he said?  Nope.  Should the woman at whom the response was directed have tried to turn a stand-up show into an open forum on Rape Trauma Syndrome?  Probably not.  But I'll leave the debates about how comedians respond to hecklers to people who actually do stand-up.  I'd instead like to focus on where the backlash has ended: with people actually taking sides on the statement of the woman who brought this whole thing into the light.  Is rape ever funny?

Rape is a horrific, traumatic, inexcusable crime.  Far too many women (and men) are brutally victimized every year, and our best guess is that most of them still suffer in silence.  Though I've known victims of rape and read some of the literature on the subject, I have absolutely no inkling how it feels to experience such callous violence.  Likewise, I have no idea how it would feel to be a victim of rape and hear someone tell a joke, any joke, about the subject.  And yet, I think it's still possible for it to be funny.

Is that because I'm a chauvinistic, arrogant, ignorant son of a bitch who ought to be castrated and dragged through the public square?  I'd like to think that I'm not a chauvinist, but the rest may apply.  I think it has more to do with the fact that I've heard/seen comedians (not Daniel Tosh) tell rape jokes and be extremely funny.  Here are a few of the big names that come to the top of my head: William Shakespeare, Sarah Silverman, Louie C.K., Seth Macfarlane, Tre Parker and Matt Stone.  The list is probably much longer.  The point is that these comedians have done jokes about rape, and no one's taken them to task for it.  Why is that?  Well, I'd imagine that it's because their jokes were funny.

Now, maybe I'm just biased because I don't think that Daniel Tosh is all that funny, but his off-the-cuff response didn't make me laugh.  I'm not sure that it would have made me laugh in context, either.  It seemed like a desperate attempt to wrest control of a show back from a heckler, and it fell flat.  But that doesn't mean the whole subject is taboo.  It just means that his joke wasn't funny.

Some people have argued that rape can't be something we joke about because it impacts so many people in such a significant way.  After all, if 1 in 4 women experience a sexual assault, then it's a good bet that a few of them are in your audience.  I take strong exception to this point, however, because one could say the same thing about almost any topic.  In an given audience, one can expect to see people whose lives have been touched by cancer, suicide, murder, physical/mental abuse, assault, terrorism, addiction, HIV, incest, genocide, war, child prostitution, and a whole host of other tragedies.  If comedians stopped joking about every topic that people might feel offended by, they'd be out of material.  And this isn't some new phenomenon of "shock comedy".  Comedy has always been, on some level, about shocking the audience and pushing limits.

So I guess the ultimate point here is that rape can be funny.  So can a lot of other horrible things.  In fact, humor is a great coping mechanism for many people who have suffered some of the worst things that our world has to experience.  We're sticking to our mission statement, and I'll close with that: "Once you put something above laughter, it stops being a human experience."  Now please don't throw things at me.