Daniel Tosh Told an Offensive Joke about Rape

Daniel Tosh has made people laugh about murder. He's made people laugh about slavery. He's made people laugh about bear mauling. Even right after all those people watched a video of a bear mauling.

In order to get those people to laugh at the attack, he didn't have to convince them that being mauled by a bear is OK. And he didn't have to convince them that they should be happy that someone got mauled by a bear. To make them laugh, first he had to convince them that altho life is full of pain and fear and there's always a risk of damage and trauma, right at that moment no-one was being stalked by a bear. And he had to be pretty sure that they knew that a round of laughter was not going to conjure two she-bears out of the woods.

Then without that fear, all it took is a little wordplay on race issues, an ironic lack of sympathy, or better yet, some misplaced sympathy—for instance, feeling sorry for the bear when someone defending the woman throws a bottle—and the audience could both laugh at the ridiculousness of the comments, and not be happy that the lady was attacked.

The bear attack was the focus of one of Tosh's "Video Breakdown" segments on his show. After having been attacked by a polar bear, a Russian woman stumbles away in her underwear, pants around her ankles. The first joke Tosh offers up: "See, when you dress like that, ladies, you're asking to be attacked."

That opinion probably sounds familiar. It has become the symbol of blaming the victim. It's the callous and accusatory scolding that too many women have heard after having been raped. This is just a guess, but I believe Tosh uses that line knowing that it sounds harsh, and knowing that the person who says that line seriously, is an asshole. I'm guessing that Tosh also believes that being that type of asshole verges on the immoral dismissal of a woman's suffering.

But here's the important difference: it's the serious, earnest use of that line. The ironic use of that line is by definition, saying it without believing it. And that's what comedians do all the time. Either by exaggerating their views, or by contradicting their views, comedians are pretty much always saying things they don't believe.

But they can still make people angry. Because sometimes people believe either 1) that the ironic statement is sincere, or 2) that even the ironic expression of an idea gives comfort support and power to people who hold that idea earnestly.

And one of those was the thinking that led a Laugh Factory audience member to walk out of a show angrily, and write a blogpost about Daniel Tosh's act. She reports the experience as "terrifying and threatening" and she ultimately judges his jokes as "violent". I can't disagree with her experience. The same way that someone who laughed can claim it's funny, she can claim it was scary. It's almost always stupid to tell someone that they're not feeling what they say they're feeling.

And as for claiming that she was threatened… I would ask her, with honest interest, what she felt the threat was. It's one thing to think you're in danger, and another to actually be in danger, but there's very little space, when you're dealing with a person face to face, between reassuring them to make them feel secure, and simply dismissing their fear and disrespecting the honesty of how they've experienced something.

In this case, the audience member claims that Tosh made very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny. She stresses that he was insistent on this point, and that he also claimed that rape itself is hilarious I'm willing to bet that Tosh thinks some rape jokes are stupid, poorly constructed, simple, obvious, and contrived. Any blanket statement about every conceivable rape joke being funny is fairly considered a purposely ridiculous opinion. And the statement that aside from jokes about it, rape itself is hilarious: are we really to believe that Daniel Tosh finds the act of rape amusing? I don't believe that about him.

She writes that she disagreed with Tosh's supposed opinions by yelling Actually, rape jokes are never funny! It's completely within her rights to share that opinion. Even tho she's not on stage, and no one attended the show expecting to hear from her, I'll go a little farther than supporting her right. I'm going to agree with the importance of sharing her opinion. She claims that

sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman.

I disagree with her claim that Tosh was telling her how she should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape, because I believe that Tosh's jokes are not statements of his belief: they're performances. But because of how she understood the statements, I repeat that it was an honest and important decision she made to disagree at that moment. To reach out in the most honest way she could was important to her sense of self, to her integrity. And if she was hurt by the response, what else could she do but what she did? She left.

And altho I don't think Tosh's reaction (if it was as she reports it) was an important one for him to make (nor was it the only option he had) I believe—just as I do about his other jokes—that it was a valid and acceptable performance. So while I believe she felt threatened, I also believe that if someone had even started walking towards her or had thrown an ice-cube at her, Tosh would've called them out and told them to stop. Call me naïve, but I do believe it. And I'm not going to simply accept jokes about cruelty as direct evidence of a comedian's cruel character.

The problems with communication begin when this becomes a matter of sides, and the two usually unopposed forces, sympathy, and levity, are pitted against each other. I refuse to agree to someone else's stricture that if I feel bad for a person, I can't laugh at a joke that makes light of their experience. Or that if I find a joke about some evil funny, I can't possibly sympathize with someone hurt by that evil.

Often, people who are upset about a joke will criticize any defense that focuses on the character of the performer rather than the effect of the act. It's a little weird to say that defending character is irrelevant, when much of the criticism focuses on motivation and character. So then, what of those criticisms that say something like 'I'm sure so-and-so is a good person, but there is a dangerous result of these types of jokes'?

When the discussion goes there, we're heading into claims about what fear a person should feel at the ability of other people to balance the two values of sympathy and levity. Does making a joke about evil—or laughing, or not expressing outrage about a joke about evil—make that evil stronger? And if the joke is the supposed admiration for that evil?

Some critics of Tosh's reported jokes are focusing on the effect this has. Some have been as specific and direct enough to claim that joking like this about rape makes it seem acceptable. Nobody seems to care that jokes and glib statements about murder are going to make murder seem acceptable. There was no outcry that all the cannibalism jokes of several weeks ago were going to hurt the cannibalism statistics. Some people didn't like the jokes, but it wasn't out of fear of some effect on society. Why not?

Rape falls into a window of evil behaviors that are cruel enough to be clearly wrong and beyond discussion for almost everyone, but are somehow still being negotiated. We could probably put child-abuse, wife-battering, bigotry, and a few other things on the list. And so we get statements, like this one from the @mountain_goats twitter feed

to compare those jokes with "I'm gonna kill you!" jokes is inane. 1 in 5 of the people you know isn't likely to get killed.

It appeals to a sense of risk and personal interest. It's a very attractive argument: An already too common problem, becomes even more likely because of these jokes. So how common does murder have to be before we decide the jokes are too much of a risk? No jokes about accidental shootings? How many people have to be killed on the highway before we get upset at jokes about reckless driving?

But does a performance like Tosh's really make rape more common? Even if we accept the claim that someone might be convinced by a joke to care less about rape, it's a huge jump to say that culture is equally lulled into thinking that 'no' means whatever. Or that joking about rape means not caring about rape. This goes back to the argument of necessary opposition: the belief that vigilance for a value will be destroyed by humor.

When comedy begins to concern itself with reaching the absolute moral certainty of being obviously satirical and impossible to mistake for an earnest statement, it isn't as good. Some of the most precise, thoughtful, intricate, and beautifully constructed jokes have offended and misled audiences. Ridiculous statements can be seen as both hilarious and completely wrong. And often they're even more hilarious when they're structured and presented as almost indistinguishable from honest statements of belief.