skull_bearer | On Rape Jokes (Reply)

This is something that's being discussed a lot recently (see here the guardian and jezebel) and I wanted to throw my two cents out there because I think I can see where the problem is. The issue isn't quite about rape itself (although that makes it worse) it's about what or who is the butt of the joke.

Now, I'm no comedian, and I thankfully haven't heard that many rape jokes. However, I have heard a lot of Holocaust jokes (my friends think it's funny to let me in on the latest ones) and as both subjects in comedy do have a fair amount in common, I'm going to use them as an analogy.

Here are two almost identical Holocaust jokes:

1 - How do you get 2,000 Jews in a gas chamber?
- Last one in pays for the gas.

2- Why did Hitler commit suicide?
- He saw his gas bill.

I think we can all agree number 1 is offensive as fuck, and I WTF duded the guy who told me it because Not Funny. Number 2 however, is a lot less unpleasant. It's still about the Holocaust, it's still making light of it, but it doesn't feel nearly as nasty as the first one, why?

Well, naturally it doesn't have the nasty subtext of anti-semitic stereotypes the first one has, but I think it's something deeper than that. It's about who gets to be the joke's punchline. In the first, the punchline is the Jews killed in the Holocaust, which is another layer of not cool. In the second, the punchline is Hitler.

This, I think, maps very well onto a lot of rape jokes. Compare these two:

- I tried to rape Disney's Little Mermaid only I accidentally did Ursula and got my dick bitten off.

- Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her …

Now, these are both really bad, the first one because it was made up by me just now and the second because it comes from a man with seagull droppings where his frontal lobe should be. But I would say they are both different and that the first one here is the less offensive, because the butt of the joke is the rapist.

Making fun of rapists in a 'oh wow aren't they horrible people lol' way seems (to me at least) to be less offensive and less downright nasty and rape enabling than making a joke where the victim is the butt of the joke. Going back to the Holocaust analogy here, it's okay to make fun of Hitler because that guy deserves everything coming to him, but it's not okay to make fun of the Jewish victims because they've already suffered enough and now you're making fun of them? Sick fuck.

To put it another way: The janitor making fun of the CEO is funny, the CEO making fun of the janitor is hateful.

So yeah, Holocaust jokes and rape jokes have some things in common, and they can be funny and relatively non-offensive (although the subject matter will always make that difficult) if done carefully.

And now all that remains is for me to combine both genres of jokes and end on this note: