Daniel Tosh and Rape Jokes

You're right a lot more often than you're wrong.

Not here.

 

I feel like I barely know how anymore.

 

Drawn out of the bubble of this specific scenario, your "who gives you the right?" argument is absolutely bizarre. I mean, truly. You bought the ticket. The comedian serves at your pleasure, not the other way around. There are limits to how demanding one can be, but the limit doesn't start at "well, you knew it'd be like this, so shut the fuck up if you want to criticize it." I'd love to see a losing coach of a bad team tell that to a reporter after a game and keep his job for another 12 hours.

If you bought season tickets to a winless football team, and you show up and boo, and your booing, I don't know, ticks off the person next to you, are you suggesting that you <i>can't boo</i> because it limits the rights of the players on the field to suck, and the rights of the fans in the stands to enjoy their sucking?

Take, now, an all-around bad comedian. Say, for example, there's a comedy club in town, and the comedians there are just beginning, they often stink, and you know it going into the club. They're heckled off the stage sometimes, mercilessly treated. Surely you're not saying all heckling is off limits? It's part and parcel of the art form, the relationship between the comedian and the crowd.

So I don't think you're saying you can't boo a bad team you already knew was bad. Or that you can't heckle a bad comedian. Although these easily fit the "you knew what you were buying, so your reaction can only be positive" argument you're making. That's why it's bizarre.

What I think you're saying, without really writing it, is that Tosh is entitled to his own morals, and who is anyone to crap on it if he's making a little coin off if it? You're making a relativist argument, in other words. <i>You came here, you knew what you were getting into, now shut up or leave. But don't judge him.</i>

Is it a useful rebuttal when you go to a comedy show and you hear a rape joke? I don't think it is.

First, your argument presumes that, if you know anything about Tosh, you also know he'll tell a rape joke. Does everyone know that? I dunno. I can't read everyone's brain.

Second, your argument also presumes that, if you know X about Tosh, then there isn't anything Y he could do that should ever offend you to the point of public response. If, for example, he said jokes about crematoriums were inherently funny, because of the burning flesh.

Third, are you suggesting that the girl in question saying "actually, rape jokes are never funny" is such a violation of the show that it gives Tosh the right to respond with: "Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…" Are you saying that, when someone tells you a rape joke is not appropriate, that the correct response to the crowd is: "Why don't five guys rape her?" She didn't tackle the guy. She didn't throw a drink on him. She engaged in the art form the way thousands of hecklers have done. It's just that, this time, it had a moral argument attached to it.

Fourth, yes, there are opinions that trump the audience's rights. If somebody in the crowd said "I was raped, and I don't think it's funny," that person's expression of pain, in that moment, vastly outweighs the enjoyment of anyone else around them at a rape joke. And if a woman wants to say, out loud, what I'm guessing most people would agree with - that rape jokes are not funny - I'd argue the truth of that statement can, theoretically, outweigh the need of the audience to suspend belief about the true nature of rape. Maybe it's a close call. Maybe the tone of how she said it is important. But to dismiss it out of hand because we don't want to bruise Tosh's or the audience's attempt to warp reality is not, in the great economy, very graceful.

 

This is absolutely what this is about.

And all I can say is you're free to swing your fist ... and I think you know how the rest of that goes.

 

Rape jokes are horrific for women in the same sense that Sandusky rape jokes would be horrific for parents of young boys. Something to that effect, anyway. And if one of those subsets is bad, so is the other one. Isn't it?

There's a reason Bobby Knight was vilified for saying, "Lie back and enjoy it." You cross a line when you trivialize rape. Makes ya famous though, doesn't it?

 

Alma,

You're missing the point here. The point isn't that this person was offended. You take your chances that that's going to happen by purchasing tickets to a show featuring a comedian who's entire routine consists of trying to push the envelope.

The point here is that this specific person was acting self-righteous by disrupting a comedy show for a room full of other people in order to heckle Tosh and express her opinion that rape jokes are never funny.

And your analogies are WAY off.

As a member of a paid audience at a comedy show, you are there to watch and listen to the man/woman on stage, laugh and have a good time. You are not, nor should you be, part of the program UNLESS the comedian him/herself brings you into the routine by his/her choice.

It’d be one thing is Tosh said “Hey, see that girl right there? Let’s imagine five guys raping her!” completely unprovoked. While I would still argue that that’s his right as the night’s entertainer (and thus the audience, as a whole, can boo him if they don’t like where he’s going with that), that’s a far different scenario than someone verbally interrupting a man’s routine to interject that they don’t approve of his latest joke.

Her disruption caused him to go off script and he retaliated with a vulgar, off-color joke meant to embarrass her for interrupting him. It’s what comedians do.

This is far different than an NFL game where the audience members can boo, yell and scream all they want and it doesn’t disrupt the actual action on the field. To make your analogy work, we have to extend it a bit. It’s like you’re arguing that a member of the audience has the right, because they bought a ticket, to go on the field and sack a quarterback because they think he’s playing like crap and they are not entertained.

Booing doesn’t disrupt a football game. It does disrupt a comedy routine in a small club where even the sound of something as simple as a cell phone going off can throw everything off track.

As for your general point about heckling, I think it has no place in comedy. That’s just my personal opinion. I can MAYBE see it if you’re talking about an Open Mic night where audience members, as a whole, are not being entertained because the guy/girl on stage is awful and booing said person is more likely to get them away from the mic so someone else who might be better can get on there but that’s not what this was.

This was a Daniel Tosh stand up show. People (I presume) who paid for this show paid for it to see Tosh and see his brand of humor. Like it or not, that’s what you sign up for when you go see this guy. If he says something that offends you to the point where you no longer want to be a part of that audience, get up and leave. No one is forcing you to stay there.

And I never said you have to have a positive reaction if you pay for something. You have the right to be negative all you want. You don’t, however, have a right to ruin someone else’s enjoyment of said event simply to get your point across.

And I never said don’t judge Tosh. I personally don’t think his retort to the audience member was funny in the slightest. I think it was crude for the sake of being crude and not nearly as intelligent as a true master of the craft of comedy could make it. But I’m here, I’m not at a Tosh show. And I’m not going to stand up and disrupt a Tosh show because he makes a remark I don’t approve of.

Wrapping this up, let me comment on your final four points.

First: The moment that this audience member, or any audience member who under your assumption was never exposed to Tosh, began to be overly offended, enough to want to disrupt the show, she should have gotten up and left. Instead, she chose to make the show about her and tried to, in my opinion, impose her morals on the man on stage. She made herself part of the comedy routine and, thus, deserved to get demolished verbally by the man paid to insult people.

Second, I’m not saying that at all. You have to know the person on the stage. A couple of years ago when Michael Richards flipped out and started throwing the N word around, people had a right to be offended/pissed off because that’s not what was advertised. When you bought a ticket to his show, you expected X and got Y. When this lady bought a ticket to see Tosh, she expected X, got X and then complained about X. Big difference.

Third, as I said above, I don’t think it was a particularly funny or witty response but, in my opinion, he was well within his rights to say ANYTHING he wanted to because A. He was the entertainer that night, B. We live in a free society where you can say what you want and C.) The audience, if they didn’t like it, could have left. She engaged in the art for the way thousands of hecklers have done, Tosh realized she was offended by rape jokes and took it a step further than he needed to to make his point that he was going to say and do what he wanted to. Not funny but well within his rights as a stand-up comedian who makes his money peddling a certain product, a product this audience member wants to complain about after the fact.

I think your fourth contention is very spot on and, had that happened, I’d be willing to bet Tosh’s response would never have flown with the crowd. But that’s making rape an actual topic of real discussion instead of another taboo subject Tosh wanted to ripe on. It’s no different than the disturbing trend of 9/11 jokes recently. If Tosh made a 9/11 joke and someone said that “9/11 jokes are never funny”, that’s inherently different than a 9/11 survivor of family member saying “I am personally affected by that topic and, thus, I feel those jokes are in poor taste”. In this context, this audience member had one point to convey and felt like she could speak for everyone by using the blanket statement that “rape jokes are never funny”. I disagree with that premise and disagree that it was an important enough statement to bring a comedian’s show to a halt. This woman had an ax to grind, she tried to bring attention to herself and Tosh responded the way all comedians do. It’s just that instead of insulting this woman’s fashion sense or appearance, he made an offensive joke to rile her up more because that’s what comedians do.

Can’t stand the heat, don’t pay to see a hack comedian.

 

Not necessarily. Some people enjoy taboo humor that pushes the envelopes. Does it make them right? No. Does it make them wrong? No.

Luckily, we live in a society where we can make our own determination as to where our line in the sand is and, for some people, that line is pushed further back than others.

 

OK, if you get it, explain it.

 

One thing to add to schiezainc's rant: Alma, you compare Daniel Tosh to a bad football team. But the football team's goal is to win, and by losing, the football team is not achieving its stated purpose. Tosh is a comedian, one that many people find funny. See those people laughing? They went to a show to see Daniel Tosh perform his Daniel Tosh routine, which they find funny in spite or because of rape jokes.

Daniel Tosh wasn't upsetting his audience. He was upsetting people who decided to enter a realm they never really were going to feel comfortable in or with. He was upsetting some moralist bitch who felt the need to take a stand and ruin everyone else's night.

 

From this moment forward, SMB will be regarded as shorthand for Some Moralist Bitch.

 

Yeah, so time-travel back to 1932 and just walk on by that Hitler rally without saying anything.

And verse, calling a garden-variety heckler who was then basically, if there were enough hyped-up drunks in the audience, offered up for gang range, a "moralist bitch" is excreble. She has every right to be there; maybe she just wanted to judge the "humor" for herself. Maybe she would have been better off picketing outside the show to get her point across.

Also excreble: the viewpoint that something has to be un-PC to be funny. But that's hardly the point in this case. That anyone can find endangering a woman a reason to chortle and to lay into the victim is really disheartening.