Time for a Web-Redemption

It appears to me that a certain sometimes hilariously funny and sometimes disgusting and unfunny comedian crossed a fairly visible line when he "joked" about gang rape for a woman who heckled him. Now I don't know about the material that prompted the woman in the audience to heckle him though it reportedly also involved facetious remarks about rape that irked that woman, and consequently I have no opinion regarding the appropriateness of that material; but based on the transcript of his response to the woman, I have to say he failed himself, his audience and his fans in every possible way.

When he responded to his heckler with the words "Wouldn't it be funny if that woman were gang raped? Like right now?" he showed a striking lack of decency, and failed on so many levels. Starting with the trivial, he wasn't even funny in his response. Any joke that starts "wouldn't it be funny...?" reveals that the narrator knows there is nothing hilarious to follow, it's a desperate plea to the audience to pretend that the material is funny even when it's not. Let's set aside the more serious issue for just a moment and replace "gang rape" with any other term: "wouldn't it be funny if a meteor fell on that heckler? wouldn't it be funny if the earth opened up and swallowed up that heckler? wouldn't it be funny if that heckler gets cancer and suffers a slow painful death?" - those aren't even remotely funny, because they evoke no humorous image, excite no chord of humorous sympathy. All they do is wish for something horrible to happen to the person who heckled him. He would have been infinitely more funny if he went medieval and cursed the heckler with words like , "I curse you and hope that something mildly inconvenient may happen to you such as an egg falling on your head as you walk under a tree".

But his failings as a comedian are trivial compared to his failings as a member of the human family. Rape is, and has always been about power. It is not about sex or even lust, and never about ordinary physical pleasure but about domination, about one party - usually but not always a man, or group of men - asserting control over another, typically a woman, but also on occasion other men. It is why victorious armies raped the women in conquered cities, a brutal demonstration of their power and domination. It's why homosexual rape is common in prisons, even amongst heterosexuals, far more than in any other setting; lack of heterosexual partners does not drive people into homosexual acts, but the structure of prison society lends itself to that same means of demonstrating power. The threat, and danger of rape is a real and present fear to many women, and that fear is used directly or indirectly to constrain their behavior and deny them the same freedoms as men, as evidenced most recently in the actions of Egyptian police towards women protesters. This is something that this comedian could hardly be unaware of, which makes his decision to joke about rape misplaced at best. When confronted with disapproval, he seems to have lashed out in a cowardly manner, prompted perhaps in part by the knowledge that he was in the wrong but unwilling to acknowledge it or apologize.

Instead he "joked" about the heckler being gang-raped, by his fans in the audience around her. One presumes that he did not mean anyone to act on it, and fortunately nothing untoward ensued, but it was a threat, a naked show of power, a verbalization of the inherent reasons behind physical rape. The nearest analogy I can imagine is for a person with dark skin tone - African or South Asian perhaps -  to be in a meeting of predominantly white people, some of them possibly white supremacists and hear the speaker invite the crowd to lynch the dark guy. I cannot imagine that any woman would feel safe when threatened with gang rape while standing in a crowd of strangers, a majority of them men. For comedian to use his podium to issue such a threat is despicable. It was as naked a threat to his heckler as possible: "shut up and get out of here, or see what happens".

There have been two main arguments in defense of this comedian, by his fans. Firstly, that he was joking, and did not intend anything to happen to the woman. Actually, since there was nothing remotely humorous about his statement, he wasn't; he was simply, and clearly, threatening the woman. Even if it was an empty threat that was never intended to be carried through, it was still a threat - and as Henry IV would attest, words like those have consequences; Henry paid for the unintended consequences of his words, Tosh should at least face up to his mistake and apologize for it. Secondly, some have argued, astoundingly that the woman "asked for it" by heckling him. As I said, I did not see the show, I don't know exactly how it played out - and I can understand that heckling can really irk a stand-up comedian, as Michael Edwards would testify - but the attitude that someone's behavior can justify rape, or the threat thereof is quite simply wrong. Charitably, fans may be suggesting that a heckler is inviting the comedian to retort and react and has no right to be aggrieved if the comedian then jokes about him or her. I would gran that logic if he had made a joke about her, said anything remotely funny about her, even humiliating, depending on whether she was actually heckling him or not. But he didn't - instead he chose to threaten her. Would it be acceptable if he had pulled out a gun and threatened to blow her head off for heckling him? Even that may have been funnier, because it would seem so ridiculously unlikely to actually happen - he actually issued a very thinly veiled and very plausible threat, which is why there was nothing funny about the situation.

Finally, there are questions about the appropriateness of any jokes regarding rape. I did see a brief video clip of Tosh making a "rape joke", about replacing his sister's pepper spray with Silly String, and her getting raped the next night as a consequence. Well, that's not actually a rape joke (I'd say it's not even a funny joke) since one could replace "rape" with "mugged" or car-jacked or any number of crimes, without affecting the premise one bit. But more importantly, rape is about power and domination, and any joke that shifts the balance of power away from the rapist and back to the victim is acceptable, in my opinion. Rapists seek to dominate their victims, and ridiculing the rapists actually erodes their power over their victims and consequently their to hurt; it would empower the victims and help them in reclaiming their lives, which the rapist sought to destroy. It is, in fact analogous to jokes about authoritarian regimes - laughter liberates and shatters the shackles of control, be it the rule of despots or the mental and psychological power exerted by rapists. And comedians have always been in the vanguard of the struggle against the established powers, on the side of the oppressed and weak and against tyranny of the rich and powerful, both religious and secular. The comedian who threatened his fan so vilely should not only apologize to her, he should decide on which side of the line he stands - with the silent masses or their overlords.