Poll: Rape is totally okay to joke about, right guys?

Sneaky Paladin

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Kahunaburger said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
I want to high five you so hard for this thread, I don't even give a shit about the topic but having the only options being no is fucking stupid.
Ahahahaha what is with the Escapist and the sanctity of internet polls.
Sometimes I just want to feel safe in the thought I can always answer yes, no, or maybe, on the internet, and sometimes that is taken away from me and I cry.
 

lacktheknack

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Sneaky Paladin said:
Kahunaburger said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
I want to high five you so hard for this thread, I don't even give a shit about the topic but having the only options being no is fucking stupid.
Ahahahaha what is with the Escapist and the sanctity of internet polls.
Sometimes I just want to feel safe in the thought I can always answer yes, no, or maybe, on the internet, and sometimes that is taken away from me and I cry.
But doesn't this thread also take away your ability to vote for yes, no or maybe?

Whoops... let me grab my umbrella...
 

Sneaky Paladin

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lacktheknack said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
Kahunaburger said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
I want to high five you so hard for this thread, I don't even give a shit about the topic but having the only options being no is fucking stupid.
Ahahahaha what is with the Escapist and the sanctity of internet polls.
Sometimes I just want to feel safe in the thought I can always answer yes, no, or maybe, on the internet, and sometimes that is taken away from me and I cry.
But doesn't this thread also take away your ability to vote for yes, no or maybe?

Whoops... let me grab my umbrella...
Don't be silly, I HAVE TWO DIFFERENT THREADS TO VOTE IN! It's amazing, wanna say yes come here, wanna say no go there. BRILLIANT!
 

lacktheknack

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Sneaky Paladin said:
lacktheknack said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
Kahunaburger said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
I want to high five you so hard for this thread, I don't even give a shit about the topic but having the only options being no is fucking stupid.
Ahahahaha what is with the Escapist and the sanctity of internet polls.
Sometimes I just want to feel safe in the thought I can always answer yes, no, or maybe, on the internet, and sometimes that is taken away from me and I cry.
But doesn't this thread also take away your ability to vote for yes, no or maybe?

Whoops... let me grab my umbrella...
Don't be silly, I HAVE TWO DIFFERENT THREADS TO VOTE IN! It's amazing, wanna say yes come here, wanna say no go there. BRILLIANT!
But I wanna say "maybe".

http://bornagainpagan.com/other/041-where-is-your-god-now.gif
 

Sneaky Paladin

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lacktheknack said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
lacktheknack said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
Kahunaburger said:
Sneaky Paladin said:
I want to high five you so hard for this thread, I don't even give a shit about the topic but having the only options being no is fucking stupid.
Ahahahaha what is with the Escapist and the sanctity of internet polls.
Sometimes I just want to feel safe in the thought I can always answer yes, no, or maybe, on the internet, and sometimes that is taken away from me and I cry.
But doesn't this thread also take away your ability to vote for yes, no or maybe?

Whoops... let me grab my umbrella...
Don't be silly, I HAVE TWO DIFFERENT THREADS TO VOTE IN! It's amazing, wanna say yes come here, wanna say no go there. BRILLIANT!
But I wanna say "maybe".

http://bornagainpagan.com/other/041-where-is-your-god-now.gif
Well damn, we totally need to make a new thread for people to not have a full opinion in right now, who's with me?
 

Helmholtz Watson

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Raven said:
Same story, I read the comments of that thread. I agreed that you can't censor a subject. I'm of the opinion that if you want to make a joke about things like rape or racism, you better damned be well prepared to face the consequences of doing so.
Fair enough.

Raven said:
We place criminal charges on people who say racist things, hurtful things that are said to offend people who have something unchangeably different about them. Talking about racism is different to making a racist comment.
I know that over there you guys charged a guy for what he said on twitter, but I don't think racist comments will get you arrested/fined by the government over here in the US.

Raven said:
Talking about rape is again different to directly making a comment designed to offend someone who have something unchangeably different about them. What Tosh said to that lady most certainly falls into the latter category (regardless of whether or not she was a rape victim).

You wouldn't get away with making a racist joke about black people on stage (regardless of whether there are any black people in the room). Why should the rape comment be treated any differently?
As other people have pointed out, he uses shock humor.

As for racist jokes, I don't know what kind of comedy you watch, but perhaps we do things differently over here.....
 
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Darkmantle said:
See, here's the difference. No people were raped in the telling of toshes joke. Because it's a fucking joke. What YOU just suggested is that we ACTUALLY RAPE PEOPLE. And you have the balls to call Tosh sick?

EDIT: and all your examples are about MEN getting raped! what it's only funny to you if a guy get violated but if it's a woman OMG suddenly it's too far?


OT: you should start a counter petition*** too while you are at it OP, post a link in the OP
Didn't you find the fact that I was supposedly saying it would be funny to rape people funny? I thought it was obviously so over the top that people would realise I was making an ironic joke. Ah well, guess some types of comedy will always be misunderstood by the moral brigade.

Hazy992 said:
But you could say that about any dark joke. Should people stop making dark jokes altogether or is just the rape jokes you don't like?
You actually reported the OP? Seriously?
I have to hold my hand up and say I did too. In my defence I was doing it under the 'don't start obvious flame wars' rule.

rob_simple said:
It's alright to make a joke about anything, provided that:

A)There's no genuine malice behind it.
.
I know people who make horrifically racist jokes about black people because they are uneducated. The jokes are completely lacking in malice, they genuinely, due to the way they were brought up, think it is funny and not mean to say that black people are subhuman, or all criminals.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just because the intent of the teller wasn't bad doesn't mean that the content of the joke is more than malicious enough on its own.

Jiggy said:
MelasZepheos said:
You know, I would absolutely call your bluff and make a joke about a girl being raped in a club, but I can't think of any funny way to add the belt into the story. So, yes, I want to make a joke. Problem?
Your response shows a lack of basic human empathy. You don't have the capacity to understand my feelings or the feelings of the girl in my story. If you truly did, you wouldn't make a joke, and you wouldn't laugh if it was made. The distance rovided by the internet has stripped you of a very basic human brain function.

In wanting to make the joke, and displaying the lack of empathy, you put yourself on the level of other people who can't understand emotions, like psychopaths and people with narcissistic personality disorder, also, you display a lot of the signs in your post of someone with anti-social personality disorder. All of these are mental conditions. And it isn't just the anonymity of the internet. The fact that you want to make these jokes reveals signs of sadistic personality disorder, deriving humour or pleasure from the taunting and pain of other human beings.

So yeah, I have a problem. Your response makes me wonder if you're a psychopath. Because a normal human being does not read a story about a girl being raped and think 'I must joke about this, this is prime comedy material right here.' They think 'oh my god this is horrible, that poor girl.'

blindthrall said:
I got ya: "If it had been a Gucci belt, they'd be married."
Deviate said:
Hrm. I'd go for something about "That's not what she had in mind when she wanted a belt of something peaty". It's a stretch as is, but someone better at jokes than me could probably make that work quite well. (This being a pun on 'belt' which is another word for a drink.)

Other than that, I agree. I want to make a joke out of that.
And the same for you two. I didn't tell a joke, I didn't present a hypothetical funny scenario. I told a true story about a girl being raped and your first thought was 'hilarious.'

And quite frankly that terrifies me.
 

lacktheknack

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MelasZepheos said:
I didn't tell a joke, I didn't present a hypothetical funny scenario. I told a true story about a girl being raped and your first thought was 'hilarious.'

And quite frankly that terrifies me.
It doesn't even terrify me... it infuriates me. It fills me with the righteous fury of a thousand suns.

Sometimes, I wonder why I come to the Escapist, even considering that it's one of the better websites when it comes to topics like this.
 

Raven's Nest

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Helmholtz Watson said:
Raven said:
We place criminal charges on people who say racist things, hurtful things that are said to offend people who have something unchangeably different about them. Talking about racism is different to making a racist comment.
I know that over there you guys charged a guy for what he said on twitter, but I don't think racist comments will get you arrested/fined by the government over here in the US.

It may well be a difference in laws then. Over here, using racist language etc will get you fined or whatever. There is a big hoohah about one of our football players being charged in court over something he may or may not have said to a team-mate. Despite the two men shaking hands and moving on, John Terry is still facing a criminal investigation and a trial.

Raven said:
Talking about rape is again different to directly making a comment designed to offend someone who have something unchangeably different about them. What Tosh said to that lady most certainly falls into the latter category (regardless of whether or not she was a rape victim).

You wouldn't get away with making a racist joke about black people on stage (regardless of whether there are any black people in the room). Why should the rape comment be treated any differently?
As other people have pointed out, he uses shock humor.

As for racist jokes, I don't know what kind of comedy you watch, but perhaps we do things differently over here.....
Well we have offensive humour types on tv too


Some better than others


But I've never seen anyone outright use rape jokes on tv. Not even Frankie Boyle.

edit: Until literally just now


In fairness, it was improvised and I think you can even see him thinking "should I go any further with this?", And cuts it short.
 

artanis_neravar

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MelasZepheos said:
Your response shows a lack of basic human empathy. You don't have the capacity to understand my feelings or the feelings of the girl in my story. If you truly did, you wouldn't make a joke, and you wouldn't laugh if it was made. The distance rovided by the internet has stripped you of a very basic human brain function.

In wanting to make the joke, and displaying the lack of empathy, you put yourself on the level of other people who can't understand emotions, like psychopaths and people with narcissistic personality disorder, also, you display a lot of the signs in your post of someone with anti-social personality disorder. All of these are mental conditions. And it isn't just the anonymity of the internet. The fact that you want to make these jokes reveals signs of sadistic personality disorder, deriving humour or pleasure from the taunting and pain of other human beings.

So yeah, I have a problem. Your response makes me wonder if you're a psychopath. Because a normal human being does not read a story about a girl being raped and think 'I must joke about this, this is prime comedy material right here.' They think 'oh my god this is horrible, that poor girl.'

blindthrall said:
I got ya: "If it had been a Gucci belt, they'd be married."
Deviate said:
Hrm. I'd go for something about "That's not what she had in mind when she wanted a belt of something peaty". It's a stretch as is, but someone better at jokes than me could probably make that work quite well. (This being a pun on 'belt' which is another word for a drink.)

Other than that, I agree. I want to make a joke out of that.
And the same for you two. I didn't tell a joke, I didn't present a hypothetical funny scenario. I told a true story about a girl being raped and your first thought was 'hilarious.'

And quite frankly that terrifies me.
Dude, you challenged then to make a joke about it, there is a very high chance that they wouldn't have thought to make a joke if you hadn't pushed the issue by telling them to make a joke

yes technically you didn't tell them to, but it was close enough
 

Slayer_2

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Raven said:
Death is universal and inevitable therefore it is something we must all face together. Therefore the discussion of death as a concept isn't inherently offensive.

One of my friends was murdered, strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend. I now happen to work with her younger brother. I can joke about death but am I going to make a joke about murder to him simply because I thought it was funny? No, because I'm not a complete dick and there are hundreds of different ways to produce a laugh than that. Comedians have the same choice, they either choose to embrace these topics as a means of producing a laugh or they don't.

I'm not saying I can't joke about murder in front of him. I'm saying I wouldn't, get the difference?
So because it's universal, it's "less bad" than rape? Also, your example is flawed, that's you and a friend in a 1 on 1 setting. Comedians are 1 person presenting to a huge audience. They probably don't know more than 10% of the people's names, nevermind every struggle in life. Also, bullying, torture, homophobia, and such aren't inevitable, so where do they fall on your "okay to joke about" scale? You'd be hard pressed to find a good comedian who hasn't joked about one of those topics.

Everyone has struggles in life. Some are inevitable, some are petty, some are horrifying. You can either ball up and let it consume you, or try to move on. If the experience was so bad that the mere mention of such an experience incapacitates you, that sucks, but you can't expect a comedian to magically know this and avoid the one specific thing that affected you negatively. Not joking about it isn't going to lessen or stop the experience from happening to anyone else.
 

Helmholtz Watson

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Raven said:
But I've never seen anyone outright use rape jokes on tv. Not even Frankie Boyle.
Well then let me show you some comedians that we have in the US.
 

Raven's Nest

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Slayer_2 said:
So because it's universal, it's "less bad" than rape?
Its not something that happens to everyone, where as death is. It is "less bad" because being raped and later dying (for whatever reason) is worse than dying having not been raped.

Also, your example is flawed, that's you and a friend in a 1 on 1 setting. Comedians are 1 person presenting to a huge audience. They probably don't know more than 10% of the people's names, nevermind every struggle in life. Also, bullying, torture, homophobia, and such aren't inevitable, so where do they fall on your "okay to joke about" scale? You'd be hard pressed to find a good comedian who hasn't joked about one of those topics.
It depends on context though. Take for example the Tosh incident. He outright told a woman it would be funny if she was gang-raped, right there on the spot. That is a 1 to 1 personal incident. Talking about rape, as I've said many times now, I don't have a problem with. Belittling rape victims in any way is something I have a big problem with. I think that comedians ought not to make those specific kind of rape jokes, not that they musn't. The same can be applied to bullying, torture and homophobia.
 

Slayer_2

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MelasZepheos said:
Your response shows a lack of basic human empathy. You don't have the capacity to understand my feelings or the feelings of the girl in my story. If you truly did, you wouldn't make a joke, and you wouldn't laugh if it was made. The distance rovided by the internet has stripped you of a very basic human brain function.

In wanting to make the joke, and displaying the lack of empathy, you put yourself on the level of other people who can't understand emotions, like psychopaths and people with narcissistic personality disorder, also, you display a lot of the signs in your post of someone with anti-social personality disorder. All of these are mental conditions. And it isn't just the anonymity of the internet. The fact that you want to make these jokes reveals signs of sadistic personality disorder, deriving humour or pleasure from the taunting and pain of other human beings.
Wow, your shrink skills are off the chart. Looks to me like we have ourselves a regular internet psychiatrist here. Tell me, where'd you go for schooling? I haven't yet heard of a place that allows you to diagnose someone as a "psychopath" or sufferer of a "narcissistic personality disorder" through a few paragraphs of TEXT posted on the INTERNET. Usually this kinda thing takes hours of face-to-face discussion, and months to determine, but fuck due process! Please, I'd rather be raped than listen to your high-horse ramblings. Oh, see what I did there? Go ahead, call me a "psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder", I have a clean bill of health, so your uninformed and poorly formed classification of my mental state means as much as a pigeon shit to me, less actually, as those could get in my hair on my beautiful car.

Raven said:
The same can be applied to bullying, torture and homophobia.
The problem is, no one raises a huge shit storm over those topics. Why? Why is rape so much worse? That is my real issue with it. My theory is sexual taboo.
 
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artanis_neravar said:
Dude, you challenged then to make a joke about it, there is a very high chance that they wouldn't have thought to make a joke if you hadn't pushed the issue by telling them to make a joke

yes technically you didn't tell them to, but it was close enough
I presented a true story about a girl being raped and said 'do you feel like making a joke about this?' and they said yes. A normal human being wouldn't. They would look at that situation and say 'Jesus, that is a terrible thing.' Make fun of people on HuffPost calling for the reinstatement of the Death Penalty every time someone says the Duchess of Cambridge looks a little fat, but I would rather a race of humans with too much empathy than those for whom the response is 'I can make this funny somehow, because no topic is taboo.'

And even then, it's not so much the desire to, it's also the ability to. I couldn't even think about the topic long enough to think up a joke about raping women. They had theirs in a few hours. That suggests something bad to me.
lacktheknack said:
MelasZepheos said:
I didn't tell a joke, I didn't present a hypothetical funny scenario. I told a true story about a girl being raped and your first thought was 'hilarious.'

And quite frankly that terrifies me.
It doesn't even terrify me... it infuriates me. It fills me with the righteous fury of a thousand suns.

Sometimes, I wonder why I come to the Escapist, even considering that it's one of the better websites when it comes to topics like this.
I tried being infuriated when people used to do this, but then I went to boarding school among primarily right wing people and was met with so much casual racism and sexism that eventually resignation that the human race are mostly horrible set in.

Getting infuriated requires for me to think that I can change things, but as this thread alone should show, I can't. There are more and more people out there for whom common human decency can be pushed aside if it means a pun, even a bad one. I'm not the sort to say I lose faith in humanity, but sometimes the sort of awful things you see on the internet do make me wonder about its future. Because if the internet leads to a loss of empathy and human connection, and more and more people are spending more and more time on it, then what happens next?
 

Raven's Nest

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Helmholtz Watson said:
Raven said:
But I've never seen anyone outright use rape jokes on tv. Not even Frankie Boyle.
Well then let me show you some comedians that we have in the US.
I like how the quality of the comedian improved with each video. See, Tosh in that video was just obnoxious about it, like there wasn't any thought or consideration happening at all. To me, hes just an unfunny prick.

Lewis CK plays it pretty straight, he's aware of the controversy to an extent. Clumsy, but a boundary pusher.

I adore Carlin, and at least he takes the time to explain why he thinks rape jokes are acceptable. You have to admire his courage and conviction. His humour focuses less on the physical and emotional pain and more on the situational comedy. That to me, is much more acceptable and backs up his claim that it's about how you construct the joke.

As i've said before, i'm not against using rape as a subject in comedy, I'm against direct, personal attacks and the belittlement of rape victims which is exactly what Tosh does. Making a joke about finding it funny that your sister was raped? That's just awful, the lowest form of comedy I have ever seen.
 

Raven's Nest

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Slayer_2 said:
Raven said:
The same can be applied to bullying, torture and homophobia.
The problem is, no one raises a huge shit storm over those topics. Why? Why is rape so much worse? That is my real issue with it. My theory is sexual taboo.
I think those issues do get raised. Rape is just a much higher profile subject. I'm sure I don't need to spell out why we as a society consider rape one of the worst crimes? That probably goes a long way to explaining why it is worse to joke about it.