Shrill

by Lindy West

  It’s a lazy joke, but a common one, and a year earlier I might not have thought anything of it. Just then, though, a friend was going through some shit—a partner had lied about his STI status, then slipped the condom off without her consent, and a few weeks later she erupted in sores so painful she couldn’t walk or sit, move or not move. She was devastated, not just because of the violation, the deception, and the pain, but because the disease is so stigmatized. She was sure she’d never be able to date again. It seemed entirely possible to her that she might be alone forever, and, she thought, maybe she deserved it. “You know,” I remember telling her, “it’s just a skin condition. A rash, like acne or hives or eczema. Are those shameful?” I rubbed her back while she sobbed in my car.

  That interaction was fresh in my mind as I watched this dude—who is a funny, good person—tell his joke, and I thought about all the people in the audience who were plastering smiles over their feelings of shame, of being tainted and ruined forever, in that moment. I thought about my friend, who—unless you believe recreational sex is an abomination and STIs are god’s dunce caps—didn’t “deserve” this virus. Neither did anyone else in that room. So, did she deserve to have her trauma be the butt of a joke? Even if you could milk a cheap laugh out of the word “herpes,” was it worth it to shore up the stigma that made real people’s lives smaller and harder? Was the joke even that funny anyway?

  Stigma works like this: Comic makes people with herpes the butt of his joke. Audience laughs. People with herpes see their worst fears affirmed—they are disgusting, broken, unlovable. People without herpes see their worst instincts validated—they are clean, virtuous, better. Everyone agrees that no one wants to fuck someone with herpes. If people with herpes want to object, they have to 1) publicize the fact that they have herpes, and 2) be accused of oversensitivity, of ruining the fun. Instead, they stay quiet and laugh along. The joke does well. So well that maybe the comedian writes another one.

  I cycled through that system over and over in my head. It was maddeningly efficient—what were people supposed to do? More broadly, in a nation where puritanical gasbags have a death grip on our public education system, can we really expect ironclad safe sex practices in people from whom comprehensive sex ed has been withheld? Blaming and shaming people for their own illnesses has always been the realm of moralists and hypocrites, of the anti-sex status quo. Isn’t comedy supposed to be the vanguard of counterculture? Of speaking truth to power? The longer I turned it over the more furious I became. Why do we all just laugh along with this?

  I moved close to Aham’s ear and said, over the boisterous crowd, “You know, I could have herpes.”

  He looked at me, clearly startled. A little thought throbbed in the back of my head—how handsome Aham was, with his broad shoulders and mole-brown eyes, towering over me at six foot five. He was an incredible comedian—insightful and fearless, always one of my favorites—and I’d recently found out he was a jazz musician too, like my dad. (He’d also been divorced multiple times, like my dad, and had two kids and a vasectomy, like my dad when he met my mom.) A mutual friend had mentioned the other day that Aham was a great cook. Was this really a dude I wanted to say “I might have herpes” to? I shoved the thoughts aside. It’s just a skin condition.

  “A ton of people in this audience probably have herpes,” I went on, “but they have to pretend to laugh anyway. That has to be the worst feeling. Why do that to people when you could just write a different joke?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re right. I could have herpes too.”

  Aham and I had been chatting at house parties and open mics for five years, but we didn’t really know each other well. Years later, he told me that he’d always been a fan of my writing, but that moment shifted his perception of me forever. “I was just blown away to hear a woman talk like that,” he said. “I started to realize that you weren’t just funny—I’d always thought you were funny—but that you might be a really, really, radically good person.” Sometimes it pays to tell hot guys you might have herpes, kids!

  We were inseparable for the rest of the weekend—we went to an arcade, played hours of Plinko, drank beer, helped Hari come up with burns in a text fight he was having with Marc Maron. Within a year, Aham and I were a couple and he and my dad were playing gigs together.

  This was the life I’d dreamed of at twenty-two: hanging out with comics, falling in love, riffing all day. But, in the same moment, I felt my relationship with comedy changing.

  Death Wish

  Comedy doesn’t just reflect the world, it shapes it. Not in the way that church ladies think heavy metal hypnotizes nerds into doing school shootings, but in the way it’s accepted fact that The Cosby Show changed America’s perception of black families. We don’t question the notion that The Daily Show had a profound effect on American politics, or that Ellen opened Middle America’s hearts to dancing lesbians, or that propaganda works and satire is potent and Shakespeare’s fools spoke truth to power. So why would we pretend, out of sheer convenience, that stand-up exists in a vacuum? If we acknowledge that it doesn’t, then isn’t it our responsibility, as artists, to keep an eye on which ideas we choose to dump into the water supply? Art isn’t indiscriminate shit-flinging. It’s pure communication, crafted with intention and care. Every comedian on every stage is saying what he’s saying on purpose. So shouldn’t we be welcome to examine that purpose, contextualize it within our culture at large, and critique what we find?

  The short answer, I’d discover, is “nah shut up bitch lol get raped.”

  For years, I assumed it was a given that, at any comedy show I attended, I had to grin through a number of brutal jokes about my gender: about beating us, about raping us, about why we deserve it, about ranking us, about fucking us, about not fucking us, about reducing our already dehumanized existence to a handful of insulting stereotypes. This happened all the time, even at supposedly liberal alt shows, even at shows booked by my friends. Misogyny in comedy was banal. Take my wife, please. Here’s one I heard at an open mic: “Last night I brought this girl home, but she was being really loud during sex, so I told her, ‘Sssshhh, you don’t want to turn this rape into a murder!’” Every time, I’d bite back my discomfort and grin—because, I thought, that’s just how we joke. It’s “just comedy.” All my heroes tell me so. This is the price if I want to be in the club. Hey, men pay a price too, don’t they? People probably make fun of Eddie Pepitone for being bald.

  When a comedian I loved said something that set off alarm bells for me—something racist, sexist, transphobic, or otherwise—I thought: It must be okay, because he says it’s okay, and I trust him. I told myself: There must be a secret contract I don’t know about, where women, or gay people, or disabled people, or black people agreed that it’s cool, that this is how we joke.

  But in that moment at Bridgetown, it dawned on me: Who made that rule? Who drew up that contract? I don’t remember signing anything, and anyway, it seems less like a universal accord and more like a booby trap that powerful men set up to protect their “right” to squeeze cheap laughs out of life-ruining horrors—sometimes including literal torture—that they will never experience. Why should I have to sit and cheer through hours of “edgy” misogyny, “edgy” racism, “edgy” rape jokes, just to be included in an industry that belongs to me as much as anyone else?

  When I looked at the pantheon of comedy gods (Bill Hicks, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld), the alt-comedy demigods (Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, David Cross, Marc Maron, Dave Attell, Bill Burr), and even that little roster of 2005 Seattle comics I rattled off in the previous chapter, I couldn’t escape the question: If that’s who drafted our comedy constitution, why should I assume that my best interests are represented? That is a bunch of dudes. Of course there are exceptions—maybe Joan Rivers got to propose a bylaw or two—but you can’t tell me there’s no gender bias in an industry where �
�women aren’t funny” is widely accepted as conventional wisdom. I can name hundreds of white male comedians. But how about this: Name twenty female comics. Name twenty black comics. Name twenty gay comics. If you’re a comedy nerd, you probably can. That’s cool. Now ask your mom to do it.

  In the summer of 2012, a comedian named Daniel Tosh was onstage at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. Tosh is a bro-comedy hero, specializing in “ironic” bigotry—AIDS, retards, the Holocaust, all with a cherubic, frat-boy smile—the kind of jokes worshiped by teenagers and lazy comics who still think it’s cool to fetishize “offensiveness.” Here’s one of Tosh’s signature I’m-just-a-bad-baby wape jokes, about playing a prank on his sister: “I got her so good a few weeks ago—I replaced her pepper spray with silly string. Anyway, that night she got raped, and she called me the next day going, ‘You son of a bitch! You got me so good! As soon as I started spraying him in the face, I’m like, “Daniel! This is going to really hurt!”’” See, it’s a good one, because being raped really hurts.

  This particular night at the Laugh Factory, Tosh was working a bit more meta: according to an audience member who later posted her account anonymously online, he was “making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc.” Uncomfortable, the woman heckled: “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

  Tosh paused, then addressed the packed house. “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?”

  Horrified and frightened, the woman gathered her things and rushed out. She wrote later: “Having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophobic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place.”

  After the predictable viral backlash, Tosh offered a predictably tepid non-apology, and comedians lined up to support him: Patton Oswalt, Jim Norton, Anthony Jeselnik, Doug Stanhope. Oswalt wrote, “Wow, @danieltosh had to apologize to a self-aggrandizing, idiotic blogger. Hope I never have to do that (again).” Stanhope tweeted, “#FuckThatPig.” They were standing up for free speech, for their art. These crazy bitches just didn’t get it.

  It was a few months into my time at Jezebel, and I was tapped to write a response. I felt confident, like I was a good fit for the assignment. I knew I had a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanics and history of comedy than your average feminist blogger. I’d been writing straight-ahead humor since the beginning of my career—you couldn’t say I didn’t get jokes. I had enough cred on both sides to bridge the gap between the club and the coven, to produce something constructive. The piece was called “How to Make a Rape Joke.”

  “I actually agree with Daniel Tosh’s sentiment in his shitty backpedaling tweet (‘The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them #deadbabies’),” I wrote. “The world is full of terrible things, including rape, and it is okay to joke about them. But the best comics use their art to call bullshit on those terrible parts of life and make them better, not worse.”

  Then: “This fetishization of not censoring yourself, of being an ‘equal-opportunity offender,’ is bizarre and bad for comedy. When did ‘not censoring yourself’ become a good thing? We censor ourselves all the time, because we are not entitled, sociopathic fucks… In a way, comedy is censoring yourself—comedy is picking the right words to say to make people laugh. A comic who doesn’t censor himself is just a dude yelling. And being an ‘equal-opportunity offender’—as in, ‘It’s okay, because Daniel Tosh makes fun of ALL people: women, men, AIDS victims, dead babies, gay guys, blah blah blah’—falls apart when you remember (as so many of us are forced to all the time) that all people are not in equal positions of power. ‘Oh, don’t worry—I punch everyone in the face! People, baby ducks, a lion, this Easter Island statue, the ocean…’ Okay, well, that baby duck is dead now.”

  I analyzed four rape jokes that I thought “worked”—that targeted rape culture instead of rape victims (in retrospect, I should have been harder on Louis CK, whom I basically let off on a technicality)—and then I explained, “I’m not saying all of this because I hate comedy—I’m saying it because I love comedy and I want comedy to be accessible to everyone. And right now, comedy as a whole is overtly hostile toward women.”

  My point was that what we say affects the world we live in, that words are both a reflection of and a catalyst for the way our society operates. Comedy, in particular, is a tremendously powerful lever of social change. Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression may have tipped the 2008 election for Obama. Plenty of my peers cite The Daily Show as their primary news source. When you talk about rape, I said, you get to decide where you aim: Are you making fun of rapists? Or their victims? Are you making the world better? Or worse? It’s not about censorship, it’s not about obligation, it’s not about forcibly limiting anyone’s speech—it’s about choice. Who are you? Choose.

  I do get it. Tosh plays a character in his act—the charming psychopath. He can say things like “rape is hilarious” because, according to his defenders, it’s obviously not. Because “everyone hates rape.” It’s not an uncommon strain in comedy: Anthony Jeselnik, Jeff Ross, Lisa Lampanelli, Cartman. The problem is, for those of us who actually work in anti-rape activism, who move through the world in vulnerable bodies, who spend time online with female avatars, the idea that “everyone hates rape” is anything but a given. The reason “ironically” brutal, victim-targeting rape jokes don’t work the way Tosh defenders claim they do is because, in the real world, most sexual assault isn’t even reported, let alone taken seriously.

  Feminists don’t single out rape jokes because rape is “worse” than other crimes—we single them out because we live in a culture that actively strives to shrink the definition of sexual assault; that casts stalking behaviors as romance; blames victims for wearing the wrong clothes, walking through the wrong neighborhood, or flirting with the wrong person; bends over backwards to excuse boys-will-be-boys misogyny; makes the emotional and social costs of reporting a rape prohibitively high; pretends that false accusations are a more dire problem than actual assaults; elects officials who tell rape victims that their sexual violation was “god’s plan”; and convicts in less than 5 percent of rape cases that go to trial. Comedians regularly retort that no one complains when they joke about murder or other crimes in their acts, citing that as a double standard. Well, fortunately, there is no cultural narrative casting doubt on the existence and prevalence of murder and pressuring people not to report it.

  Maybe we’ll start treating rape like other crimes when the justice system does.

  No, no one thought that a spontaneous gang rape was going to take place just then on the stage of the Laugh Factory. But the threat of sexual violence never fully leaves women’s peripheral vision. The point of Tosh’s “joke” was to remind that woman that she is vulnerable. More importantly, it reinforces the idea that comedy belongs to men. Therefore, men must be correct when they tell us what comedy is.

  There are two competing narratives here. One is the “Women Aren’t Funny” narrative, which posits that women are leading the charge against rape jokes because we are uptight and humorless, we don’t understand the mechanics of comedy, and we can’t handle being the butt of a joke. Then there’s the narrative that I subscribe to, which is “Holy Shit Women Are Getting Fucking Raped All the Fucking Time, Help Us, Please Help Us, Why Are You All Laughing, for God’s Sake, Do Something.” As a woman, I sincerely wish it were the first one.

  “How to Make a Rape Joke” wasn’t perfect, but it accomplished what I’d hoped: It bridged the gap between feminists and shock comics in a definitive, reasoned way. It went viral like nothing I’d ever written before, the res
ponse overwhelmingly supportive from both sides. Many female comedy fans, who’d long been told their voice wasn’t welcome in this “debate,” expressed relief. A lot of people said I’d finally shut the lid on the conversation. Even Patton Oswalt retweeted it. The reception was positive enough that I was able to shrug off the relatively small amount of snide abuse from the Tosh faithful:

  “Shut the fuck up Lindy West (who?)”

  “Just read @thelindywest’s article about Tosh on Jezebel. Two things: 1) Rape is hilarious. 2) I have no idea who she is. Shut the fuck up.”

  “I hope Lindy and all the people who commented on this article are raped”

  A few characterized my critiques of Tosh as a “witch hunt,” calling me a “fascist” who was trying to destroy his career and the career of any man who challenged the feminazi orthodoxy. Contrary to their dire warnings, Tosh’s popularity soared. As of the writing of this book, he’s still on the air.

  Overall, I was pleased. It felt like we’d made progress.

  A year passed. The following summer, 2013, a feminist writer named Sady Doyle published an open letter to a young comic named Sam Morril. She recently saw him in a show and found his jokes about raping and brutalizing women questionable. Like me the previous year, she hoped to engage him in a constructive dialogue rather than just throwing the same old talking points back and forth.

  “One in five women reports being sexually assaulted,” Doyle wrote. “For women of color, that number is much higher; one study says that over 50% of young black women are sexually assaulted. (One of your jokes: ‘I’m attracted to black women. I had sex with one once. The whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the n-word. Yeah, the whole time, she was yelling NO!’) On your Twitter, you warned people that they shouldn’t attend one particular set of yours if they’d recently had a miscarriage or been raped. So, like: Are you comfortable excluding that big a chunk of the population from your set?”