by Lindy West
Reasonable questions, in my opinion. If you’re leveraging people’s trauma for laughs, the least you can do is look them in the face. Why make art if you don’t have a point of view?
The same week, feminist writer and comedian Molly Knefel published an impassioned essay about the contrast between Patton Oswalt’s brutal dismissal of rape joke critiques and his “too soon” reverence for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Aurora theater shooting: “The suffering in Boston, as horrifying as it is, is largely abstract to a nation that has, for the most part, never experienced such a thing. On the other hand, in every room Oswalt performs comedy in, there will be a rape survivor. Statistically speaking, there will be many. There will be even more if he is performing at a university. If exceptional violence illuminates our human capacity for empathy, then structural violence shows the darkness of indifference.”
Both pieces are eminently reasonable and fair—they read beautifully, even years later. The response from comedy fans, however, was horrific. Doyle and Knefel were interlopers, frauds, unfunny cunts, Nazis. Oswalt fans harangued Knefel for days until she took a break from the Internet. Sam Morril eventually replied to Doyle’s letter with a lengthy blog post. The key quote? “Stand-up comedy is a performance, not a discourse.” A dead end. A wall. You are not welcome. Women, it seemed, were obliged to be thick-skinned about their own rapes, while comics remained too thin-skinned to handle even mild criticism.
I was done. I wrote an essay in defense of Knefel and Doyle. It was plainer than “How to Make a Rape Joke,” less affectionately fraternal, less pliant. “Comedy clubs are an overtly hostile space for women,” I said. “Even just presuming we can talk about comedy gets women ripped to shreds by territorial dudes desperate to defend their authority over what’s funny. ‘Jokes’ about rape and gendered violence are treated like an inevitability instead of a choice; like they’re beyond questioning; like they’re somehow equally sacred alongside women’s actual humanity and physical sanctity. When women complain, however civilly, they’re met with condescension, dismissal, and the tacit (or, often, explicit) message that this is not yours, you are not welcome here.”
To my surprise, Oswalt tweeted a link to my post, saying that THIS was feminist discourse he could respect—not like Molly’s hit piece. It was a savvy move, to use me for some feminist cred while discrediting the piece that called him out most damningly by name. I replied that if he agreed with me, he agreed with Knefel; our views were not at odds. As we volleyed back and forth, I thought about a night at M Bar in 2003 or 2004, when I’d shyly approached him after a show and told him he was my favorite comic. He was kind and generous with his time. We talked about Seattle; neither of us could remember the name of the movie theater on the Ave that wasn’t the Neptune. Later, when I remembered, I emailed him: the Varsity. He thanked me, warm and sincere.
Fighting about rape on the Internet was not how I envisioned our next encounter.
I was in a cab to JFK, heading home from a New York business trip, when my friend W. Kamau Bell called my cell. Kamau, at the time, had a weekly show on FX, produced by Chris Rock, called Totally Biased—a sort of news-of-the-day talk show structured vaguely like The Daily Show, but with a social justice bent. Hari wrote for the show; so did Guy Branum. It was a rare writers’ room—straight white men were a minority. It was a rare show.
“I want to talk to you about a crazy idea,” Kamau said. “We want to do a debate about rape jokes, on the show. You versus a comic—it looks like it’ll be Jim Norton.”
“Oh, god,” I laughed. “Do I have to?” Norton is a darling of dark comedy, a prince of the Opie & Anthony set—a scene that makes Howard Stern look like Terry Gross.
“Jim’s not like a lot of those guys, I promise,” Kamau assured me. “He’s not just like, ‘Ugh, feminists.’ You can actually have a conversation with him. We tried to get Colin Quinn, but honestly I think you’ll be better off with Jim.”
“Is this a trap?” I said.
“I promise it’s not a trap.”
I made arrangements to fly back to New York the following week. Now, the thing about Totally Biased was that it was a national television show, and the thing about me was that I was just some fucking lady. Aside from one bizarre time when the Canadian prime-time news had me on to make fun of James Cameron, I think because the anchor had a vendetta, I had never in my life been on television. I didn’t have, like, a reel. I wasn’t trying to be an actor or a pundit. Me being asked to be on TV was exactly the same as, say, you being asked to be on TV. Or your math teacher, or your dog, or your mommy. It was bizarre and terrifying, but I agreed, because, hey, maybe I could make a difference. Maybe I could win and comedy would open up just a crack more to female comics and audiences.
My segment was going to be framed as either comedian vs. feminist, or feminism vs. free speech—neither of which, Kamau told me, was his preference, but you had to package things a certain way on television. Fine by me, I said, tamping down my anxiety about debating whether or not it’s a good idea to glorify the victimization of women onstage within a framework that explicitly excludes women from even being capable of comedy. What does just some fucking lady know of television?
Totally Biased taped in a haunted hotel in Midtown—the set a penny-bright, Technicolor diorama, while behind the scenes was this sort of moldering, dripping, Soviet gray dungeon tower. I gave it fifty-fifty odds that I’d be kidnapped by a masked, erotic ghost on my way to the bathroom. I had a quick sit-down with Kamau and Guy to go over my general talking points. “The time is going to go faster than you think,” Guy warned me. “Don’t save all your best shit for the end—you won’t get to say it.”
Producer Chuck Sklar took me aside and told me that Chris Rock was coming to my taping. “He doesn’t usually come,” he said, “but he kind of hates this whole rape joke thing. Thinks it’s whiny. So he’s curious to see how you’re going to do.” First of all, solid pep talk, boss. Thanks. Second of all, what the fuck?
One flawed but instructive plank in the debate over rape jokes is the concept of “punching up” versus “punching down.” The idea is that people in positions of power should avoid making jokes at the expense of the powerless. That’s why, at a company party, the CEO doesn’t roast the janitor (“Isn’t it funny how Steve can barely feed his family? This guy knows what I’m talking about!” [points to other janitor]). Because that would be disgusting, and both janitors would have to work late to clean up everyone’s barf. The issue isn’t that it’s tasteless and cruel (though it is), but that it mocks the janitors for getting the short end of an oppressive system that the CEO actively works to keep in place—a system that enables him to be a rich dick.
In a 1991 interview with People magazine, Molly Ivins put it perfectly: “There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity—like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule—that’s what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel—it’s vulgar.”
Punching up versus punching down isn’t a mandate or a hard-and-fast rule or a universal taxonomy—I’m sure any contrarian worth his salt could list exceptions all day—it’s simply a reminder that systems of power are always relevant, a helpful thought exercise for people who have trouble grasping why “bitch” is worse than “asshole.” It doesn’t mean that white people are better than black people, it means that we live in a society that treats white people better than black people, and to pretend that we don’t is an act of violence.
Here’s the reason I bring this up: I’ve always been told that “punching up” was a concept coined by Chris Rock. That attribution might be apocryphal—I can’t find a direct quote from Rock himself—but my enduring comedy hero Stewart Lee said it with some authority in a New Statesman column about why right-wingers make terrible comedians:
>
“The African-American stand-up Chris Rock maintained that stand-up comedy should always be punching upwards. It’s a heroic little struggle. You can’t be a right-wing clown without some character caveat, some vulnerability, some obvious flaw. You’re on the right. You’ve already won. You have no tragedy. You’re punching down… Who could be on a stage, crowing about their victory and ridiculing those less fortunate than them without any sense of irony, shame or self-knowledge? That’s not a stand-up comedian. That’s just a cunt.”
Are rape jokes so sacred—and misogyny so invisible—that the dude who literally invented the model for social responsibility in comedy can’t imagine a world without them? I never got an answer. Rock didn’t come to the taping after all.
Backstage, before we got started, I met Jim for the first time—he told me he loved my “How to Make a Rape Joke” piece, said we agreed more than we disagreed. “Duh,” I joked. “I’m right.” We had a good rapport. I felt jumpy but righteous.
When we got onstage, my heart sank quickly. In my intro, to an audience that largely had never heard of me, Kamau explained, “She’s a staff writer for Jezebel [who’s] called out everyone from Louis CK to Daniel Tosh, and now she’s ready to put Jim on blast.” The majority of Totally Biased viewers would have no idea who I was, and they heard no mention of my lifelong comedy obsession, the fact that I’ve done comedy, that I write about comedy, that (at least at the time) I was most widely known in my career for writing humor. They had no reason to assume I had any standing to critique comedy at all.
Before the debate had even started, I was framed as combative, bitchy, shrill. I wasn’t there to have a constructive discussion, I was there to put Jim “on blast.” “Call-out culture” and putting people “on blast” are both loaded terms that the anti-social-justice right loves to throw scornfully back at activists. To unfriendly ears—of which, I’d soon learn, there were many pairs listening—the terms connote overreaction, hysteria, stridence. “Comedian vs. feminist.” I felt uneasy.
Kamau addressed his first question to Jim. “Jim, do you think comedians should be able to say anything they want to say without any repercussions?”
Silently, I thanked Kamau. Whether intentional or not, the question was framed in a way that forced Jim to concede a few points right off the bat. Everything has repercussions, obviously. The audience laughs, or they don’t. They come see you again, or they don’t. They buy your album, or they don’t. You get booked again, or you don’t. He couldn’t possibly deny that with a straight face.
Jim nodded enthusiastically, eyes wide. “If you’re trying to be funny, I think! Everybody knows the difference—Michael Richards said something in anger. Reasonable people can sense when you’re trying to be funny and when you’re trying to be angry. I think, like Matt and Trey said on South Park, it’s either all okay or none of it’s okay.”
He referenced a joke about Hitler that Kamau had made in an earlier segment, then added: “If we go down the road of ‘Hey, don’t make fun of this, don’t make fun of that,’ well, then people have a very legitimate argument to go, ‘Well, don’t mention Hitler in any context, because it’s never humorous!’ So I’m just not comfortable going down that road. I just think as long as you’re trying to be funny, you’re okay.”
“Everybody knows the difference,” he said. “Reasonable people can sense when you’re trying to be funny.” There’s a nasty implication there. The entire rape joke debate can be boiled down to women saying, “These are not just jokes. These bleed into the world and validate our abusers and reinforce our silence. These are rooted in misogyny, not humor. These are not funny.” Therefore, Jim implied, women are not “reasonable people.” “Everybody knows the difference” except feminists, apparently.
Kamau threw the question to me. I breathed sharply through my nose, trying to slow my heart. I wanted to establish myself as someone who wasn’t there to equivocate, to bow and scrape, to cede ground to an older, more famous man who talks for a living. I know what I’m talking about, and I mean it. Don’t fuck with me. I also wanted to open with a laugh. “I think that question is dumb,” I said.
“Everything has repercussions. If you’re talking about legal repercussions, yeah, I do not think that comedy should be censored, and we’re not here to talk about censorship, and”—I gestured to Jim—“I’m pretty sure we agree.” The censorship argument is a boring red herring—I wanted to knock it down early. Rape joke apologists are quick to cry “free speech,” to use the word “allowed,” as though there are certain things comedians are and aren’t “allowed” to say “anymore.” Barring the most extreme forms of hate speech and credible, specific threats of violence, there is no legislative body governing comedy club stages. The “thought police” is not a real law enforcement agency.
“What I’m talking about is the kind of repercussion where you choose to say something that traumatizes a person who’s already been victimized, and then I choose to call you a dick.”
Jim cut in. “I totally agree with you…”
(Great. Are we done?)
“… and if you think somebody sucks for what they said onstage, you should blog about it! You should write about it! As long as a person isn’t calling for somebody to get in trouble for an opinion or a joke.”
The vagueness of “trouble” felt like a misdirection. “But what do you mean by trouble?” I asked, trying to pin him down. “Is the trouble ‘people are mad at you’?”
“The trouble is, I do Opie & Anthony, the radio show. So a lot of time, the trouble people will do is if you’re doing jokes they don’t like, they begin to target your advertisers. Because the market should dictate whether or not people enjoy you. But they’ll go to the advertisers and say, ‘They’re making jokes that we don’t like, so remove your advertising support,’ which is a way to punish them. That’s the type of trouble I’m talking about.”
So Jim was fine with people complaining about comedians, as long as we do it where no one can hear us—as long as we don’t complain in any of the ways that actually produce change. No petitions, no letter-writing campaigns, no boycotts. It’s odd to invoke “the market” in such an anti-market sentiment. People boycott because boycotting works—and, more importantly, because it is the only leverage available to us. People target advertisers because they’re tired of their hard-won consumer dollars going to pay sexists and racists and homophobes who got those jobs, at least partially, by coasting on the privileges and benefit of the doubt conferred by sexism and racism and homophobia. Also, you know, you’re not entitled to a job. It is okay for a white dude to be fired.
It is also okay to draw hard-and-fast distinctions between different ideas—to say that some ideas are good and some ideas are bad. There’s a difference between church groups boycotting JCPenney because JCPenney put a gay couple in their catalog and gay people boycotting Chick-fil-a because Chick-fil-a donated millions of dollars to groups working to strip gay people of rights and protections. Gay people wearing shawl-collar half-zip ecru sweaters does not oppress Christians. Christians turning their gay children out on to the streets, keeping gay spouses from sitting at each other’s deathbeds, and casting gay people as diseased predators so that it’s easier to justify beating and murdering them does oppress gay people.
That said, right-wing Christians should have the right to boycott and write letters to whomever they please. The goal is to change the culture to the point where those boycotts are unsuccessful. You do that by being vocal and uncompromising about which ideas are good and which are bad—which ones we will tolerate, as a society, and which ones we will not. I do not tolerate rape apologia. And, yes, I want to actively work to build a society in which rape apologists face social consequences.
The next few minutes of the debate were more of the same: Kamau asked me if I thought that comedy clubs are “inherently hostile environments for women,” to which I joked, “Well, they’re dark basements full of angry men.” (I took a tremendous amount of abuse f
or that quip later on, from male comedians who were “offended” by my characterization of them. Weird—I thought “reasonable people can sense when you’re trying to be funny.”) Jim compared feminists complaining about sexism to religious people complaining about mockery of their religion. He hammered away, yet again, at the idea that “we all know the difference” between “a comedy club where you understand that we’re trying to have an emotion pulled out of us, which is laughter, and standing up at the office party”—here he pantomimed raising a toast—“and going, ‘to rape!’”
I was frustrated. What the fuck is the point of debating the cultural impact of jokes if your opponent’s only argument is “They’re jokes!” It’s a cheap trick, forcing me into a position where I have to argue that jokes aren’t jokes. So, he’s the “Yay, jokes!” candidate, and I’m the twenty-minutes-of-nuanced-feminist-jargon-that-kind-of-makes-you-feel-guilty candidate.
“I’m sure it’s super-comfortable and nice to believe that there aren’t systemic forces that are affected by speech,” I said, “but that’s not true, and those of us who are affected by those forces know that’s not true. I’m sure sixty years ago there were some ‘hilarious’ jokes about black people, and comedy was way more overtly racist sixty years ago, and it’s not a coincidence that life was more hostile and dangerous for black people—not that it’s great now, by the way!—and you literally think that’s a coincidence? You don’t get to say that comedy is this sacred, powerful, vital thing that we have to protect because it’s speaking truth to power, blah blah blah, and also be like, ‘Well, it’s just a joke, I mean, language doesn’t affect our lives at all, so shut up.’”
Jim turned to the audience with a kind, paternalistic smile, as though he felt sorry for me. “Comedy is not a cause of what happens in society. A lot of times it’s a reaction to what’s happening and a reflection of what’s happening. And comics’ speech has never inspired violence.” He then segued into a weird rant against “the press,” who, he said, is “the only group that I think owes an apology,” because they sometimes report on the identities and manifestos of mass shooters, which “contributes to violence.” Applause.
