Paul Krassner: Can A Rape Joke Be Funny?

One of my favorite of the human beings, Krassner, who coined the term Yippie and "soft core pornography" and a few others I'm forgetting, first published his ethical quandary- can rape jokes be funny? -  in Reason magazine, but updated the article a month later in Huffington Post to include what Louis C.K. said on The Daily Show...although I'm sure he's touched on it in one or more of his numerous books, but I can't find my notes if he did. (In a private email Paul showed me he'd further updated this article, recently, to include the idiotic comments by far-right-wing Republicans Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock.)

                                                      Paul Krassner

One of the titans of free speech in the second half of the roaring twentieth century, and up to today, Krassner (b.1932) has held that irreverence is his only sacred cow.

If you were too lazy to read Krassner's article I link to from HuffPo above: in 1970 he was doing stand-up and - Roe v.Wade was a few years off - Krassner has been candid about his own role in providing an abortion referral service before the Roe decision. His joke in 1970 was how we ought to hold a "rape-in" of lawmakers' wives, in order to impregnate them and so they'd lobby their husbands to legalize abortion.

Some of his friends objected to this joke. Krassner was in an ethical quandary: he thought his joke was an effective satirical jab at the hypocrisy of men who were legislators who had outlawed abortion. But then also, as a political satirist, he didn't want victims to be the target of his humor, even in a joke. It wouldn't be the congressmen's wives who were to blame for illegal, unsafe abortions. But he abhorred censorship, even of the self- variety. As he says, he stopped doing the joke by "rationalizing" that his consciousness had evolved.

Skip ahead 42 years and you have the Daniel Tosh incident, covered in Paul's article. Note that, on or about the same night Tosh joked about rape, Sarah Silverman also joked about it, but it didn't go viral on Twitter; she didn't receive the backlash Tosh did. Tosh, in holding with the True Comedian's Creed (which I just made up), said of course rape is horrible, but we should be able to joke about anything.

Rape Jokes Go Way Back
At a lawyer's convention in 1942, this joke was told:

A girl rushes into a lawyer's office. "I want him arrested! He threw me on the bed. He...oh it was awful!"
Lawyer: Now calm down. Let's get the story straight. What did he do first?

Girl: He locked the door.

Lawyer: Aha! Kidnapping! (He makes a note.) Ten years. Then what did he do?

Girl: He pulled up my dress.

Lawyer: Indecent exposure. Two more years. (Making a note.) Then what?

Girl: He put his hand on my...my...

Lawyer: It's all right. I understand. Attempted assault. Five years. And then what?

Girl: He threw me on the bed.

Lawyer: Ah hah! Mayhem and felonious constraint. Ten to fifteen years. And then?

Girl: Then...he did it to me.

Lawyer: That does it! Rape! Twenty years - maybe we can get him the chair! And meanwhile you were screaming and struggling...

Girl: Wellllll...not exactly. You see, it was kind of late, and I didn't want to disturb everybody, and...

Lawyer: (Tearing up his notes in disgust) Oh for Christ's sake, that's just a plain ordinary fuck!
-gleaned from Gershon Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor. Legman - one of the great compendious minds of the 20th century, by the way - says this is an updated version of a joke Rabelais told in his 1532 book Pantagruel.

                                     16th c. French satirist Francois Rabelais, looking
                                     rogue-ish. Trained as a doctor, his books are filled
                                     with drinking jokes, fart jokes, shit jokes, even a rape 
                                         joke. Look for his stuff under "classics."

I wish Tosh - who probably did not graduate from a Great Books program - would've defended himself by referring to Rabelais, if only because Rabelais deserves to be in the cultural spotlight again. Plus it would've been a real mindfuck to switch the tone to Renaissance French literature. Or to just palm off the rape joke as a legacy from Francois Rabelais, who was trained as a physician. Maybe it's just me.

Now a quick divergence:

The Intellectual Class and Its CCD
Often referred to as "Careful and Critical Discourse," I'm more influenced by Alvin Gouldner, who calls it the "Culture of Critical Discourse." Gouldner makes a series of arguments about the speech idioms of the humanistic intellectuals and the newer technical intelligentsia - together they form the "New Class," and they are slowly winning a war against the older, monied bourgeoisie. The CCD is marked by three things: You must be very concerned to justify your assertions. Secondly, you can appeal to authority, but that's not impressive enough: you must still ground your argument using a rhetoric that does not appeal to authority. Finally, you must try to win the voluntary consent of those appealed to, based solely on the logic of your assertions. In other words, you can't say "My dad's rich and my uncle's a judge, so I'm right, and if you say I'm not I'll have my guards throw you in the moat."

Also, the CCD is situation-free: if you're holding a meeting and some heavily tattooed guy with dreadlocks and sandals has something to say, and it's a good idea, it must be taken seriously; it doesn't matter who is talking: if they are able to speak in the CCD-idiom, it doesn't matter their dress, their accent, their skin color, their gender.

But Gouldner also says the New Class's CCD: "In its virtuous aspect, self-editing implies a commendable circumspection, carefulness, self-discipline, and 'seriousness.' In its negative modality, however, self-editing also disposes toward an unhealthy self-consciousness, toward stilted convoluted speech, an inhibition of play, imagination, and passion, and continual pressure for expressive discipline.  The new rationality thus becomes the source of a new alienation." - p.84, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class

Thus, I would argue, the quality of speech we get from intellectual comedians - and I would consider Louis C.K, Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Sarah Silverman, Marc Maron and about 15 others here - is either a variant of this CCD (all of these stand-ups are writers with fine minds, well-read, maybe not steeped in the CCD that becomes habitual after four years in a good university), or they represent an outsider's challenge to the intellectual class in their daring, open speech. Who among us has not sat and listened to the Learned Professor, who, gosh, sure has a lot to say and he says it so well, but it's kinda boring, and who ever thought a talk on (rock and roll/masturbation/James Bond films/the history of beer) could be so dull? I say: the academics need to figure out a way to inject some "play, imagination, and passion" every now and then. What? You think if you do that we won't think your PhD was serious?

Whatever you think, there's a reason why I consider George Carlin a linguistic philosopher of some sort, and the best intellectual comedian who ever lived. Here he is on our topic.

George Carlin on "The Humorous Side of Rape"
From Napalm and Silly Putty, pp.175-176:

Many people in this country want to tell you what can and can't talk about. Or sometimes they'll tell you you can talk about something, but you can't joke about it. Like rape. People say you can't joke about rape. They say rape's not funny. And I say, Fuck you, I think it's hilarious. How do you like that? I can prove rape is funny: Picture Porky Pig raping Daisy Duck. See? Hey, why do you think they call him Porky?

And I know what men are gonna say. Daisy was askin' for it; she was comin' on to Porky, she had on tight feathers. Porky got horny, and he lost control. A lot of men talk like that. They blame it on the woman. They say, "She had it comin'. She was wearing a short skirt." 

Doesn't seem fair to me; doesn't seem right. But I believe you can joke about it. I believe you can joke about anything. It just depends on how you construct the joke, what the exaggeration is. Every joke needs one exaggeration. Every joke needs one thing to be way out of proportion.

I'll give you an example. Have you ever seen a news story like this? Some burglar breaks into a house, steals some things, and while he's in there, he rapes an eighty-one-year-old woman. And you think to yourself, "Why? What the fuck kind of social life does this guy have?" I want to ask him, "Why did you do that?" But I know what I'd hear: "Hey, she was comin' on to me. She had on a tight bathrobe." And I'm thinkin', "Next time, be a little more selective, will you?"

Now, speaking of rape, but changing the subject slightly, you know what I wonder? Is there more rape at the Equator or the North Pole? I mean, per capita; I know the populations are different. I think it's the North Pole.

Most people think it's the Equator. Because it's hot down there, people don't wear a lot of clothing, guys can see a woman's tits, they get horny, and there's a lot of rape and a lot of fucking in general. But that's exactly why there's less rape at the Equator; because there's a lot of fucking in general. You can tell the Equator has a lot of fucking: look at the population figures. Billions of people live near the Equator. How many Eskimos we got? Thirty? Thirty-five?

No one's gettin' laid at the North Pole; it's too cold. An Eskimo says to his wife, "Hey honey, how about some pussy?" She says, "Wally, are you crazy? The windchill is 150 below!" Eskimo guys are deprived, they're horny, they get pent up, and every now and then they gotta rape somebody.

Now, the biggest problem an Eskimo rapist has is trying to get wet leather leggings off a woman who doesn't want to take them off. Have you ever tried to pull the leather pants off someone who's trying to kick you in the nuts? It takes a lot of effort. And, in the process, you would lose your hard-on. In fact, at the North Pole your dick would shrivel up like a sack of dimes.

That's another thing I wonder. Does a rapist have a hard-on when he leaves the house in the morning? Or does it develop during the day while he's walking around checkin' out the gals? Just wondering.

                                                  Prof. George Carlin


So: whattya think? Can rape jokes be funny? Why?