To see how many of you disgusting fucks think its okay for someone to tell a woman, to her face, that she should be gang-raped on the spot, maybe?
Oh Sweet Darwin, it is a comedy act. It is all about the context. If someone on the street told a woman that she needed to be raped, that would NOT be OK. However, the automatic assumption at a comedy act is that the person on stage is not to be taken seriously. They will say shit that under any other context would be horrible, but the fact that they are on stage obviates that fact. The whole point of entire branches of humor is to poke--often with a sharp stick-- at people's comfort zones. In fact, humor EVOLVED as a social signal partially to communicate social status, and partially to diffuse tense situations and signal that something that may have been horrifying is safe. Twig snaps, no lion, group laughs at their own reaction to fear.
His comment was certainly in poor taste, but that is the fine line between a successful joke of that school and a failed one. A comic faster on their feet would have been able to say something with almost the same meaning, but not nearly as offensive to the well-founded sensibilities of most people.
Tosh isn't that funny, but this was very bad and very low even for him. Defending it because you have no standards for your comedy is very bad and very low of you.
That is a matter of personal taste. Do not make the mistake of thinking your preferences are somehow higher-brow than others. I said I dont have barriers, not that I have no standards. The two do not mean the same thing, and I would not have found his joke funny. My way of coping with a fucked up and insane world is through humor. I think of rape, just think of it, and it horrifies me. I diffuse that horror with humor--usually at the expense of the rapist.
Pedophilia? Horrifying, but the power of its wrongness is reduced if we laugh about it.
I don't know about the point that's she shouldn't have heckled, I'm of the opinion that bullshit should be called out but I can see the anti-heckler point.
The issue is that you might not know what you are going to get when you do it. You assume a certain risk to your sensibilities when you go to a comedy show. Heckling a bad comic (like The Situation at the Trump Roast) is one thing, but you need to know the performer before you do that. Otherwise, someone like Tosh, who thrives on poking fun at the fucked-up nature of human beings in various ways will zero in on you like a missile and say the most offensive thing to you that they can. It is the nature of the show. Hell, there are comics who make their career ruthlessly insulting their own audience with everything from racial slurs to accusations of pedophilia.
What I'd like to know is, where do you draw the line between unfunny joke and making threats of violence? Can you legitimately make the distinction just because you're in a comedy club?
There are a LOT of context when threats of violence are in fact not threats of violence. Almost all of them involve some sort of Act or Pretense. If actor A threatens actor B as part of a production of Romeo and Juliet (Speaking of which, the whole first scene of that play is basically one drawn out rape pun) it cannot be reasonably assumed they mean it. In the same way, a comedy act is such that, and I realize this is a difficult concept, people pay to come in and laugh at things they would normally view as horrible, wrong, or unacceptable.
It cannot even be assumed that a comic is even talking about their own personal views, unless that is part of their act.
No, I think I already posted what I was comparing it to in my original post there. Only you saw just 9/11. How are rape jokes any more or less tenable than jokes about killing or any other traumatic event, past or present? Rape is wrong is not a reason.
DING DING DING! We have a winner.
