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Comment count is 23
IrishWhiskey - 2012-07-18

He didn't get in trouble for telling a rape joke (except one woman complaining in the audience). He got in trouble for NOT telling a rape joke.

If "What if she got raped by like, five dudes, right now?" had a punchline, then it'd be just another offensive joke. But since there is no punchline, it's just creepy fantasizing.

It should be obvious. After all, Danial Tosh bases his whole public persona on his impression of a partially aborted gay retard born from incest, and it's only when he stops making jokes that people get upset with him.


CornOnTheCabre - 2012-07-19

yeah, as a huge RLM fan, I'm pretty confused as to why they felt the need to weigh in here, and sadly, as their pool of content gets deeper, it gets more and more obvious how little they have to say about the role of race and gender in modern filmmaking.

and i don't think there's anything inherently wrong about sticking to your strengths as a critic, I just wish they'd supplement the site with another perspective instead of just giving Rich Evans something else to do.

I KNOW YOU HIRE WOMEN, I HAVE SEEN THEM


Jericho - 2012-07-19

Pretty much. It's the same as Michael Richards' meltdown. Jokes about horrible things should have a little more thought put into them than none at all. Enough thought so that they fit the literal definition of a joke. Your one job is to be funny, Daniel Tosh.

But really nothing funny has ever come out of his mouth so how he has not been crucified for that I don't know


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2012-07-19

In 1985, Louie Anderson told a joke on HBO about Rock Hudson being placed in his casket face down "so his friends could pay their last respects". I think I've just recently stopped hating Louie Anderson over that. I'm never going to forgive Andrew Dice Clay for the experience of listening to side 1 of "The Diceman Cometh" It sounded like a Klan rally. I listened to side one, and pictured it in my mind as being torchlit.

People don't forget a hateful, ugly joke. It touches them deeply and personally. Making people hate you will work against your career in the long run. You gotta be offensive without being hateful. Remember George Carlin? George Carlin never seemed hateful. EVERYBODY loved George Carlin. Republicans in suits loved George Carlin, the man who did the most disgusting version of the "Aristocrats" joke that I've ever heard. Lenny Bruce never seemed hateful.

What's Andrew Dice Clay been doing lately? The Celebrity Apprentice?


chairsforcheap - 2012-07-19

isn't he in a new woody allen movie


Anaxagoras - 2012-07-19

"Never seem hateful"? That's absurd. Remember Bill Hicks? He's widely loved, and well thought of. And yet, he was often hateful. But he was hateful towards groups & people that deserved it. That's partly why he was loved. Telling truth to assholes can endear you to many people.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2012-07-19

There's a difference between hateful and angry.

Let me break it down another way. Molly Ivins wrote in a prologue to a book about Rush Limbaugh that it's a profoundly vulgar thing to satirize the powerless, the appropriate target for satire is the powerful.

It's hateful to satirize the powerless, e.g.

To satirize the powerful is angry.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2012-07-19

>>The whole standard is just so fucked up. Not to go all TFL, but it's so freaking bizarre how this outrage only comes up when it's adult male/female rape, while prison rape or catholic priest rape (child abuse for christ sake!) are considered so harmless that they make up half of Jay Leno's monologues.

So if the heckler had a child with her, and Tosh had said, "Wouldn't it be funny a priest raped your daughter?", no one would have been offended?

The standard isn't exactly fucked up, it's complex and subjective, and that makes it hard to measure and predict. What Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke was pretty average, for him, but it got a huge unexpected response because he framed his remark in such a way that millions of women could follow his logic and think "he's talking about me."

There's a reason why jokes that aren't jokes about "adult/male female rape" are especially offensive. It's that they're especially common.

Remember this? "Yale Frat Pledges Chanting 'No Means Yes! Yes Mean Anal!'"

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=85630

I'm going to talk about Boxxy now, so everybody who's going to object, please keep in mind, I don't care. I made a video a couple of years ago, (it's lost now) of one day's worth of violent comments on Boxxy's youtube videos. She got about 20 threat/jokes in that one average weekday. The most common one was a variation on "I would shut her up by putting my dick in her mouth." Others were far worse. More recently, maybe a year ago, someone posted a long "fan fiction" piece on unichan.org that described Catie Wayne being raped (her real name was used), and included imagery of blood, shit and asphyxiation.

Here's an image that Catie Wayne herself posted on her website, after she found it on the internet:

http://tinyurl.com/7ylfbwa

I was once threatened with implied rape by someone on the internet who thought I was a woman. I would be "jumped".

I think that a lot of women experience this drumbeat of shitty rhetoric from shitty men, and it's MEANT to be intimidating and humiliating. It happens on the internet. it happens at Yale. it probably happens in a lot of places. So I can understand why the woman was offended, and there is a difference with other crimes that are just as heinous but not alluded to constantly.

There's another side to it, though, which is that hecklers are asking for it. The comedian has half a second to respond or face public professional humiliation. He has to fire whatever happens to be in the chamber. I once read an article by a black comedian defending Michael Richards. No one else could have done it.

Did Tosh apologize? He did? Well, what do you want, then?


dek863 - 2012-07-18

Fuck Bot 5000 always deserves 5 stars.


Caminante Nocturno - 2012-07-19

"I like these funny internet videos, but I would enjoy them more if they were interrupted by a horrible little man telling bad jokes. Also, commercials."

-The average Tosh.0 fan, apparently


cognitivedissonance - 2012-07-19

"I like these funny b-movies, but I would enjoy them more if they were interrupted by a horrible little man and two puppets telling bad jokes. Also, commercials."

- The average MST3K fan, apparently.


chairsforcheap - 2012-07-19

oh shit this summer JUST GOT HOTTER


Rodents of Unusual Size - 2012-07-19

Not that there's anything wrong with MST3K.

But getting back to Tosh, I think what happened was waaaay different than the Michael Richards incident. Michael Richards really has some majorly fucked up racist issues. I think Daniel Tosh was genuinely just trying to say whatever he could to piss the hell out of the bitch that interrupted him.

YAY EVERYONE INVOLVED IS HORRIBLE.

Oh and since no one else is saying it, his heckler should have shut the fuck up.


Bort - 2012-07-19

cognitivedissonance: eventually Mike took over for Joel, so it got better. (OH SNAP!)

RoUS: as far as I know, Michael Richards just got mad and pushed the first attack buttons that appeared in his mind -- the heckler was black so he went for material specific to blacks. It could be Richards genuinely hates blacks and yearns for the days of lynchings, but I'm not going to make that assumption just because Richards went all frothy in the face of a heckler. Either way, it was a bad move on his part.

Red Letter Media: as a rule with humor, you choose your material and delivery so that you're no more brutal than intention and social context allow for, not much different from every other conversation you ever have with people. There's a little more latitude with comedy, but even so it's not particularly hard to tell when you're veering out of "good humor" into "offensive" territory. The details of the material will be one factor, but not the only factor. This should be kind of obvious.


Hooker - 2012-07-19

When I read the "victim's" account of what happened, it seemed pretty clear to me that Tosh was intentionally trying to bait someone into speaking up before launching into his "we should rape that person" thing, which was the whole punchline. Did nobody else get that impression?

I'm not trying to say that makes it better or anything, but it's strange that, if I'm right, people never bring up that part of it.


memedumpster - 2012-07-19

Daniel Tosh just owned poeTV.


FABIO - 2012-07-19

I think we can all agree it was a non-joke.

But has anyone come up with a valid argument why rape is the one dark subject that's completely taboo when it comes to comedy? Why catholic priest, prison rape, and serial killer jokes are ten thousand times more acceptable?

The most common point I've heard is "rape victims are still alive to be offended while serial killer victims aren't", which is some pretty fucked up thinking.


Hooker - 2012-07-19

Daniel Tosh is hardly the first comic to make a rape joke. The issue is because the joke (stripped of its context, timing, delivery, and presented as badly as possible by the offended) wasn't funny. Even if Michael Richards' meltdown was planned ahead of time as a joke, it wasn't funny and he still would have gotten in the shitstorm he did. Imus's stuff _was_ a joke, but it was in super bad taste and not nearly funny enough to make up for that.

Comedians, writers, musicians, artists, etc. all walk a fine line when dealing with taboo subjects. If Bob Dylan released an album tomorrow that was just a bunch of Holocaust denial, it would destroy his legacy in one fell swoop.

The tragedy here is that, to the best of my knowledge at least, the video hasn't been shown of the routine. I would at least like to see it before I write Tosh off as the worst person in the world.


FABIO - 2012-07-19

Oh no doubt it wasn't funny. I wouldn't even consider it a joke.

Whether it was a joke or not isn't what the shitstorm is about though. ANY rape joke gets this kind of response while equally dark or darker subjects are brushed off.

What if Tosh had called for a heckler to be beaten? Beaten to death? Shot? Run over? A mildly uncomfortable silence at most and we never would have heard of it.

The whole standard is just so fucked up. Not to go all TFL, but it's so freaking bizarre how this outrage only comes up when it's adult male/female rape, while prison rape or catholic priest rape (child abuse for christ sake!) are considered so harmless that they make up half of Jay Leno's monologues.


IrishWhiskey - 2012-07-19

I don't think that's true at all. Lots of popular comedians make rape jokes without getting this type of response. Louis C.K. does it and he got criticized when he accidentally supported Tosh, not for his own rape jokes.

There's an article written in response to this listing all sorts of popular comedians making rape jokes, to make the point that there is a difference between joking about dark subjects, and just being an asshole. My favorite was this Sarah Silverman one:

“Who’s going to complain about rape jokes? Rape victims? They barely even report rape.”

I also think you're dead wrong on the other parts. If Tosh had fantasized about the heckler being beaten or killed, he would have also gotten a strong response. Because it's not about the topic, it's about the fact that it was personal nastiness with no joke involved. Jokes about Catholic priests and prison rape are acceptable because they are jokes, while just hoping aloud that some person who disagrees with you "was raped as a child" would be considered being an asshole.

It's not to say that the lines between joke and personal nastiness can't be blurred, since context matters. But like with the Tracy Jordan thing, if the only way there's a punchline or laugh is by agreeing with the hateful or bigoted message, then it's not a joke involving or satirizing nastiness, it's just revealing a bad character.


ashtar. - 2012-07-19

As far I can tell, he was trying to ad-lib and fucked up. I've done that, sometimes something intended as a joke at someone's expense turns into just a nasty insult. She was right to be upset and he should have apologized sooner.
The rest is just cultural feedback scandal noise.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2012-07-19

Imagine what it must be like to be a woman in roomful of men laughing at the thought of you being raped. This goes beyond taste and "subject matter". It's personal humiliation.

But I don't think it's what Tosh intended, and again, hecklers are asking for it. Comedians are placed in a position where they have to hit back right away, any way they can, and it's not going to be pretty. These ugly incidents must have happened all the time before the internet gave the hecklers a chance to hit back as victim.

Tosh should apologize, and that should be the end of it.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2012-07-20

By the way, I saw Richard Belzer do a set at Binghamton university years and years and years ago when he was the opening act for Talking Heads. It was the only time I've ever seen a comedian open for a band, no one was expecting him, and there were hecklers. Richard Belzer is amazing with hecklers, it's the best part of what he does.. If I ever get to see him again, I intend to heckle him, just so I can have the pleasure of being put in my place by a master.


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