Michael Richards

Faced with public professional humiliation? Really? Comedians die on stage all the time, even the pros with TV shows and loads of concert videos.

The "professional" part should be the ability to fire back and be funny, not rally the mob by essentially saying "wow, wouldn't it be just hilarious if someone were to violently assault you right now? It'd be a shame if that happened, am I right, fans?"

"On the internet, this sort of rhetoric is used all the time against women, and the intent is to humiliate and intimidate."

Really? I don't buy the argument that the girl was intimidated, or that Daniel Tosh was in some way "inciting rape" (not your words).

Maybe the women I hang around are tougher than normal, but none of them would be intimidated by some jackass on the internet talking about raping them, or by a comedian in a comedy club. They may not like it, but God, some of the comments against Tosh make it seem like all women live in perpetual fear of being raped, and that just saying the word makes these poor delicate creatures faint.

I know! I mean, what girl hasn't shrugged off having a room full of strangers laugh at the thought of her rape?

I'm deeply offended by the implication that Daniel Tosh is a comedian.

Allright, points:

1) If you heckle a comedian, you're going to get a response. If you directly challenge a statement from a comedian, one should expect them to rebut that statement. If you declare that rape jokes aren't funny, expect the comedian to try and make a funny joke about rape in response.

2) Tosh is a shitty comedian, and it was neither a funny, nor an insightful, nor a tasteful response. He handled it, but did it in a ham-fisted way, and catching flak for such a poor response is kinda expected. On the other hand, maybe he thought that she wasn't going to relent to an insightful remark, so he just beat her over the head with offensive remarks, but that was dumb of him regardless. He won over the crowd, because the crowd was a bunch of idiots, mostly evidenced by paying to see him doing stand-up.

3) Playing the PTSD/trigger card in a dispute works really well in pity parties online, but it's a stupid thing to do in real life. Basically, it amounts to a "you're a big meanie-head if you argue with me". Getting into an argument with someone about something and then claiming trauma if they contradict you is a bullshit passive-aggressive response, and if anyone expects this tactic to work in real life I have bad news for them. But hey, it worked for her in the online pity party after the fact, and probably changed zero minds in the long run.

In short, taking a swing a beehive when you're allergic to bees may be your right, but it's also their right to swarm you, and after that it's a matter of public opinion who is making the bigger mistake. Tosh is a shitty comedian who handled it badly, and the person in question is an idiot for starting an argument and then diving when the other person hit back.

A lot of my thinking about heckling comedians comes from an article I read by a black comedian defending Michael Richards. Wish I could find it now; I've tried.

What Old Zircon said.

Louis is one of my favorite comedians for a lot of reasons, and I agree that nothing should be taboo in comedy because comedy can be used to diffuse anxieties in unlike any other popular art.

That being said, I think that his nigger faggot cunt bit has a big hole in it. I mean, how surprising is it that a white, straight man isn't offended by the words faggot, cunt or nigger? While I agree with his position, and I think his jokes with the terms are funny his usual humility is sorta lacking here: what the fuck does he know about being called a cunt, faggot or a nigger? Or being raped? Why does his opinion matter? Being self conscious about this inconsistency would make the bit more human, and funnier i think.

er...diffuse anxieties we assume are permanent

Couldn't be bothered to actually watch the interview, eh WWD?

He's got too many opinions to be bothered.

Yeah, that was my reaction. Didn't watch the interview.

Wonder Woman beating up her boyfriend is pretty funny.

He shouldn't have gone there when there are so many acceptable subjects for humor. For instance:
- Dead babies
- Torture
- Terrorism
- Cannibalism
- Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and so on
- Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot and so on
- Mutilation of male genitalia
- The motion of mutilated male genitalia "whizzing around" in a trash disposal unit
- Pedophilia (which is totally not another form of rape)
- Heaven's Gate, Jim Jones, and so on
- Addiction to alcohol, tobacco, heroin and so on
- Cancer, AIDS, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, FAS, Asperger's and so on
- Starvation, poverty, pollution, global warming, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes
and so on. (*)

(*) Disclaimer: I'm being sarcastic. All of these are just as bad as rape, if not worse. This is my attempt to illustrate the multitude of standards people have for what's acceptable in public discourse. With the exception of self defense and/or self preservation, I don't condone any kind of violence and I strongly condemn and abhor all types of pain, agony, injury and/or death inflicted on people or animals by other people, animals, poisonous insects, poison berries, falling rocks, traffic accidents, diseases, natural or man made disasters.

They may be as bad as rape, but they don't occupy the same place in our culture as rape. What you just did is the equivalent of complaining that there's no White Entertainment Channel.

Sure there is.
FOX News!

No, because when people complain that there is no White Entertainment Channel, they actually don't care that there is not a White Entertainment Channel. But there are plenty of people who are deeply impacted by one or a number of those things.

Ultimately, both Daniel Tosh and Malcontent With A Tumblr got exactly what they wanted out of this whole mess.

I'll make all the Heaven's Gate jokes I want, those assholes aren't going to be back here for another 4,000 years.

They're fucking dead. They explicitly explained that they wouldn't get on the spaceship by committing suicide. It's actually even more sad than the News version of the story. It's clear from their article titled "our position against suicide" that they were going to kill themselves after the cops surrounded their compound, but the cops never came. Maybe they made a change to their doctrine, but I think it's more likely that they just found a reason to believe the cops were on their way.

I had thought that they believed the UFOs were going to beam their souls aboard once the comet passed, but after doing a bit of research it seems a little murkier and sadder than that. There goes my set at the Chuckle Hut, THANKS BLUE.

When you make jokes about dead babies we can safely assume you are anti-dead babies. We can't do that with rape. Watch George Carlin's "Rape Can Be Funny" bit. His jokes are at the expense of rapists, not rape victims. I don't know why people have such a hard time making that distinction.

Woody Allen made a pretty good rape joke in Annie Hall. To his shiksa girlfriend.

"My grammy never gave gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks."

What Tosh did was the worst, meanest kind of rape joke, and it barely qualifies as a joke. I can forgive him because it was against a heckler, but Tosh isn't funny, so it doesn't matter very much if I forgive him or not.

I will never joke about rape around you Cherry Pop Culture. I will simply nuzzle into your bosoms.

RWJ is a notch lower than Tosh in the comedy department.

My comments are meant to insult Tosh. Nothing I say is meant to be interpreted as meaning that Ray William Johnson is not an unfunny douche.

2/5, nice laid-back delivery but still too obvious.