Since the beginning, standup comics have taken on the rape joke. Some rape jokes, like this one by Sarah Silverman, highlight the low-brow inanity of the rape joke itself: “…it seems that when you do rape jokes that, like, the material is so dangerous and edgy. But the truth is it’s like the safest area to talk about in comedy. Cause who’s going to complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape. I mean, they’re traditionally not complainers.” Others work to expose men’s uncomfortable relationship to rape culture, as John Mulaney accomplishes in a joke in which he suddenly realizes that a woman considers him a threat, despite his own fears of physical violence. Still others advocate violence, as Daniel Tosh did in his response to an audience member who objected to a rape joke: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now?” Perhaps even worse, in early rape jokes—like one told by Redd Foxx about a preacher’s daughter—the rape is most often peripheral to the actual joke, employed simply to move the action to the punchline.
Unlike rape jokes from the forties and fifties, or even George Carlin’s 1990 rape joke involving Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd, today’s jokes are subject to social media critique, making the joke tellers specifically, and standup more generally, the subjects of broader discussions of privilege, rape culture, political correctness, and feminism. This paper examines the feminist discourses that develop on social media in relationship to rape jokes as well as their effects on contemporary feminism.
About the presenterBeth Anne Cooke-Cornell
Beth Anne Cooke-Cornell is an Associate Professor of Humanities at Wentworth Institute of Technology where she teaches Gender and Sexuality History, among other subjects. Her most recent research focuses on women’s sewing circles in Salem, Massachusetts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.