A Tribunal consisting of Zing (representing black people and those who play the flute), myself (representing gay Alabamians and hyperbolic reactionaries who dwell in tents) and Hilarity N. Suze (rape victims and maritime shipping concerns) has cleared the video for public consumption. As by your own admission you don’t fit into any of those categories, I really don’t see where you have the right to be offended on our behalves. (Of course ideally the tribunal would be composed of three hyperbolic queeny gay brothers of attempted rape victims, but that’s the original “herding cats”- there’ll invariably be two sidetrips to blow the limo horn outside the house of an ex- boyfriend, six bitchslaps, a threeway “I’m not talking as long as he’s here” and a dance club stop before you ever get them into the hearing room.)
The few rape jokes I hear tend to be along the line of what male prisoners do to each other or what priests do to altar boys. So I kind of question the necessary element of misogyny.
The thing is, I agree with most everything Cats is saying. Rape jokes in general aren’t funny. They are an expression of misogyny. They contribute nothing to the world, and by trivializing a traumatic experience they make it worse.
But that is really irrelevant to the thread. As someone said, the humor is in Antoine’s personality and reactions - it could have been any sort of crime that he helped thwart, and the vid would still be funny just because he’s such a unique personality.
I do believe that some people just have too many cats. They end up cleaning up cat litter all day and inhaling those fumes and all that dander can really cause you to become clueless as well as irrationally judgemental and hypocritical. That’s why I have a dog.
See, this is my point about analysis. You can’t just say, “This joke involve rape (or race, or gender, or religion) therefore it’s misogynist (or racist, or sexist, or so forth).” You need to examine the specific joke and determine what it’s saying about that topic.
For example, this video. After you failed to get any traction with, “OMG sexist!” you fell back on, “OMG racist!” with little better success. Except, you were correct in that the humor here plays off of racial stereotypes. But you didn’t dig any deeper than that. You were content to play “Spot the Stereotype,” as if that was all the argument you needed, but you didn’t consider how those stereotypes were employed. The video did play off of racial stereotypes, but the humor comes from subverting them, not supporting them. If you were told, “This is a video of a black guy from the 'hood threatening to track down the guy who attacked his sister,” you’d most likely have an expectation of what that video would look like. You would probably not expect to see Antoine. Which is where the gender stereotypes come in, which, I think, is a much larger part of the humor. Antoine is not a very threatening man. The audience expects, in this context, a “scary black man” stereotype. What they get is a “queeny gay guy” stereotype. The introduction of the second stereotype subverts the black stereotype, by re-enforcing the idea that people don’t fit neatly into our preconceived notions of them: black guys can be campy and effeminete, too. But it further subverts the gender stereotype, because Antoine already drove the rapist off once. The second layer of humor here comes in from the fact that Antoine’s threats are not idle. Despite being a “queeny gay guy” stereotype, he’s demonstrated that he’s willing to fight - and fight successfully - to protect people he cares about, which runs counter to the stereotype that being queeny means you’re weak and ineffectual. This double subversion is what makes the video funny, but also communicates a message that, at its center, is very positive. Yes, it’s about race, and gender, but the question that is important here is not what the joke is about, but how it is about it.