The internet is a place of trends. And the past motnsh I’ve been seeing a lot of rape humor which to me is incomprehensible. I can relate to most humor, even the darkest and blackest humor. But joking about rape is simply not funny, it’s *tasteless *and it’s ignorant.
I am disgusted everytime I come across any such material. It just makes me angry and I would get crushed if I saw that I sunk to that level myself. I’m writing this because I don’t want to care less just because I’m continually exposed to it.
Humour, especially black humour (which you have said you partake in yourself) is often a way of diffusing our painful reactions to some of the most horrible things that occur in life.
I just don’t see why you have picked rape out of the bunch of things that can be joked about. IMHO, it’s not necessarily the worst thing that can happen to a human being…shit, being the dead baby in the blender must rank higher on the ‘things I would like to avoid happening to me’ scale.
Yes. I said most, not all. And I wouldn’t agree if you said that you get one thing, then you get everything. I have been known to joke about essentially black subjects like pain and misery, but I think rape is in its league. I haven’t come across an example yet where it wasn’t tasteless.
Yes, by why rape in particular? What makes rape more distasteful than say, babies dying horrible deaths, mass suicide or people trying (but failed) to beat a train? Seems to me that all of those at least as bad, if not worse. If you’ve ever seen the end result of a train trying to go through a human being, you’ll know it’s pretty horrible. But people joke about that, too. It’s our nature, I suppose.
I’m not convinced of that. If it’s done with a certain finesse, there can be many layers to it rather than the obvious crassness.
And I can regonize intellectually that somehow rape would be a good joke fodder for somebody with lots of skill, but that has simply not been the case. It’s rather the case of young ignorants with quick photoshop fingers on a sugar rush.
In defense of the OP, rape is a lot more common than babies getting put into blenders.
I can get up in front of 100 people, tell a dead baby joke, and I’ll be 99.99% sure that no one in the audience has directly been affected by a baby put into a blender.
If I get in front of the same audience and tell a joke about rape, there’s a 99.99% chance that someone in the audience has been directly affected by that.
Jokes about mass suicide have their place, to a family member of a victim of the Jonestown massacre isn’t one of them.
I don’t think statistical analysis is quite the issue here. There is always going to be someone who has been ‘affected’ by a particular incident, no matter how obscure you might think it is. It is the ‘humour’ value, and just because more people have had some direct or indirect experience of rape does not necessarily mean we should never make jokes about it. Of course, that depends upon the joke…the one quoted by our new guest above does nothing for my funny at all.
Agreed on both counts. Just having been raped (twice) doesn’t put me off good jokes about it. I can’t think of a good one offhand (for some reason the only one that comes to mind is a Victorian newspaper headline that read “Woman Murdered But Not Interfered With”), but I don’t find any subject taboo.
I’m really sorry for your troubles, but the way you phrased that sounds like you have just been raped now, twice, and have toddled over to the computer to add your experience to the thread.
And my perverse mind said that you didn’t get raped, you just got lucky tonight dude.
Could go either way in my defence. Just having been raped, or having just been raped leaves the doors way open for misconstruances like mine. It’s the ‘just’ that threw out the tag-line.
Thank goodness you have a sense of humour **MrDibble.
**
