The whole point of that clip is that the man making the crashingly inappropriate and ill-judged rape joke is a total dick.
David Brent is making a rape joke, and it goes down like a cup of cold sick. Ricky Gervais is making a joke about how David Brent is the sort of socially inept, bruisingly insensitive dickhead who would make a rape joke. We don’t laugh at Brent’s joke. We laugh at Brent, the dickhead who made it; the horrifyingly embarrassing and awkward situation he creates by making it; and his idiotic lack of awareness of what he’s just done. And we can do that, because the mockumentary format of The Office is designed to let us distance ourselves from Brent so we can laugh at him openly. If someone did the same thing in front of us in real life it wouldn’t be funny, it’d be mortifying.
But in your OP you didn’t phrase it as “stabbing a woman didn’t warrant mention”; you phrased it as “speaking of stabbing a woman is just fine”, which is a different thing entirely.
It’s worth noting that rape jokes are a real thing, more common than they really ought to be on the internet and often a vehicle for barely-veiled violent misogyny. Woman-stabbing jokes aren’t really a genre (or if they are, it’s an extremely niche one, and one that has not been a previous issue here TTBOMK). In addition, the joke in question didn’t really need the stab/rape references to work as the other, milder versions were just as funny if not funnier. I find the Mod note as written to be entirely reasonable under the circumstances.
I should add that my sense of humor is sufficiently macabre that there exist a few rape jokes that I find amusing. But they’re rare, and neither gratuitous nor trivializing. And no, I’m not going to repeat them here.
I’m pretty easy-going when it comes to offensive jokes, and I’ve certainly told my share, but the day Ricky Gervais becomes the arbiter of what is good or bad taste here, I may have to leave.
Our society does not, in general, have a problem with people thinking that certain shades of stabbing are acceptable. We don’t ask what the stabbing victim was wearing, or attack them on the witness stand. Law enforcement officers do not contemptuously refuse to take a report from a stabbing victim. Nobody uses social media to shame or defame stabbing victims in order to negate their testimony. Stabbers do not - in general - get off on a technicality because the punishment might affect their future. There is no powerful minority of society who openly consider certain types of stabbing to be an acceptable assertion of masculinity. Nobody argues that stabbing is OK if both parties are a little bit drunk. Colleges do not insist that stabbing victims live in the same building with their attackers.
A joke about stabbing does not contribute to an overall societal culture of victimization and minimization of a brutal crime.
We are working to change this culture, and this requires a bit of vigilance on the subject. What’s your agenda?
Note that Emiliana specifically asked for the moderation in question here. IMHO she was within her rights to do so.
If you’re going to tell a joke involving rape, you have to be careful: know your audience, or at least provide some kind of context or warning. The OP of a “tell the funniest joke you know” thread did neither.
As engineer comp geek said when modding the lawn mower thread:
While not specified I am pretty sure that non sexual violence against women jokes are also unacceptable here. Would the op have been more content to have that spelled out in the note?
while any subject can be a source of humor, the more edgy the subject, the more insightful the joke needs to be and the more skilled the humorist. The tired old joke in that thread does not rise to that level and none of you are anywhere near enough to be telling edgy jokes. Find all the examples you want of professional comedians, that doesn’t change your limitations.
I feel like we should be able to rule that jokes about rape or domestic violence aren’t allowed without getting into whether they’re funny or whether they exist or whether Ricky Gervais ever made one.
It didn’t occur to me that the woman being Inuit was because Inuits were undesirable, rather that finding and seducing one posed a challenge for the subject of the joke. The goal could have been to “make love to” a left-handed redheaded woman from Utah (if the joke is being told on or near the east coast) or from Rhode Island (if the joke is being told on or near the west coast).
And adding the violent elements doesn’t improve the joke, they only distract from it, and it’s a weak enough joke as it is.
Stanislaus, if you have watched that show through to the end including the Christmas special, you know that David Brent is not treated as a villain but as an awkward but still lovable protagonist.
