Daniel Tosh is suffering from controversy because he told an audience member she should get gang raped. Or rather, he made a joke about rape, she primly heckled that “rape jokes are never funny,” and then he started screaming that wouldn’t it be funny if she were gang raped. Or something. So now he’s in some shit.
Or not. I don’t know. Is he in any danger of losing his show? Comedy Central doesn’t give a fuck, right? Except tons of Jezebel commenters watch The Daily Show and Colbert Report and so there could be letter writing campaigns, boycotts of Stoli Marshmallow and the Subaru Forrester and whateverthefuck else advertises on those shows. He has to tweet an apology, but, maybe he also has to do the Tracy Morgan apology press conference where he tearfully says that his own mother was raped and he’s going to tour the country counseling rape victims and blah blah blah. And suddenly Daniel Tosh won’t be funny anymore. Just like Tracy Morgan. Tracy Morgan was funny for going on morning shows in Dubuque still drunk from the night before and taking his shirt off and telling the bemused weather girl that he was going to impregnate all the women in town…. you never knew what was coming, but you knew it was going to be something crazy. Now you see Tracy Morgan, maybe it’ll be something crazy but it won’t be something crazy about gays, and probably not something crazy about women or rape victims or child molestation. He has to come up with crazy material about airline food now. You see him, you know he’s gonna be constrained. So you lose the tense part of what the fuck is he gonna do next, which is kind of what made you laugh. What the fuck is he gonna do next– nothing that might irk people who might buy detergents and personal toiletries advertised on NBC Universal entertainment products. Nothing that could rustle the feathers of anyone who could write a sternly worded letter to someone at NBC, its parent corporation NBC Universal, its parent corporation Comcast International, or any of the above’s myriad sponsors, local affiliates, public relations agencies and hangers-on, and etc. etc. etc.
Rape jokes are never funny. But what if a guy was trying to rape somebody and slipped on a banana peel? In that case, the rapist is the victim, so it might be funny. As long as jokes are at the expense of power. Here- let me get a white board and some dry erase markers and I will diagram for you what can be funny and what cannot be funny; no making fun of marginalized groups, but it’s funny if we lampoon heterosexual white men because it’s an expression of the marginalized claiming power back from blah blah blah.… figuring out what can and can’t be funny is a fucking vivisection of funniness. Once you even start having that conversation, nothing can ever be funny. And anyone who is offended by anything is the least funny person in the world. That’s why there are no funny feminists.
I don’t think it would be a big loss if Louis CK or Steven Wright or Mitch Hedberg had been caught making a rape joke and people had freaked out and made them back off. Those guys are (were) wordsmiths who can craft a funny bit about anything; you could tell them to walk away from rape, race, homophobia, lay off the guy in the wheelchair, etc. etc.; they could come up with something funny about knitting. But…. and I speak from the limited experience of watching Daniel Tosh’s TV show precisely twice, and never having seen any of his standup– Daniel Tosh is only funny when he’s being racist and insensitive. His bits affirming stereotypes about blacks, Mexicans and women are hilarious, and everything else is just hackish shit. He’s not some comic genius; he’s funny because he’s openly racist on TV, which is something white people are too chickenshit to be anymore. But that’s enough. He does a bit about a chick walking up to a bunch of Mexicans in the Home Depot parking lot and coming back in a Lakers jersey holding 3 babies and it’s fucking funny. It’s funny because stereotypes are true, and it’s funny because you aren’t allowed to say that shit… and it has no social value, it does not get us any closer to being a better society and in fact probably drags us a hair closer to a reactionary dystopia, but– it made me fucking laugh. And that’s all I ask from the fucking guy.
Just making one guy laugh is enough. The standard where comedy has to not only be funny but also provide succour to the raped and marginalized and downtrodden is too god damn motherfucking high. Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and whoeverthefuck happened and suddenly because we have examples of comics who made high-minded points about the way we live, suddenly that’s the standard we gotta hold all these guys to. Louis CK can make a joke about raping a baby but it’s OK because his self-deprecating schtick seems to go after middle aged straight white men collectively, so, he’s on our side and we give him a pass.
I guess we need these sensitive people though; these people who complain about getting offended. Because without them Daniel Tosh would not be funny. It is in fact not intrinsically funny to say Mexicans hang out in the Home Depot parking lot and get people pregnant. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s people from Alabama fuck their sister. Going to prison, eh? Don’t drop the soap! It’s such a tired idea, and what’s truly fucking funny is when a comedian makes a new but undeniably true observation that you hadn’t thought of yourself. And believe me, I think that shit about Mexicans my fucking self every time they walk in front of me in a crosswalk. The only thing funny about Tosh is “holy shit! He’s saying that on TV!”
But again: that’s plenty. He said that shit on TV and it was shocking and made me laugh for two seconds, thus reducing net human misery in the world. So what if he made a fucking rape joke. If you got raped, or are afraid of getting raped, that’s horrible, but it’s beyond the purview of comedy to help you. Everything is probably going to be unfunny to you for a very long time. You think John Walsh has laughed in the last 30 years? I bet he hasn’t laughed once since he got his kid’s head in a box in the mail. He just went on a big decades-long crusade to bring criminals to justice. That’s fine, the world needs those people too. But we also need marginally funny douchebags on basic cable.
If you are the type of person who is offended by a rape joke, or think that (X) is never funny, you are doing yourself no favors by going to a motherfucking comedy show. But then again, you get off on being offended, so– more power to you. Write an angry letter to General Mills, get them to pull their sponsorship from Tosh, make rape jokes forbidden and then I’ll get laughs from making even the hacky ones. The circle of life.
delicioustacos 
This entry wasn’t funny.
I hope you get raped by a pack of wild Zulus.
George Carlin, with all his high-mindedness, was fine with rape jokes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FsfLPohZ_c
I hate you.
Wow…your readers do really respond to negative feelings…
Okay. Fine. Funny rape jokes are funny. Now I hate myself.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/daniel-tosh-chuckles-through-own-violent-rape,28769/
The best is her describing how she had to “flee” from a “viscerally terrifying and threatening” Daniel Tosh at the end. You gotta be fucking kidding me. Look, I can’t stand Daniel Tosh – his stand-up is moderately amusing at best, and his show annoys me to no fucking end. But people like this chick I can’t stand even more. I can barely believe people like this exist outside of the comment sections of Salon, Gawker, Jezebel, Reddit, etc. and possibly some fucking drum circle in Zuccoti Park. But they’re out there. This new breed of… I hate to use the word cultural marxists because it’s so ambigous and it sounds like some shit Glenn Beck or Anders Brevik would say, bleeding-heart liberals would be a better term – these people that feel like they have to champion the cause of every seemingly marginalized and afflicted group no matter what. It doesn’t matter if the actual group is offended or not; if the group isn’t offended by the so-called transgression, they will be offended for them. The only way I could see her even having the slightest justification for being offended is if she herself is a rape victim. Otherwise, just shut the fuck up, because there’s probably a girl in the audience who actually DID get raped laughing her ass off because she understands that it’s just a fucking joke, you know? You don’t see any rape alliances outraged over this. No, just Thinkprogress.org and all these other bastions of bleeding-heart liberalism.
You know that reminds me of something else completely unrelated…
People like this are always fucking hypocrites, too. The other day I was talking to a buddy of mine who lives in a historically working-class Irish neighborhood of Philly called Fishtown. Like a lot of other inner city neighborhoods all over the Northeast, over the past decade or so it’s becoming increasingly gentrified. Hordes of these yuppie-ish, twenty-something, ultra-PC liberals have been swarming in like they’re giving away free Vespas and non-prescription thick rimmed Paul Pfeiffer glasses.
Anyway, one of these types just moved onto my buddy’s block. So we’re outside talking to the kid the other day and my friend asks him how he likes the neighborhood so far. Kid says to him “Well, I just wish Fishtown was more diverse.” My buddy pressed him a little bit to see exactly what he meant. Kid says “It’s a very white neighborhood. We hoped it would have a more diverse racial make-up.” We looked at each other like, is this kid fucking serious? Basically what the kid was saying to him was “I need a certain amount of brown people around me to alleviate my white liberal guilt.” And, like, this dude makes it a point to talk to every passing black guy like he’s keeping fucking score, but when me or some our Kenzo (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Kenzo) buddies are hanging around, forget it. You can barely get a “hello” out of him.
Fishtown has been an Irish neighborhood for as long as anyone can remember; it’s not a big secret. Fishtown is as Irish as Passyunk Square is Italian as Fairhill is Puerto Rican as Germantown is Black. What pisses me off is that this asshole specifically chose to move into a predominately white neighborhood, then – perhaps in an effort to show how open minded and tolerant he is – starts complaining that there aren’t enough minorities around. Which is fucking racist itself when you think about it. That’s like moving to Chinatown and complaining that there aren’t enough Romanians around.
But these people are unknowingly racist as hell – complete hypocrites. You won’t catch one of these types of liberals moving to Germantown – which is ripe for gentrification, by the way – you won’t catch them moving up there. Because underneath all the superficial “we are the world” bullshit, underneath all of that they are scared of minorities, so they go out of their way to prove how tolerant they are of them. But they got no problem mocking some freckle-faced drunk ex-con with shamrock tattoos on his neck standing outside the corner bar behind his back, though. That’s okay, because he’s just white trash, and like Louis Ck said, nobody gives a fuck about white trash.
Well fuck you, asshole. Fuck you right in your liberal cracker ass.
And don’t mistake my anger for any oldshool “they got their neighborhood, we got ours” bullshit. That’s the type of thinking that leads good people to hate other good people without even getting to know them, but Oh how I hate these types of liberals, and I’m a goddamn borderline socialist, too, card-carrying union member, but PC liberals like this make Democrats like me look like pussies. Anybody who likes to beat you over the head about how tolerant they are is usually doing it to conceal some underlying thoughts or feelings they feel guilty about.
Anyway, Tracy Morgan, I don’t know if his act got soft because of the whole gay incident, or because he doesn’t really party like he used to. He was on Opie and Anthony not too long ago talking about how he almost lost his foot from drinking too much and not taking care of himself with his diabetes. That might be why his act isn’t as outrageous as it was.
And as far as making tragic shit funny, the best was how Louis Ck managed to spin 9/11 into his act. He said something along the lines of, “you can tell how affected you were by 9/11 by the amount of time you waited before jerking off after it happened. For me, it was in between the two towers falling, so…” That shit was funny.
Tracy Morgan actually just had a kidney transplant. So, yeah, I think his health has to do more with his act falling off than the gay incident.
Never go into a comedy club and heckle someone in their act. Especially someone named Daniel Tosh who is notorious for his no bar hold humor. He doesn’t make appropriate jokes, they are crude, racist, degrading, and to be honest mostly true when it comes to all stereotypes.
I figured out why Daniel Tosh annoys me so much; it’s not so much his jokes as it is his delivery, his demeanor. He’s just a fucking… I can’t even describe it, you just want to strangle him the way he acts, don’t you? Delivery makes all the difference. A guy like Norm Macdonald, I could listen to him read his grocery list and he would have me cracking up. That’s how good his delivery is. Daniel Tosh’s delivery is just horribly irritating.