The rape-joke double standard

Thu, 09 May 2013 09:57:00 +0000

There’s something of a general cultural consensus that sensitivity and empathy be shown in the wake of tragedy or violence; after a mass shooting or a terrorist attack, many comedians explicitly avoid making jokes. But, it turns out, there are exemptions to the rule.

A conversation about misogyny in comedy sprang up this week after feminist journalist Sady Doyle wrote a critical response to jokes performed by male comedian Sam Morril. Doyle's impression of Morril's material that night, as well as his Twitter feed, was that it disproportionately relied on jokes about nonconsensual sex, violence and the degradation of women. Her piece was a good-faith effort to bypass the usual debate about “rape jokes,” which often gets stuck around concepts like the importance of dark humor and freedom of speech, to explore issues at hand: the number of women who experience sexual violence, and the merit (or lack thereof) of making those women the target of jokes. An Onion article this week about Chris Brown and Rihanna also functions as a helpful distillation of how violence against women can act as a punch line; many feminists, notably women of color, felt that a domestic violence victim became collateral damage in service of a joke.

Jerry Seinfeld explains how he writes comedy

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Analyzing comedy is a lot less funny than hearing it. But if you want to gain some insight into what goes into writing stand-up, legendary comic Jerry Seinfeld breaks it down for you in a video put out today by the New York Times (and it's actually kind of funny, too).

Seinfeld talks about how he constructed a joke about Pop Tarts and, of course, his trademark "nothing." "In my world, the wronger something feels, the righter it is," he says. "So to waste so much time on something this stupid--that felt good to me."

Here's the Pop Tart joke from a 2010 performance on David Letterman's "Late Show" (at 1:19)--which is still a work in progress:

Salon.com > jokes

The rape-joke double standard

Jerry Seinfeld explains how he writes comedy