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.

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John and I walked over with a couple of other media people.  He covered the Zuccotti Park eviction for Salon, live-tweets most of the OWS events in the city, and has gotten to know many of the independent journalists who document the movement.  We arrived at the designated area, which felt like an enormous common space in a mall.  The main floor was decorated with Christmas trees, festive lights and public tables and chairs, with a wide marble staircase leading up to a balcony that overlooked the space.

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