Posts Tagged “Louis C.K.”

Yes, this is about the Daniel Tosh rape joke. But now that Todd Akin accidentally highlighting the GOP’s redefinition of rape, the obvious important question about our world is: Can we make rape jokes yet? Miles Lothe, known jokist, explains.

Often the funny is the unexpected. Louis C.K. makes us laugh with his surprising honesty; we’ve all had the thought that four year-olds are fucking idiots, but we didn’t expect anyone to say it, and now that someone has, we rather enjoy it. We laugh at slapstick because in order to function from day-to-day, we form the entirely reasonable expectation that people know how to fucking walk, for chrissake. When a grown-ass man kicks a crack in the sidewalk and goes tumbling forward, that shit is hilarious. And so on. As creatures of habit, our expectations and norms come in all sorts of forms about all kinds of topics that can be toyed with or reversed in myriad ways, which is why so much can be funny.

What counts as an expectation is subtle and depends on plenty of factors, but since norms and expectations vary so widely among individuals and even groups of individuals, humor is largely subjective, a matter of personal preference. The difference between ‘funny to me’ (how the word ‘duty’ sounds like ‘doody’ every single time I say it) and just ‘funny’ (Steve Martin, for example) is mostly a function of overlapping preferences and shared expectations; there will always be sticks in the mud who insist that a dog on a telephone isn’t funny, but enough of us agree that they’re wrong to say it’s objectively hilarious.

The problem with joking about the subject of rape is that rape jokes aren’t funny for different reasons than, say, Dane Cook isn’t funny. (Read on.) »