What Daniel Tosh doesn't get about comedy (besides the obvious)

This post contains potential triggers, but chances are that you've already heard the anecdote it derives from; if you don't find that triggering, you should be fine.

I've been putting off writing something about this ugliness with Daniel "Joel McHale is already doing my job" Tosh, simply because it pisses me off to write about it and you don't want to read a blog post that's nothing but keyboard-mashing Irish rage, and if you did, you are probably already busy following Lawrence O'Donnell on Twitter. But anyway, for anyone fortunate enough to have not followed this, a Tumblr user posted that she and a friend had been to the Laugh Factory during a set by Tosh (by her telling, she didn't know who he was prior to attending):

Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didnt appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape. After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”

LOL! Because, you see, then she would no longer be interrupting Daniel Tosh, and would instead be violently sexually assaulted!

As is often the case when comedians do shit like this, the line Tosh's apologists (who, disappointingly, include Louis CK, somebody knows how to ACTUALLY do edgy, assumption-challenging comedy instead of just trolling and thinking that's what he's doing) have been trotting out is some variation on "Comedy is about pushing buttons and making people uncomfortable, brah, and no topic should be off-limits". The thing is, I do kind of agree with that. But that's not Tosh's transgression here. I mean, first of all, if Tosh had said, over the course of his pre-prepared act "Wouldn't it be funny if a woman got gang-raped?" it still wouldn't have been funny (or even really a joke), but what he actually said was in response to a heckler, and when a comedian engages a heckler, the idea is to intimidate them into not heckling anymore. And usually that intimidation is accomplished by encouraging people to laugh at them, but in this case, it was by endorsing the idea of someone being gang-raped, which is, needless to say, a pretty fucked-up way of telling somebody "shut up while I'm talking".

Second of all, yes, a lot of comedy is about saying things society doesn't want you to say, or is made uncomfortable by, but there's more to it than that: edginess derives from shooting up, at people more powerful or influential than you. That's why, even as someone who's left-of-center, I find Jon Stewart consistently hilarious no matter which side of the aisle he's taking shots at because these are people who make decisions that affect all of our lives, and it's fun to see someone with no actual power over them refuse to make them seriously. When you make fun of or humiliate someone, via comedy, who is already marginalized and degraded in a non-comedic context, someone who's already an underdog (i.e. rape victims, minorities, LGBTQIA folk), you're not challenging or upending anything, you're just using an entertainment medium to reinforce the current system. And that makes you the comedy equivalent of an animated short about table manners.

Chris Rock addresses something like this in his routine about white people who get upset that they're not "allowed" to say "nigger". Rock's response is "Okay, you can say it when I can raise interest rates". In other words, do you want to make your hilarious joke about rape or gay-bashing or lynching or whatever the hell without being made to feel guilty for it SO badly that you'd give up your privilege to make it? A guy like Daniel Tosh's attempts at humor are all about smugly affirming his privilege and the lack thereof of the people he mocks (a lot of his defenders have pointed out that, besides his racist humor, he also invokes white trash stereotypes, as though classism is any less lazy coming from somebody like him). And, I'm sorry, but that's just not objectively very funny.