Rape Joke-
I’ve been reviewed for doing Stand-up, and apparently according to the
review I am mildly outrageous; which makes no sense a bit like saying “he’s generically
original” or “a tender rapist” oof! ethically grey circumstances veiled consent.
O Yeah! Pushing the boundaries with a rape joke, some people
find it offensive some just tiresome a comedian comic friend of mine said, “I
don’t think rape is very funny.” I said to him… “Well you should stop doing it
then.”
He apologised immediately, gathered up his clothes and left
the thicket.
In Edinburgh I had people walk out because of that joke, and
I saw him (the walker) outside afterwards, he didn’t seem satisfied with my
explanation that it was a joke about rape jokes, and offensiveness or the mundaneness
of manufactured outrage. He made a sort of screwed up face as if to say ‘who do
you think you’re kidding.’
Right, yeah, because you can’t use an art form to explore
the boundaries, meanings, and expression inherent with-in that art form. If
only he’d been there, with his screwed up face, when Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs,
or Franz Kafka were there constructing there works he could of saved them a lot
of time and innovative effort by just walking off in befuddled disgust, and
making a ‘who do you think you’re kidding’ face.
But maybe he’s right, because even if he and I had understood
the context and implication of the meta-joke around which I was orbiting, the
rest of the audience might not have, and instead just been laughing at the face
value of a rape joke. So maybe he was walking out on the rest of the audience
as much as the performer on stage. Except; that never would’ve happened because
he was the only fucking audience member there. I had to stop the bloody show,
if there’d of been anyone else there, I could’ve just carried on and he could’ve
fucked off, I don’t care. So he either doesn’t acknowledge a mode of modernist
meta-text that’s been around for at least a hundred years or he doesn’t know
how an audience functions, he’s an idiot either way.
I hate audiences, don’t
leave though, please stay in your seats existing as an audience, I need your
faceless mass to listen to me telling you that I hate you, it’s what fucking,
Franz Kafka would do.
But perhaps it was not the contrived content of what I was
saying on stage but rather the subtleties of context and performance that made
him uncomfortable enough to leave. Most likely on this occasion my performance
was not adept or eloquent enough to meaningfully convey these ideas about the
state of stand-up comedy at the Edinburgh festival.
And he thought: -
this empty room, in a cave, at the back of some Goth bar at 11pm on a Sunday night
is probably not the time or the place to listen to this mumbling, child face, skeleton
boy fumble through what appears to be his first run through of this material,
especially when he’s doing over complicated offensive stuff right at the beginning
of the “show”.
Also he had 3 young lads with him, like his son and his son’s
friends or something, who I think liked it a bit, but he went anyway. And there
was also 2 young girls sat on the other side of the room but it wasn’t going
that well, so I stopped.
And that was my first
performance of a solo hour in Edinburgh a couple years back, cut short to under
15 minutes by poor attendance and then audience walk outs.
But luckily as I went out-side and wondered what to do next
with my evening/life, I got chatting to someone enthusiastic, who was doing their
own show somewhere else at some other time, and he ended up insisting on seeing
my show, went round the bar got all his friends, and some other people and I
started all over again to an entirely new audience, and I was the last show on,
so could do as long as I wanted, so did
my full time and had a really good gig.
But I learnt that I should tread more carefully and try and
walk my audience through any complicated bits. So I added a whole new bit on
the end of my oh so clever rape joke, about how I wrote it whilst listening to Woman’s
Hour on radio 4, as they were having a debate about just such issues.
And how jokes should function as jokes and not templates for
codes of conduct, ethics, morality or endorsement and that perhaps this debate
is more about the high status that light entertainment performers have gained
rather than the content of their candour, as stand-up tends to represent it’s
cultural origins rather than describe them, and if the clown still existed with-in
his original outsider status then perhaps this debate would be defunct.
However, just so I’m not being misogynistic or making any
gender power based polemic, or indulging in some personal prejudice I make sure
that all my jokes about rape are implicitly and/or explicitly gender neutral by
referencing man on man rape, which luckily and coincidently happens to also be intrinsically
funnier.
It’s either that or comedy just follows the base consensus of
its audience and cannot be considered an art form in any way.
