Tosh Rape Joke and the Importance of Media Over Message

To me, a particularly interesting example of humor and rhetoric in digitally networked media was the infamous Daniel Tosh rape joke controversy. The case provided interesting discussions, rants, and jokes about humor and feminism, and how far is too far in comedy.

Perhaps the most straightforward narrative of the incident comes from comedian and general TV personality Joe Rogan on his enormously successful podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

According to Rogan, Tosh—who is also an enormously successful comedian thanks to his standup and popular TV show, “Tosh.0”—was sarcastically asking an audience for topics to joke about, since he said he couldn’t think of any.

Rape, someone in the audience said.

What’s funny about rape? Tosh said, going on to list sarcastically all the horrific things about rape and why it was a ridiculous thing to joke about. (None of these are reliable enough to be direct quotes, by the way, if you’re wondering about the lack of quotation marks.)

Actually, a female heckler said, rape is never funny. Which comment no doubt ground any irony and humor Tosh had going to a screeching halt. Frustrated, looking for a way to find the humor in the situation, Tosh uttered his infamous response:

“Wouldn’t it be funny if she got raped by like five guys right now?”

Some people think this crosses a line in humor. The story hit the blogosphere, and the people who were offended called lots of attention to themselves and to the horrors of Daniel Tosh.

The blogs got emailed and shared on Facebook and tweeted and re-tweeted, and pretty soon everyone I knew had an opinion on it.

The interesting aspect to this aftermath is that there is no audio or video of the incident. The only record of what happened comes from the woman herself, who reportedly felt threatened. We are, in accepting her account as the only truth, supposed to accept her on some vague basis of ethos, since she blogged about it, and bloggers are always right on the Internet.

(Above is a video of one of my favorite comics discussing the incident and related topics with a feminist blogger, Lindy West, who's also very smart. This is an example of the kind of media exposure that made the topic bigger than the incident.)

There was a backlash against the initial backlash, in which pretty much every comedian worth his or her salt defended Tosh—Louis C.K., Jim Norton, Joe Rogan, etc. It was a clash of ideologies: art vs. fairness, good taste vs. tastelessness, humor vs. morality. It hit a much wider audience than Tosh usually does, all thanks to digitally networked media. My theory is that Tosh (who had to apologize) got in trouble not because of how egregious the joke was (I’ve heard much more brutal jokes), but because of how much exposure it got thanks to feminist blogs like Jezebel and thanks to various podcasts. It was magnified because of the media that conveyed it. The medium superseded the rhetoric. And I think that’s particularly relevant to this class.