If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a comedian tells a joke in a room and no one laughs, was a joke really told? If a woman is raped in a forest but no one believes her, was she really raped?
If you weren’t there for any of the above scenarios, are you permitted an opinion? You might not have been in Vietnam, around for the Renaissance, seen Hendrix at Woodstock or heard that joke at the Melbourne International Comedy festival last week, but you may have some legit thoughts about them nonetheless.
Comedian Ray Badran was performing to about 30 people recently when he made a so-called rape joke: “If you’ve been to a comedy night before then you might know that there’s a bit of an unspoken rule in comedy right ... gay people can tell jokes about being gay ... black people can tell jokes about being black ... so I don’t know if you can tell, just from looking at me, but I ... can ... tell rape jokes.”
Offended by the joke, audience member Cecelia Devlin slid under the table in protest. Badran reacted badly, his show ended early, and he left the venue. Both he and Devlin then copped a storm of abuse on social media.
I’ve done an hour of rape jokes nightly for the past 18 months, with no pants on (I do wear a jacket and heels – I’m not ridiculous). I wish I’d experienced Badran’s joke live. On paper, where jokes go to die, it sounds like it may have been a decent one – provocative, contextualised and sharp. Not so much a rape joke (the victim of the act, at least, isn’t the intended punchline), but a joke about stereotypes and authorship.
But it had that word in it. Very different.
That word has the power to trigger feelings so strong it could minimise someone’s ability to notice other subtleties at play. In all sincerity, if you haven’t been raped, you might not get how that works. The trauma triggered can be faster than a Twitter shitstorm of opinion takes over an otherwise complex conversation.
The audiences for my show are diverse, I think because curiosity strikes races, genders, ages and sexual orientations democratically. I get heckled for all kinds of reasons. Occasionally someone leaves. I’ve been heckled with silent protests or not laughing. I’ve been given the finger and icy stares meant to hijack the whole gig. I’ve had ladies with “go girl” enthusiasm step on countless punchlines with whoops of encouragement and dudes’ birthday and bachelor parties jockeying to throw me off track. I’ve had a gay African-American professorial mister sleep through the entire show while snoring throughout. A mature gentleman tweeted me photos of his penis, which I downloaded, mistaking them, in such low resolution, as desert landscapes.
I know the material I’m putting out there, and I never go out on stage assuming it’s all going to work. Early on I made a list of go-to comebacks to potential hecklers. It ran the gamut from things that might work in any situation from downing a pint (which I can’t really do) to doing a standing backflip (which I can, but probably not in heels and no pants). Anything that would one-up the heckler, because I thought the one thing that can’t happen if I’m going to do this material that is absolutely intended to provoke, is have a heckler get the better of me, undo me, make me lose my shit.
As hard as I try to improve the show’s writing and my delivery, I have offended rape survivors – the very last thing I want to do. When I can, I talk to them afterwards, to make sure they are OK and often to defend my material and my right to do it.
And what is my right to do it – because I’m a woman? A comedian? Journalists ask me if I’ve been raped. A fair question in a way, or does it reveal an assumption based on my material: that I couldn’t simply be a comedian doing an hour of pointed observational comedy. Would being raped give me the right to joke about rape? No, anyone has the right to do it, but it could make my observational comedy about it more incisive.
I don’t imagine that, based on some of his material, journalists regularly ask comedian Jim Jefferies if he’s ever raped anyone.
Conversely, even when drunk dudes take photos of me naked, I don’t lose my shit. Not because I’m a genius comedian (I’m not), but because I’ve thought long and hard (ewww) about the material, the nudity and know I have to be better than them and ready for anything. That’s part of the fucking thrill of standup, right?
It’s OK to be aware of the climate as a comedian. Awareness doesn’t mandate self-censorship; it just lends a reality to what we do. Heckles and rewrites make some material sharper. But it’s OK to ignore that climate too if that’s your choice, which of course it is.
It’s not unlike every time I walk home alone tipsy from a gig, or go running in a park alone. That’s me ignoring the climate out there, my choice, because I loathe self-censorship. I wish that climate didn’t exist (it’s certainly not political correctness I’m sometimes wary of in a park), and because I do want to do exactly what I want to do, onstage and off.
I have every right to walk home alone and as a performer or comedian, regardless of my gender, I believe I have every right to do any material. But I can’t say I’m unaware of the possibility of unpleasant consequences. And I still do both.
But sometimes in spite of my insistence that I shouldn’t have to think about it, I have a back-up plan for both that I hope works so I don’t die. Onstage or off.
If a comedian tells a rape joke in a room and no one laughs, was a joke really told? Yes, if someone tweets about it.
What if it was misunderstood? What if the delivery could have been better but it killed the night before? What if one of the people who heard the joke hadn’t thought about what had happened that one time, and then suddenly she did think about it, when she least expected to be reminded of it, on a night out for drinks and laughter?
I peed myself once at a sleepover and didn’t handle the aftermath well and I hoped it didn’t define my whole middle-school experience. Because most people should get a second chance, not all jokes work all the time, no one should be defined by one moment – whether that’s a joke gone awry or surviving a rape. One of those things is surely a tougher hill to climb.
It would be a shame if this whole conversation devolved into a tennis game of overreactions from both sides and lazy reporting. It’s just a shift in the climate out there. But it’s totally workable. Keep the jokes and the conversation smart. If you have the luxury of performing for 2,000 sycophants, take them to the edge and push them right off – challenge the fuck out of them if you want to be edgy.
(Note to self: if all of us are doing jokes about the same topic, can that even be considered edgy?)
