When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, I had a wart on the outside of my right wrist. I treated it with some over-the-counter medicine from Wal-Mart. The product eventually did the trick, but for a while, the area was enflamed, split open, and dry. I covered it with gauze and medical tape. A few days in, while riding the bus home from school, one of the kids in my neighborhood grinned, mischief in her eyes, and said, “Hey, you’re doing it wrong. Next time you try to kill yourself, make sure you cut the veins on the inside of your wrist.”
To be clear, she was my friend. Neither she nor anyone else had ever bullied me. She no more wanted me to die than she wanted to sit on a land mine. Later that day, we hung out with a bunch of other neighborhood teens, laughing and joking about harmless things.
But still.
I’ve never forgotten that moment, that so-called “joke,” because if she had said it some other time, my reaction might have been different.
My friend could not have known that I sometimes considered suicide. The catalysts for those moments were legion. Sometimes, they represented the pretty common, overly Romantic stage that so many teens pass through, the one where death seems like both an escape from a mean, uncaring world and a means of revenge—“Boy, they’ll be sorry when I’m gone.” At other times, my suicidal ideations stemmed from certain traumas I had undergone, from parts of my core identity that my community had deemed unacceptable, from the typical heartbreaks every teenager experiences but that always, to that individual, seem fresh and earth-shattering and unconquerable.
Kids often suffer trauma that no one sees or understands. Everyone endures a broken heart, usually several times. And as a white male, I could hardly claim to have cornered the market on being marginalized for my identity and beliefs. But this commonality is part of the point. We never know what someone else has been through. We never know what they are truly thinking or feeling. We laugh and we kid, we trash-talk and insult as a matter of course, but we can never be sure if we’ve said exactly the wrong thing to exactly the wrong person at exactly the wrong moment.
What if, on the bus that day, I had been fighting an undertow inside myself, swimming desperately for the surface, the light, the air, knowing--knowing!—that no one cared much if I drowned? What if that joke, which nobody really found funny, had hit me like a cramp? What if I had spiraled the rest of the day, and I had locked my door and opened my wrists with a razor blade or shot myself with one of the many guns we owned? What would the consequences of those careless words have been?
The end of my life, for one, which means my three children and one grandchild would never have existed. I would never have met my wife. No degrees earned, no teaching career, which means no positive effects on those students I have managed to reach. No writing career, thus robbing—some might say sparing—the world of whatever entertainment and enlightenment my works have brought.
On Salon.com in 2012, Roxane Gay published an article entitled “Daniel Tosh and Rape Jokes: Still not Funny.” Using Tosh as a specific lens, this piece raises questions about how we define “comedy” and when humor can be an appropriate response to trauma. This question gets incredibly tricky, as it raises issues of authority, of the line between empathy and censorship, and more. For her part, Gay rejects rape as a subject for humor, stating, “I don’t have it in me to find rape jokes funny or to tolerate them in any way. It’s too close a topic. Rape is many things — humiliating, degrading, physically and emotionally painful, exhausting, irritating. It is never funny for most women. There are not enough years in this lifetime to create the kind of distance where I could laugh and say, ‘That one time, when I was gang raped, was totally hilarious, a real laugh riot.’”
In October 2016, my Tour of American Creative Nonfiction students at the College of Southern Nevada read a revised version of this essay, now titled “Some Jokes Are Funnier Than Others,” as part of Gay’s book, Bad Feminist. Much of our discussion centered on issues of free speech and censorship, of empathy with victims and laughter as a coping mechanism. Many students agreed with Gay’s assessment of Tosh’s joke as offensive, tasteless, and dangerous. Others strongly disagreed with the notion that, for comedians and other artists, any subject should be off-limits. No one defended rape, or rapists, or even rape jokes per se; even those who championed Tosh’s free speech expressed some amount of distaste for the man himself and/or the “joke” in question. But they were very concerned that Gay’s rejection of rape jokes could, if broadly applied, lead to limitations on freedom of expression, particularly for artists.
I understand these concerns. As a writer, they are, in fact, my own. Freedom of expression is sacred to me. I would never condone censorship. But, as we discussed in class that day, censorship is not Gay’s point or her goal. In her essay, she says, “We are free to speak as we choose without fear of prosecution or persecution, but we are not free to speak as we choose without consequence.” In other words, just because you can say something does not mean you should, and if you do, you may pay some cost, even if the government does not arrest you. The idea that we can say whatever we want to whomever we want whenever we want with impunity is a dangerous misreading of the First Amendment. It ignores slander and libel laws. It ignores the illegality of, for instance, yelling “Fire!” in a crowded venue when there is, in fact, no fire. It ignores that speaking your mind can lead to societal marginalization, broken relationships, or getting your ass kicked. If you are a comedian who makes a lousy, unfunny joke about a sensitive topic, you might get heckled. You might find yourself the subject of articles written by people who find your brand of humor problematic. And, as Gay points out, if your “humor” leads even one more person to believe they have society’s permission to traumatize someone—and why wouldn’t you have permission, if it’s so funny?—then you have directly contributed to the culture of violence and misery that many of us are fighting against.
I say “many” because, as events constantly remind us, some people support that culture. When the infamous tape of Donald Trump’s conversation with Billy Bush was made public, Trump called his remarks “locker-room talk.” When directly asked about his comments during the third presidential debate of 2016, Trump continued to paint “grab ‘em by the pussy” as mere banter between guys because, you know, that’s just how guys talk. Having been in many locker rooms, and in other all-male, allegedly heteronormative spaces, I wonder what kind of locker rooms Trump has frequented. I have heard the word “pussy” used freely in such places, mostly in three contexts: as part of a statement of desire, as in, “I’d sure like to get some pussy”; as part of a statement of inquiry about recent sexual exploits, as in, “Have you gotten any pussy lately?”; or as part of macho posturing, as in, “If you can’t play with a sprained toe, you’re a pussy.” All these statements and situations are crass and indefensible, but none rises to the level of trivializing sexual assault. Once Trump moved from discussing how easily he could get laid and admitted to unsolicited and nonconsensual groping, he abandoned any pretense of even the problematic and Neanderthal normality that mars talk among macho men in locker rooms. He suggested that sexual assault is no big deal, and he reiterated that statement while standing on a stage with the first female major-party nominee for President of the United States.
On Twitter, after the tape’s release, the poet and memoirist Alice Anderson said, “Rape culture is when a presidential nominee is discovered saying ‘Grab them by the pussy’ on tape & millions will still vote for him.” This tweet, which also appeared as a Facebook post, went viral to a certain extent, eliciting tens of thousands of “likes” and hundreds of comments, many of which were supportive of Anderson’s position. Others repeated two or three long-debunked stories about Hillary Clinton (“She once laughed at a rape victim!” No, she didn’t. Quit it), as if a mistake of Clinton’s would somehow excuse Trump. And still others, resorted to pathetic, juvenile, ad hominem attacks on Anderson herself. These commenters would certainly make Trump proud.
One person wrote, “It’s not rape culture u over sensitive bitch. It’s how guys talk. Including ur husband if u got one.” There you have it, straight from the horse’s ass. Rape culture does not exist. If you believe it does, you’re an oversensitive bitch. All guys think and talk alike—even the gay and asexual ones, apparently, and even the ones this person clearly does not know. The irony of a mansplainer using aggressive and hateful language to deny the existence of rape culture and silence a woman was lost on this guy.
In response to this comment, another man wrote, “Bet she’s single.” Yes, because the goal of any woman, including queer women, should be to land a man, presumably men like the ones responding to the post. I bet the ladies are lining up.
The message seems clear: when men joke about rape or brag about sexual assault, we’re supposed to believe it’s all in good fun. When women speak out against such a culture, they must be insulted and harassed into silence. Their voices, like their genitalia, exist at and for the pleasure of men, and woe to the woman protests. She will be attacked online, perhaps in real life. A President might call her a liar on television. The onus, as always, is on women to get with the program and accept their objectification, their subservience. To laugh about it all.
What would we do if we made comments like those above to someone at their lowest point? What if our words were just enough to push past their point of endurance? What if they experienced a breakdown? What if they died?
How funny.
The right to make such comments is indisputable. But why would anyone want to exercise that right? And if we should not want to hurt others, when, if ever, are trauma jokes and insults potentially funny?
Perhaps trauma should only be joked about, if ever, when the jokes are told by the traumatized or when the joke comes at the expense of the perpetrators. Certainly, this guideline is overgeneral and imperfect, but I wonder if it could be used as a rule of thumb.
Domestic violence is never funny, but I recall an episode of the sitcom Grace Under Fire when the titular character, a survivor of domestic violence, listens to a typical explanation for another victim’s black eye and then says, “Yeah, I used to tell people that my husband was cleaning his fist, and it went off.” I feel comfortable laughing with this character about her trauma because she is clearly using it as a coping mechanism and to reach out to another victim.
Similarly, racism is never funny, but comedians of color often lampoon ignorant or just plain stupid racists, and they use their own experiences with racism as a means of addressing a societal horror through the shared experience of laughter. One might argue that these words and jokes hurt the racists who hear them and similarly push them toward negative outcomes. This is a point worth considering, though others might argue that participating in the oppression of others means you give up the right to be defensive or sensitive about how they react to you.
White comedians from Mel Brooks to Louis C.K. have also done good work in using their art to critique the idiocies of racism. They condemn both the acts of violent domination and the perpetrators. It is unlikely these artists’ works would be well-received, though, if they had made fun of the victims.
Rape—like racism, like homophobia—is an ever-present threat to the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of millions of Americans. The wrong joke, at the wrong time, told in a careless way, can inhibit healing. And if that chips away at your will to live, if you find yourself finding death preferable to fighting against the world’s tide, you might decide to stop the pain.
How funny.
Just because we have the Constitutional right to say something doesn’t mean we should. Our words carry weight. We can use them as blunt instruments to batter each other into unrecognizability. The jokes we tell, the comments we make online, the names we call each other, the ways in which we use our common language to deny someone’s personhood—these things matter. They can make the world better or much, much worse. While the best comedians, and the best people, choose their words carefully and think deeply about what they say, too many of us check our empathy at the door and demand that everyone, regardless of their experiences and their pain, conform to our own viewpoints, including our perspectives on their own traumas. Perhaps, instead of calling someone an oversensitive bitch, we should think hard about why people might be sensitive in the first place. Perhaps, instead of accusing a sexual assault victim of lying, we should consider the evidence we’ve seen and heard and ask ourselves why we automatically support the alleged perpetrator. Perhaps, instead of leading with a suicide joke, we should show we care about the wound.
Brett Riley is the Pushcart-nominated author of The Subtle Dance of Impulse and Light (Ink Brush Press). His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Solstice, Folio, The Wisconsin Review, Red Rock Review, The Evansville Review, and many others. His nonfiction has appeared in Role Reboot.
