🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <34D0C9EF.40CF@dbis.ns.ca>, Barbara Amero <amero@dbis.ns.ca> wrote:

> Thomas M. Cantine wrote:
> >    I'm interested to know how you'd distinguish between a joke that makes
> > light of rape and a joke about rape, or do you hold them to be necessarily
> > the same thing? That is, would you want to say that a joke about rape is by
> > definition a joke that makes light of rape?
> 
> I said any jokes that make light of rape, make rape a joke, 
> i.e. meaning to take away the seriousness of rape, which is 
> no joke. I will clarify that now by saying that any, all jokes
> about rape make light of rape, make rape a joke, take away the
> seriousness of rape. Rape is no joke!

   I certainly agree that rape is no joke, but I don't think I agree with
the general claim that any joke about rape necessarily means to downplay
the seriousness of rape. Humour is sometimes based on a sense of outrage,
and not always a belittling of the topic. Remember the outrageous,
exaggerated violence in the Monty Python sketch about Sam Peckinpah's
"Salad Days"?

   I don't know if my last message on the subject made it to your server,
but do you remember participating in a joke about cannibalism some time
last year? I said something about how we were saving my son for
Thanksgiving, and you played along with it. Anyway, with that joke we
certainly were not saying that cooking and eating babies is really no big
deal. Indeed, quite the opposite; it's so absolutely horrific an idea that
our only reasonable way to deal with it is by laughing at it.

   Of course, with rape, it's kind of different in that rape is rather more
common than cannibalism in this society. So the idea of someone actually
committing rape is all too believable, and thus much harder to joke about,
and  we have to introduce some element of unbelievability to allow the
humour in. Say, for example, putting my 10 month old son in a lineup as a
rape suspect. Something ludicrous like that. Or maybe something about that
obnoxious purple dinosaur getting gang-raped by a pack of demented
Care-Bears. 

   Anyway, my point is simply that the interpretation of a joke about rape
as necessarily making light of rape is not perfectly complete. If we accept
the absurdity type of humour, then it is conceivable for a naive but
well-intentioned person (one who sincerely is unaware of the actual
frequency of rape, for example) to joke about rape on the assumption that
surely no one would ACTUALLY do that, would they? Such a person's
incredulity when you answer "Yes, people DO do that all the time," is not a
sign of evil intent, but perhaps a desire to maintain faith in the goodness
of one's fellow humans.

-- 
Thomas M. Cantine, Philosopher for hire
/=================================\
|     "Will Think For Food"       |
\=================================/
http://www.incentre.net/tcantine/home.html