Shameless comedy: investigating shame as an exposure effect of contemporary sexist and feminist rape jokes

Abstract

This article adds to the conversation of controversial feminist humour by moving away from debates as to whether rape jokes can be funny or feminist and instead examining how they may impact feminist women and female sexual assault survivors. Beginning with a brief discussion of shame’s characteristics and uses, this work investigates various critical status difference factors including the kind of rape joke (sexist or feminist), the gender of the comedian, the composition of the audience, the social setting, and the level of trust, to determine how rape jokes create or alieve shame in female feminist audience members. By studying contemporary rape jokes from comedians including Daniel Tosh, Dave Chappelle, Jim Jefferies, Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer, and Heather Jordan Ross, through an affective lens, this research shows that whereas sexist rape jokes told by male comedians to a mostly male audience may force women to experience shame (whether intentionally or unintentionally), feminist rape jokes told by female comedians are more likely to eliminate or prevent shame.

Keywords:

• Controversial humour
• rape
• feminism
• affect theory
• cultural studies
• gender studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Based on Shifman and Lemish’s work, I thus refer to feminist rape jokes as any rape joke that criticizes or challenges existing patriarchal notions, norms or power relationships (2010, 873).

2 As a simple reminder of trauma can cause victims to relive their experience and force their bodies into a ‘physiological state of frantic alarm,’ I would like to take a moment to mention that my analysis does feature examples of rape jokes some may find explicit (van der Kolk 2014, 45–46).

3 Tomkins (1995) argues that shyness, shame, and guilt are all the same affect (133).

4 Trust has also been identified as a possible critical status difference factor between joke teller and audience members (Sev'er and Ungar 1997, 89).

5 Jeffries’ joke is a good example of this.

6 I refer to satire as defined by Robert Phiddian (2016, 44), ‘a rhetorical strategy (in any medium) that seeks wittily to provoke an emotional and intellectual reaction in an audience on a matter of public (or at least inter-subjective) significance’.

7 This is of course not to say that male comedians should not make feminist rape jokes but just to highlight how differently they function.

8 Of course, some may also laugh because of the incongruity of the scenario.

9 An example of this can be found in Reddit where someone asked, ‘Rapists of Reddit Why did you do it?’ and a psychiatrist had to notify Reddit to shut the post down because not only do assaulters feel no remorse, sharing their story gives them a rush similar to when they actually committed their crimes (DrRob 2013).