“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”
Thumper, in the classic Disney movie ‘Bambi’, delivers this line in something of a begrudging way. I can’t say I blame the bunny for that. If we lived in a world where every comedy act followed this rule and kept strictly to the social niceties, nobody would be funny ever again.
There are times when you just have to make a little light-hearted joke out of a situation. That one time you saw someone get their obscenely long scarf caught in the bus door. Any and every occasion that your uncomfortably forthright grandmother is present at. Those things are fair game.
Rape, however, is never funny. A number of comedians – sadly, pretty much all of them male – seem to have missed this particular memo.
We take a lot of liberties in comedy, and at Funny Women we’ve dealt first hand with the cries of ‘that’s not funny’. A lot of humour is indeed subjective. But there’s a difference. Gently ribbing a man for his over-enthusiastic love of football and making fun of a woman’s physical and emotional trauma are incomparable. The first is unwise if your crowd is mostly male – the second is simply wrong.
Lovely people Mel & Sue have hit back against an alarming ‘wave’ of comics using rape jokes as the bulk of their routines. We’ve seen this go really wrong for Dapper Laughs, but the duo admit the problem doesn’t quite lie solely with the men.
I’m not about to delve into the ins and outs of the influence of porn and Page Three, which the Independent’s article does perfectly well. What I want to bring your attention to is the comments section.
“They just need a man to give them a good seeing-to.”
“Let these two dykes eat cake!”
“Rape is no laughing matter……… Unless you are raping a clown!”
“I doubt they have ever met a comedian or attended a comedy show. How could they? Their mere presence sucks the joy out of any room.”
I could go on, but I don’t really want to. These people have also clearly never seen ‘Bambi’.
One of the biggest problems is that, whenever someone is brave enough to speak up and say ‘hang on, that’s not okay’, there’s a massive pile-on of bullying and snarky replies. That makes the original speaker understandably reluctant to do it again. Given that Mel & Sue cite a number of other successful women, we’d love to see them speak out on this issue too.
