Giving survivors the last laugh
Canadian comedians give control back to victims with Rape Is Real and Everywhere
Heather Jordan Ross and Emma Cooper wish their comedy show wasn’t so relevant. Not that Rape Is Real and Everywhere: Rape Jokes by Survivors is only suddenly topical, they insist.
“People keep on saying, ‘This Weinstein thing makes your show superrelevant,’ ” Ross says. “And we say: ‘Yeah, just like Cosby made it superrelevant and Ghomeshi made it super-relevant.’ Unfortunately, there’s always some gigantic creepy (person) making our show super-relevant.”
Ross and Cooper have embraced the tricky balance of using humour to discuss sexual assault and harassment at a time when late-night TV hosts have been reticent to go there.
The first allegations against Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein broke in the New York Times on Oct. 5, but they didn’t get mentioned in most late-night monologues until the next week. Any mention of Weinstein was also noticeably absent from Saturday Night Live that first weekend.
On Oct. 13, James Corden built a joke around the Weinstein headlines at a Los Angeles charity gala, which backfired.
“It’s a beautiful night here in L.A.,” Corden reportedly told the crowd. “So beautiful, Harvey Weinstein has already asked tonight up to his hotel to give him a massage.”
Emer O’Toole, professor of performance studies at Concordia University, wasn’t impressed by Corden’s joke, but has seen Ross and Cooper’s show and applauds their approach.
Rape Is Real and Everywhere succeeds in giving narrative control back to survivors, she says. “Of course rape isn’t funny, but these comedians really are.”
“The ways in which they’re framing their stories and the skill they apply to framing those narratives (means) we end up laughing at rapists. We end up laughing at the ridiculous things that survivors are made to feel about their assaults.”
Appropriately enough, the idea for the show came from a joke made in a dark situation. It was late 2015, a few days after Ross reported her rape to the police. As people who both use humour to help process grief, Cooper was sympathetic when Ross told her she wanted to incorporate parts of her experience into her standup set, but also “never wanted to hear rape jokes again.”
“And then Emma said, ‘I wish there was a show that was only rape survivors telling their own rape jokes,’ ” Ross remembers. She was being facetious, but it struck them both as a good idea. Three weeks later, Cooper and Ross sold out their first show.
Ross says the key to a successful rape joke lies in who the joke rewards. “If the person who walks away loving (the joke) is a rapist, and the person who says, ‘Maybe I can’t do comedy anymore’ is a survivor, you have to think about the atmosphere you’re creating,” she says.
Over 30 comics have been involved in Rape is Real and Everywhere, which has also included male survivors, who Ross says are under-represented in conversations about sexual assault. She hopes to take the show to more university campuses in the upcoming year.
“We’ll basically do this show until we’re not relevant,” she says. “That’s the goal: to someday be completely irrelevant.”