COMPLICATED CULTURAL TERRAIN
Edgy comics flip the script on rape as a punchline
Comedian Cameron Esposito was thinking about rape jokes long before the #MeToo movement.
Can they be told? How should they be constructed? Who has a right to tell them?
So it’s only fitting that she released a standup special this summer titled Rape Jokes. It’s centred on a night when she played a drinking game with a man who proceeded to sexually assault her after she was drunk.
With the rise of the #MeToo movement, several comedians and TV shows are focusing on the survivors of sexual assault. And several of the comedians, such as Esposito, are survivors themselves.
Standup comic and Conan staff writer Laurie Kilmartin has watched this play out in the comedy world.
“I think there’s more room culturally to talk about having been through the other side of that experience as opposed to having a rape joke where rape is sort of the punchline,” she said. “Now, sadly, it’s a premise.”
That wasn’t always the case. The 1934 screwball rom-com We’re Not Dressing follows a man and a woman who share a mutual attraction but can’t admit it: She’s high society; he’s not. The movie’s comedic climax arrives when Bing Crosby’s character wrestles with Carole Lombard’s, ties her hands with a belt and chains and says, “Tomorrow, you’ll be back in your own world, spoiled and feted and sheltered and out of my reach ... But tonight, you’re mine.”
Consider 2007’s Superbad, which follows teenage boys on a quest to buy alcohol in hopes of getting their female classmates drunk enough to have sex with them. In Porky’s, teen boys peep on their showering female classmates.
Sujata Moorti, director of Middlebury College’s gender, sexuality and feminist studies program, said rape jokes became more pervasive with the rise of feminism, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s. Suddenly common were gags such as a Revenge of the Nerds character donning a jock’s Halloween mask and having sex with the jock’s unsuspecting girlfriend, and jokes like Rodney Dangerfield’s “My girlfriend is so ugly, when two guys broke in to her apartment, she yelled, ‘Rape!’ They yelled, ‘No!’”
Actress Molly Ringwald said jokes are often about a loss of power.
“There’s something funny about when someone slips on a banana peel, or when someone who is all dressed up falls in mud or seeing someone with toilet paper on their foot. (Rape) is the most extreme example: completely taking away a woman’s power.”
Many women are using comedy to take that power back by telling their own stories.
Comedian Brittany Brave likes opening sets with: “My name is Brittany, and I know that makes you either want to take me to a mall or punch me in the face. If you’re my ex-boyfriend, you get to do both.” Hannah Gadsby released a revolutionary Netflix special called Nanette that deconstructs comedy itself, using the story of her own sexual assault to explain that rape isn’t a topic that should be approached lightly.
Esposito walks a similar path in her special. As she tells the story of her assault, she begins with humour, such as when she’s describing the drinking game they were playing, which involved darts: “If you hit the dartboard, you would shotgun a full beer. And if you missed the dartboard, you would shotgun a full beer. Hazy rules.”
Her tone then shifts dramatically. “I don’t totally remember what happened that night. I have a lot of flashes of what happened. I know that I didn’t say ‘yes.’ I also know that I couldn’t have. And I used to tell this story at parties as a funny thing that happened to me. That’s, I think, how disconnected so many people are from our own agency.”
Esposito said she wrote the special because she felt that during the #MeToo movement the media generally focused on the perpetrators. “Never in this cycle did I see a moment where people were tracking the story of the survivors,” she said, adding that she would wonder, “‘How did you continue to date? How do you trust people? What is it like at work now that you’re out about this?’”
Reboots like Will & Grace and Murphy Brown are retooling characters’ backstories to address sexual assault.
While many artists are breaking new ground, some find themselves looking back at art that might be problematic. Ringwald, for example, has spent the past several months re-examining the sexual politics in the John Hughes comedies that launched her to teenage stardom: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink.
In The Breakfast Club, “as I can see now, Bender sexually harasses Claire throughout the film. When he’s not sexualizing her, he takes out his rage on her with vicious contempt,” she wrote in The New Yorker. “He never apologizes for any of it, but, nevertheless, he gets the girl in the end.”
Yet The Breakfast Club is her “favourite” of the trio, in part because it showed “everyone is different and everyone has a voice.” As she wrote, “How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it?”
“It was really hard to look at them with a critical eye,” Ringwald said. “It was very heavy, but ultimately I feel like it’s just not black and white — and life isn’t like that.”
I don’t totally remember what happened that night. I have a lot of flashes of what happened. I know that I didn’t say ‘yes.’