Copyright © 2012 Shane C Gray. All rights reserved. Poetic Ramblings • Posts Tagged ‘George Carlin’

Here is the first angry response to my Tosh post

Link for my original post for those who missed it:
 http://shanecgray.tumblr.com/post/27046244804

 From http://xsamantharae.tumblr.com:

“This just pisses me off. His response and apology were pure bullshit. Saying a woman getting raped by 5 dudes would be funny is enough for me to know that he deserves all the hate he’s getting and this is coming from someone who watches Tosh.0 and likes his show generally speaking. He was never going to make a Carlin rape joke because he’s not fucking Carlin. He told a heckler she deserved to be raped. That’s just not funny. Period. End of story. I’m not defending her, I’m not berating him. I have liked him for years. But to even go on some “the first amendment says, no topic is off limits” bullshit tangent is fucking absurd. The first amendment allows people to walk around saying the N word too, but I can guarantee Tosh isn’t going to Compton and throwing that word around. But because he offended a woman it’s all cool and it’s no biggie and anyone who is mad is are all over sensitive feminists.”

Well xsamantharae…I am so sorry I pissed you off by being one of the only human beings on the planet to post something reasonable about this subject. Let’s clear a few points up shall we? 

1) I never once defended what Tosh said…I said I refused to defend what Tosh said in response to that heckler. Rape jokes make me sick…I find them highly distasteful…which I said in my original post…which you ignored in your response like everything else that might invalidate your argument.

2) I never said Tosh was on par with George Carlin…I compared the routine setups since there are obvious parallels . You have no idea whether Tosh would have redeemed himself by the end of that joke like Carlin did or not because he never got to finish the joke.

3) As I pointed out…I never make rape jokes on stage or off…they disgust me. I am a mid thirties white male who doesn’t make rape jokes, gay jokes, race jokes, or political jokes that are targeted at a specific party (I do make fun of individual politicians that do really stupid shit)…this makes  me something of a comic anomaly.

4) Female comedians attack men all of the time and I doubt you express your outrage to them. You call yourself a feminist, but you’re missing the point. Feminism is about empowering women…not tearing down men. I never made her gender an issue but since you have lets play that game. If it had been a male heckler that he tore apart this shit never even would have made the news. He has torn men apart at his shows many times and no one has shed a tear. You certainly would not have cared. You said that no one cares because he degraded a woman…but everyone cares…it’s all over the web, on every blog site, it was all over the news. They only cared because the heckler was female and the comment was about rape. It would not have been an issue if he made a rape remark to a man because people have a tendency to pretend that rape is not a male issue. Before someone quotes the statistic that 1 out of 4 women will most likely be the victim of a rape or sexual assault at some point in their life I will say that I know this. It is a fear that women live with and the stats aren’t as high for men…which may be due to another fun statistic…75 to 95 percent of all rape related crimes are never reported and women are around 70 percent more likely to report rape or sexual abuse than men. To me this shouldn’t be a gender issue…I would still defend the right to free speech if Lisa Lampanelli was terrorizing a male heckler and threatening to cut his penis off (which is not to far fetched a possibility so I may get the chance to one day.)

5) You say it is bullshit to make this a 1st amendment issue but it is one. You say it’s not simply because you don’t like what he said…that is exactly what makes it a first amendment issue. That particular bill was written to protect people’s right to say unpopular things. If you start putting limits on who and what it applies to…soon nothing gets said at all because everyone who has ever spoken has managed to piss someone else off at some point in their life. The Westboro Baptist Church has won every first amendment case and every lawsuit they have ever been involved in and they preach hate against gays, minorities, women, soldiers, other religions, and the US government.  People have screamed first amendment for Patrice O’Neill, Tracy Morgan, Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Nazi skinheads, satanists, cults, wall street occupiers, and anti-government militias…just to name a few others both worthy and unworthy. One of the biggest 1st amendment crusaders in the history of this country was Larry Flyntt and he is a porn king. When it comes to going before the supreme court and defending your right to free speech…these are the kinds of people who end up fighting your battles for you and they are all offensive as hell to at least some of the population. Soldier’s normally use the Jefferson Quote “the tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants”. In the case of the 1st amendment…it is “from time to time refreshed with the blood of comedians, shock jocks, bigots, and pornographers.” Like it or not it’s true…even if you hate what they are saying.

6) Even though it wasn’t an issue touched on in my post you brought up race. First off…the “N word” as you put it is protected by the first amendment as much as I hate to admit it. Famous comedians including George Carlin have gone up against criticism for use of that word in routines. Second…Tracey Morgan, Patrice O’Neill, Chris Rock, Dave Chapelle, Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor are all examples of black comedians that have routines which are openly Racist towards white people…I never hear people like you screaming over those routines so screw your double standard.

7) I never claimed Tosh was right…I just held the heckler accountable for her part in it. I said I wouldn’t defend Tosh’s statements…just his right to make them. I don’t even like Tosh’s comedy. I called him an onstage douchebag in my original post. You on the other hand have claimed to be have watched his show for years. His show is full of racist and misogynistic material but apparently you have never had a problem with that until now…you said you even liked it. Get your story straight.

8) I can’t argue with what you said about his apology.

For all of the people out there expressing their moral outrage and joining in on a Daniel Tosh feeding frenzy I offer this classic George Carlin routine. In this routine Carlin starts off discussing 1st amendment rights, moves on to people telling comedians what they can and can’t joke about, and runs into the subject of rape. He very clearly says in this routine that rape is hilarious…much like Tosh did…but as he unravels the routine he gets into the bullshit excuses that men use to justify rape…takes the female side on the issue of women’s clothing not being an excuse for rape…makes fun of rapists and their apparent lack of standards…and makes a very important point about being able to joke about anything as long as the joke is constructed well enough. By the end of the routine you see that he is not pro-rape, and not some simple sexist pig who is just in it to harass women. You get to see all this because he was allowed to finish the damn joke…Tosh wasn’t. Daniel Tosh’s joke might have turned out to be just as iconic as this routine (one of the most famous jokes Carlin ever made) but we will never know because he was cut off. What people are judging isn’t his “Rape Joke”…it’s the way he handled the heckler who busted up his routine. I am not going to defend his response to this heckler but I will say as a comedian that we have all been in situations where we had to respond to a heckler and it got very ugly. There is no script for off the cuff responses and they sometimes go horribly wrong. 

Having said that I will now say this…anyone who has ever seen me perform knows that I don’t do rape jokes. This is not because people say it’s wrong or tell me I can’t…it’s because I choose not to. I find the subject distasteful. It’s one of the few restrictions I have on what I say….however…I don’t need to like the content of Tosh’s joke (of course I will never know since he never got to make the joke) in order to defend the right to make it. If you go to a comedy show you should expect to hear off color comments made about controversial subjects…either wear your big boy pants and pack your sense of humor…or don’t go.

The lessons to learn here are probably:

1) People who are easily offended shouldn’t go to comedy shows.

2) Comedians talk about social issues as a form of satire.

3) The first amendment protects a comedians right to make a joke no matter how much you dislike it…the first amendment does not just apply to people who say things that you like.

4) Stick to the facts…we were not judging his rape joke because it was never made…we were judging his reaction to a heckler

5) Yes this woman was a heckler. A heckler is by definition someone who stands up and starts yelling to interrupt your routine…which is what she did. It doesn’t matter whether Tosh was talking about rape or my little pony…it is still heckling.

6) If you think you can stand on a stage in front of a few hundred people and deal with a heckler without ever having an off night and pissing someone off…you are probably seriously deluded (but prove me wrong…I dare you.)

7) If you call out a comedian on stage you are calling down the lightning bolts from Zeus…and everybody knows that. We generally do not let it pass as a rule. That is letting the audience control the cadence of your show, and that can ruin your delivery completely. If you let one person get away with it…it will only be a minute or two before another one tries it.

I would like to point one last thing out…Tosh’s onstage persona is very much a douchebag. His mannerisms, his inflection, even his facial expressions are all used to cultivate this persona. He is the kind of guy that you see and instantly want to punch in the face just for looking as smarmy as he does…before he even speaks. I have no idea if he is like that in real life but that is his onstage schtick. His fans eat that shit up and ask for seconds. I don’t know why any of this surprises anyone. How anyone could go to one of his shows and not expect this is what surprises me.