Rolling Stand-Up Comedy 2012

Like what's the difference btwn "Wouldn't it be funny if, like, 5 guys raped her?" and "Wouldn't it be funny if we, like, curbed a bunch of faggots?" or "Wouldn't it be funny if we, like, shot a bunch of black people in the head?"

That's where it gets into tricky territory about listener/audience interpretation and original intent. xpost

Stevie, that's literally all variations of the one joke that Daniel Tosh does

"Wouldn't it be funny if this girl got raped" actually means "Isn't it funny that i;'m SAYING it's funny if this girl got raped?"

I think it actually means "shut up you stupid woman" but yeah we're splitting hairs here

the thing is, he could have handled that heckle without going there with her

he could have been all, "Oh come on, yes they are. What if it was about me? What if the joke was about me getting raped? Wouldn't that be funny? No? What if the rapist was wearing a pirate hat and a monocle? Still not funny? Maybe he has clown shoes, too? And afterward he makes me a latte? No? Well, you just don't have a sense of humor," and then the situation is defused without him calling for some anonymous woman in a dark, tiny club to get raped by someone. Then again, his act is the exact opposite of, say, Joel McHale's, who will often turn jokes back on himself, so he may not even have the performance vocabulary to deal with a heckler that way, which is all the more reason for him not to do stand-up IMO.

that reminds me, in terms of the "are rape jokes ever funny" aspect of this debate... I brought up Rodney Dangerfield earlier, who's one of my favorite comedians ever, but he did have a rape joke. Which, in typical Rodney fashion, was ultimately about himself but even so... anyway, I'm curious as to whether anyone actually thinks this joke is funny to wit:

"the only reason I have any sex at all is because of who I am...a rapist."

xp

he could have handled that heckle without going there with her

no doubt, which goes back to my post upthread that you can judge comedians by how they handle hecklers, and this idiot is a case in point.

i think that dangerfield joke is funny but i'm awful and u should condemn me for laughing

Rodney's joke has the advantage over Tosh's of being a) clever b) structured with 'rapist' at the end of the joke rather throwing it out and waiting for effect and c) actually a joke.

I don't see many people defending Tosh because of the quality of his rape joke/response.

yeah the Rodney one is pretty funny

http://jezebel.com/5925186/how-to-make-a-rape-joke

didn't even open the link, but jezebel not at the top of my list of blogs who i'd trust with humor related advice

That's actually a really good piece, Mordy.

Stevie, that's literally all variations of the one joke that Daniel Tosh does

spoken like a guy who watched literally half of one episode of his show

Johnny Fever OTM, that piece has several very funny jokes in it.

I mean, personally, I'd just like to see an end to "I'm saying this CRAZY THING I DONT REALLY BELIEVE" joke as an excuse to make racist/sexist/rapey/etc jokes.

this is kind of weird coming from a guy who's defended Chappelle on a number of occasions

This paragraph is funnier than anything I've ever heard Tosh say, which is admittedly not that much, but still.

Male comics: this is not an issue of your oppression. You guys know that "thought police" isn't a real thing, right? (I mean, not anymore—it was the first thing to go in the recession.) At no point in time will some shimmery grandpa-of-the-future say, ‎"When I was your age, Timmy, we had these things called 'jokes.' But then they came for our rape humor and our racism, so comedy died and chuckles were abolished." I'm pretty sure there are a couple of jokes out there that don't involve a lady getting raped. Like 100 at least! Hooray, comedy is saved! Nobody is taking away your right to talk about rape, make jokes about rape, or use the word "rape." No cunty feminist killjoy is citizen's-arresting you and taking you to brain jail for your shitty rape joke.

not to be the fuckin namedropper asshole but I have heard fairly reliable reports that when you do the Colbert show he comes to the dressing room personally to explain the persona to you & make sure you dig that he doesn't believe what he says, and that he leads off this presentation by saying "You understand my character, right: I'm an idiot?"

― perry en concrète (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, July 12, 2012 12:12 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ive seen a couple of shows where it seems like the person doesnt get it. Maybe it was early in the run before Colbert understood that he needed to have this pre-show meeting with the guest. But then again, there was one with some author a couple of weeks ago (i seem to remember the guy's book being called "Canada") who truly seemed to not get it. Or maybe he just had no sense of humor. Anyway, he was a terrible guest.

I was cool with that article until the Borat

xp

ok, i'll check it out

that would be acclaimed novelist Richard Ford
xpost

noted humorless individual Richard Ford more like

I loved her Sex and the City 2 review, and I think using "rape" in it had a lot of humorous impact.

tho tbf she admits that Borat's joke is in itself racist

xp

(This joke is almost certainly offensive to Kazakhs, but someone else can be in charge of the anti-Kazakh-joke manifesto.)

Shakey, I believe she has identified your calling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLWlBgj0uOc

that would be acclaimed novelist Richard Ford
xpost

― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, July 12, 2012 2:53 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Acclaimed lame-ass Dick Ford

you should check him out, he's probably written some books about fucking prostitutes

more like independence gay

you should check him out, he's probably written some books about fucking prostitutes

― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, July 12, 2012 2:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for the recommendation on Dick Ford. I will check out some Dick.

Ive seen a couple of shows where it seems like the person doesnt get it. Maybe it was early in the run before Colbert understood that he needed to have this pre-show meeting with the guest.

Early on (up to about the point he did the Coorespondants Dinner, where the people who hired him clearly had no idea what his character was) I don't think most of the guests were told. It felt like an Ali G thing at times. Nowadays his guests are a little more self-aware but I would doubt that unless it's a major political figure they would feel the need to say "oh, he's playing a character here, in case you've never watched the show ever"

I hate it when guests acknowledge the character at some point in the interview. Stephen always shoots them an "eat shit" look.

spoken like a guy who watched literally half of one episode of his show

― frogbs, Thursday, July 12, 2012 1:47 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not gonna suffer through hours of his shit searching desperately for the pearls. Fifteen minutes on a variety of subjects (Katrina, Demi and Ashton, gays, women) is enough to safely say I don't find him remotely funny. Not because he "goes there." Because I don't find him funny.

on a normal day of the week i think about tosh 0:00 minutes of time. on days when i watch my DVR recording of Futurama, i think about tosh 0:02 minutes of time, bc i catch the last 2 minutes of his show before futurama starts. since he told his rape joke, i have thought about tosh probably like 1500% more than on futurama days (which tbf is still only half an hour altogether but is still 28 more minutes than the worst tosh day of the week). at first i wanted to blame someone, ilx in aggregate, the internet, for subjecting me to this. but maybe this is the way it should be. we should all share in the misery of dealing with tosh. none of us should be able to hide behind the privilege of not having to know about him and his stupid banal bullshit. if one of us has to hear tosh, we all have to hear tosh. that's what it means to be a human.

what if they fire Tosh, but replace him with Carlos Mencia

Carlos has burned every single one of his CC bridges.

mencia.ó

What if they just delete Comedy Central

nooooooooo they are still showing Futurama and South Park and Workaholics

i actually watched a full tosh.o episode this week bc i wanted to see if he'd address what happened (someone at the end of the episode threw bags at him and shouted that he was bad - i assume that was a response to the hullabaloo). at some point he told a joke about black ppl. i don't remember exactly what the particular racist implication was but after he said it he grinned and said, "it's funny because it's racist."

netflix should just do those shows djp

adult swim >>> comedy central

I hate it when guests acknowledge the character at some point in the interview. Stephen always shoots them an "eat shit" look.

that totally ruins the interview; however it is kind of funny when Bill O'Reilly tries to do it as Stephen either doesn't acknowledge it or turns it back on O'Reilly. The Colbert/O'Reilly interviews are incredible

I'm not gonna suffer through hours of his shit searching desperately for the pearls. Fifteen minutes on a variety of subjects (Katrina, Demi and Ashton, gays, women) is enough to safely say I don't find him remotely funny. Not because he "goes there." Because I don't find him funny.

That's fine, but it's kind of like saying "I watched 15 minutes of Chappelle's show, so I can say that literally the only thing he ever talks about is race, and everything you hear from him is a variant on that"

I mean you're not completely wrong on him and I do seem to like him less every year, but there's a lot of good self-aware stuff on there too, and he's not as predictable as you guys are making him out to be

also Mordy IIRC this airs on Tuesdays so I don't think he's had time to respond to it; if he has a response to it it'll probably be on this week's episode

you really have to watch a tv show for like 30 hours to hate it authoritatively, so you should watch every tv show for at least 30 hours

I'm rmde pretty hard about mordy not wanting to click on a jezebel article because humorless feminists obv, when the article is actually funny, is ABOUT a kind of humor that we can all agree is offensive, and in itself makes a joke about "cunty feminist killjoy(s)." I got lost in the layers of that somewhere but...really?

ok, i read it but let's not get too excited. i didn't LAUGH OUT LOUD. Jezebel is fine and I read it frequently but they don't exactly bring the funny. which is okay. they're not a comedy website.

i did read that author's review of SATC2 when it came out and i enjoyed it. do i need to say it was a funny article bc it made some good points?

i'm pretty sure i have laughed at every wrong/taboo/etc subject there is to talk about when it comes to comedy. think i mentioned this on ilx somewhere but someone sold me a bunch of old national lampoons from the 70s and i hadn't looked at them in years - i read them all the time when i was a kid - and most "edgy" modern comedy doesn't come close to how fitlhy/horrible/wrong/racist/sexist those magazines are. tosh doesn't come anywhere near them. he's a choirboy in comparison. you could never get away with a magazine like that now unless it was a porn mag that nobody reads like hustler or something. i used to buy them all the time when i was like 11 and 12!

and now john hughes and pj o'rourke are revered elder statesmen, right? well, sorta.

that magazine was staffed with snooty smug white dudes who loved to "shock" and basically didn't care who they offended.