If You Think Rape Jokes Are Funny
N ervous cheers greet the master of ceremonies as she steps out onstage ahead of the evening's comedy show. "You're witnessing stories of people who are really putting themselves out there," she tells the audience.
The crowd trade glances. The show, which wrapped up its cross-Canada tour this week, features an unlikely blend of personal stories of sexual violence and comedy, challenging performers and audiences with a deceptively simple question: can a rape joke ever be funny?
"Everyone is taking a risk in this show and it makes it a little bit electric," said Emma Cooper, one of the two producers behind Rape is Real & Everywhere.
Cooper, 30, and fellow comedian Heather Jordan Ross dreamed up the idea last fall over beers. Riled by the base humour behind most rape jokes, the two women – both survivors of sexual assault – remarked how often it seemed that those who most delight in joking about rape had never lived through the experience.
What if, they mused, survivors told the jokes instead? Could joking out their personal experiences onstage allow survivors to take back the narrative?
Some three weeks later, the pair was delving into those questions in front of a sold-out crowd in Vancouver. They were joined by five other comedians, all survivors trying their hand at a comedic style that tightropes between exposing vulnerability and evoking laughs.
Cooper told the audience about a love note left for her by a man who, after consensual sex, proceeded to remove the condom and reinsert himself.
In the note, he had spelled the word "beautiful" wrongly. "Which made me realise that I need to get standards," she joked. "Rapists' standards. I want a smart rapist who can understand and spell hard words like, 'communication', 'consent' and 'coercion'."
The unusual mix of factors at play during the show is incredibly challenging, said Cooper. "For me, the hardest thing was how do you make this funny? And then how do you make sure that other people see that we're being genuine in our approach?"
One male comedian summed up this challenge during a show, quipping, "Guys, if you don't laugh at these jokes, I got raped for nothing."
As she waited for the Toronto show to begin, Joanne Cave wasn't sure exactly what to expect. "There's a moment of hesitation when you're not sure if your sense of humour is going to align perfectly." She had bought a ticket though, drawn to the platform the show offered survivors. "There are so few opportunities to hear rape survivors and particularly women, tell their stories on their own terms," she said.
The show was a thought-provoking success, she said. "The comedians certainly weren't completely polished in their narrative. You can see as they're telling it, they're still working through some of the discomfort about it," she said. "I think that's where the power came from … They use humour as a really powerful tool to reclaim experiences that they've had."
The show, says co-producer Ross, "confuses the hell out of people". Feminists who normally shun rape jokes sit next to ardent defenders of freedom of speech, as survivors share their stories and poke fun at a society that has long marginalised the issue of sexual assault.
Some of the show's power also lies in putting names and faces to what Ross calls an invisible epidemic of sexual assault. "It's such a common story that no one tells," she said. The name of the show, Rape is Real & Everywhere, was lifted from graffiti scrawled on a wall in East Vancouver.
For 26-year-old Ross, humour was a natural response after she was violently sexually assaulted two years ago by a co-worker. "I knew I wanted to talk about it in a funny way, but I didn't really know how. To do stand up about this is super, super cathartic."
She still struggles at times to find the right words or the right tone to transport her experience into the world of comedy. "I've got this 18-year-old boy rage that nobody says happens after you've been sexually assaulted," she said. "I finally came up with some jokes that I think is the beginning of talking about that in a way that doesn't make the audience feel uncomfortable."
As the show crisscrossed Canada, local comedians joined in at every stop. The more than two dozen performers on the tour – ranging from male survivors to First Nations survivors – were auditioned only for comedic ability and then given carte blanche to take the stage with their stories.
Becky Dingwell caught the show in Halifax. "I thought it was amazing." She was surprised by how candid the performers were about their own experiences of sexual assault. "I definitely laughed and I cringed a little bit as well," she said.
What made her squirm were the personal experiences shared by some on stage of being assaulted as children. "I found that particularly difficult to laugh at … there was something about imagining a child going through this that made it harder to hear," she says. "At the same time I think it was really brave of them to be able to share in that way, and if that was helpful for them or in anyway made them feel empowered, then I think that's great."
The show's mix of highs and lows left her exhausted. "Even though I loved the show, afterwards I felt very heavy and kind of drained in a way. So I went and bought myself a cupcake afterwards, because I felt like I needed something like that."
Much of the reaction to the show, says Cooper, has been coloured by the country's lingering discomfort over the trial of prominent radio host Jian Ghomeshi. In March the former CBC star was acquitted on charges of sexual assault, some 18 months after more than 20 women came forward with claims of being assaulted by the prominent celebrity.
"This was the case that got people aware of how embedded rape culture is and power dynamics and abuse are in our culture," Cooper said. "This show is not the solution, this is just an avenue for honesty and a little bit of catharsis in a time when people are realising stuff they already knew deep down and didn't know where to put."
The trial also pried open a space for issues of sexual assault to be addressed in popular culture – a small opening that the pair is now seizing to reclaim the narrative around how stories of rape are told. "This is what people are hungry for," Ross said. "People have been telling rape jokes. People are raped. Why have those two things not come together?"
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/10/comedy-tour-rape-is-real-everywhere-canada
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