Ben James: You know it’s disgusting – all these jokes about rape.
Finn Carter: Why? Exactly?
Ben James: Umm... because it’s degrading? Because it belittles the suffering of rape victims everywhere?
Finn Carter: There might be tasteless jokes, yeah, but surely there’s no difference between jokes about rape and all the other forms of dark humour. Jokes about the holocaust. Jokes about nuclear war. Jokes about cannibalism.
Ben James: Jokes about the holocaust? You’re seriously trying to justify something by comparing it to jokes about the holocaust.
Finn Carter: OK, possibly a bad example. Nuclear war is a better one.
Ben James: You’re really not doing your case any good, you know.
Finn Carter: What are you talking about? Dr. Strangelove was a brilliant movie. And it manages to make a comedy out of unimaginable horrors. What is there inherently about rape that makes it any different?
Ben James: The thing about Strangelove – and A Modest Proposal, since I’m sure you’ll bring that up too – is that they satirise state policy. They deal with something that many people, especially those in power, thought was actually moral at the time. The reaction to Swift provides a brilliant example of that. The danger of trivialising horrors only exists when there are actually horrors to trivialise.
Finn Carter: So we can agree that jokes where the humour comes from attitudes to rape, rather than rape itself, are permissible.
Ben James: Like in Pratchett’s The Last Hero?
Finn Carter: Yes, among other things.
Ben James: I’m not sure I like it, but I’ll accept for now that they could be OK if they were done sensitively.
Finn Carter: Great. But that’s a side point. What about jokes about terrorism? Those can’t really be said to not be trivialising horror. Are you saying movies like Four Lions and Team America shouldn’t be made?
Ben James: We haven’t seen one of those, and the other one we hated.
Finn Carter: I fail to see why that would be relevant.
Ben James: And suddenly I know why you failed English. But the thing about terrorism is that the whole point – or at least a significant part of the point – is to make people fear you. That’s why it’s called terrorism. Things that make terrorism into a ridiculous joke might to some extent trivialise the horror of terrorism, but one might argue that doing so would actually be a good thing.
Finn Carter: Would you argue that?
Ben James: I fail to see why that would be relevant.
Finn Carter: Fair enough. There are other jokes about murder though, for which that excuse wouldn’t work. I presume that we can agree that being murdered is worse than being raped.
Ben James: Only on the understanding that it’s true in the same way that it’s worse to be forced to eat broken glass than to have needles pushed under your fingernails.
Finn Carter: That’s debatable. And fairly disgusting. But OK. Let’s take the onion articles about starvation, kidnapping kidnapping and child abuse*. What’s the inherent difference between them and jokes about rape?
Ben James: Very little. Those articles make me feel cold and alone.
Finn Carter: What about Saint Lawrence?
Ben James: Remind me.
Finn Carter: Patron saint of cooks. He was burned alive.
Ben James: You actually find this stuff funny? What is wrong with you?
Finn Carter: Nothing. You just have no sense of humour. What about James Bond? He regularly makes jokes about murdering people. Noone finds that offensive. Or the saying among doctors ‘all bleeding stops eventually?’
Ben James: First off, just because everyone thinks it’s OK, doesn’t mean it is. Secondly, I think there’s a difference between comedy that finds humour in something without letting it actually affect the outcome, and comedy that uses torture just for comedy. The doctors are going to do as much as they can to save the patient anyway, and they’ve probably earned the right to make jokes, if only to keep themselves sane, and Bond would kill just as many people if he wasn’t making jokes. Thirdly, everyone knows that murder is wrong. Everyone understands that it’s a tragedy when patients bleed to death. Whereas we live in a society where historically, the victim has been blamed for rape. In some parts of the world that still happens. Even here, rape isn’t taken nearly seriously enough for a crime which is, in effect, sadistic torture.
Finn Carter: Well that probably rules out the Monty Python example I was going to use, as well as all the dead baby jokes. What other examples can I use...
Ben James: Let’s end this discussion here, shall we. It’s depressing me.
Finn Carter: Fair enough. What else shall we talk about?
Ben James: How does God know that he knows what he knows.
Finn Carter: Sorry?
Ben James: It occurred to me that if you apply the concept of Cartesian doubt to God, the only thing that God could possibly actually know is his own existence – He has no way of knowing that he isn’t being fooled by an evil demon, any more than we do. Which means that he’s not omniscient at all. And if he does know somehow, that has fascinating theological and philosophical implications.
Finn Carter: Ben. You do know that there is no God, don’t you?
Ben James: You don’t know that.
Finn Carter: Last week the president was devoured by extra dimensional horrors. There is no God.
Ben James: That is pretty hard to explain. Maybe Cthulhu is necessary to a consistent universe. Maybe it’s a test of faith. Maybe it was actually a fallen angel. Also, I thought he was killed by a bomb.
Finn Carter: You don’t think we’d tell people about something like that, do you? Of course, it helped that all the witnesses were driven to gibbering insanity.
*Kinda
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