14 thoughts on “Check Inside”

      2. SOMK

        How about some rape threats can potentially be funny within a given context, for example a granny threatening to rape a duck who just ate a cake she baked in the shape of the Pope, hypotethically if you were to walk in on that scene (a granny scolding a duck with threast of rape for eating a cake in the shape of eamon devalera’s head in your kitchen), I could imagine potentially finding that pretty funny and I don’t think I’d be a bad person for finding it funny (but maybe I am a bad person).

        On the other hand would it be funny if the person you were threatening was someone pretty much everyone agreed was terrible and completely beyond redepemption, who’s crimes would on blance eclipse the issues around using rape as a threat (because their psychopathic nature and the suffering they inflicted on other humans was off the chart), people like say Genghis Kahn, Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy, Pinochet, and Ivor Calley?

        On a further third hand, why would someone be washing themselves with keys in a shower, is this new, trendy thing all the kids and FF TDs are down with these days, does it work or is it some kind of homoepathic, sugar pill, placebo, rutual thing?

        On balance making ‘jokes’ about someone going to prison potentially getting raped fails to amuse not just because of the immoral natgure of making light of such an appaling experience, but also because it’s a bit of a cliche really, you could set your watch to it, here’s an article about someone broadly unpopular going to prison, t-minus dropping soap reference in 5, 4, 3, 3, 2, 1…

        However can safe moralistic comedy be drawn on a meta level, by say mocking not the act itself, but the fear of the act (for example here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNc6G_sQPto ). You don’t want to make light of something, but it depends on what your target is, for example you could take the brass eye paedophile special and say “no one should ever make fun of paedophilia”, but whilst the episode did feature jokes on the topic of paedophilia (a paedophile disguised as a school for example), the butt of the joke wasn’t victims as much as it was the media hysteria around that (and indeed a blinding hysteria at that, because cynically manipulating people’s fear about such things causes people to leap to paranoid and false assumptions that adhear to their often limited worldview). Comedy in it’s ironic detachment can offer a valuable lens through which loaded subject matter can be discussed, one definition of comedy is tragedy with timing, if you take away the tragedy, all you’re left with is timing and only mad people laugh at ticking watches.

        That being said to infer someone going to prison will get raped in and of itself isn’t funny, there’s no construction to the joke, no punchline, no surprise or confounded expectation and it does the second thing in that it implies raping people is a kind of legitimate punishment, it severely dehumanises prisoners, which on a grander scale also limits the functionality of prisons as institutions of reform as opposed to punishment.

        If you have to make a joke based around a dodgy subject then the least you can do it is constuct an actual joke, saying “don’t drop the soap/keys” trivalises the issues, but it’s also tremendously half-assed and quite frankly the internet met it’s quota on half-assed commentary back when Yahoo Serious was still getting asked for autographs in the street.

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