I understand your viewpoint but I find it severly flawed. The problem with making rape a joke is not because it is a terrible part of human life. Cancer, heart attacks, etc. I can understand because they are things that can happen to any of us and there is not perpetrator. There is no human being that was committing an act that should be seen as one of the most terrible things one human can do to another (as should child abuse). I believe in the right to free speech and I do not think that a person who makes a rape joke should be tossed in jail. But I will moan, complain, become outraged, picket, boycott, petition and use my own free speech to express my outrage as someone taken a horrific exprience of another human being and using it to make others laugh. I have seen images that were made in ‘jest’ that say “rophyphonol: when charm just isn’t enough”. Things like that are wrong and people who laugh at them need to think about what they are laughing at.

As to you comment that people should check their egos at the door and relax and shouldn’t take it seriously is wrong. People should always take rape seriously, they should take genocide seriously, they should take chlid abuse seriously, they should take violence seriously.

Also just because a person laughs at a joke does not make it right. Comedy is an art and I highly respect it as a way of holding up the ridiculous parts of our culture and can help lead to lasting social change. When you make a rape joke, you are not holding up the rapist, the criminal, the person who violated another human being up for censor and ridicule. You are holding up the victim.

Think before you act. Think before you speak and don’t underestimate your ability to hurt people because you did not think clearly.

I wrote and crumpled up five responses of what I wanted to say in response to this, but no written words can do my anger justice. This is my final attempt to express how utterly repulsing your uneducated opinion and writing abilities are.

Never in my time at Grand Valley have I felt as uncomfortable as this letter made me feel. Rape is not something that comes and goes in a person’s life and it isn’t something that can be laughed about later with friends over coffee. Rape victims are permanently scarred for the rest of their lives. There are men, women, and children rape victims who have seen things that would make anyone lose their lunch, yet you, amongst others, have the nerve to see humor in it.

The type of message your Letter to the Editor sends is one of self-absorbed ignorance. Yes, people joke about things that happen to themselves, but I promise you, PROMISE YOU, that you will never find a rape victim who has any desire to laugh at the physical and mental torture they’ve been through. And to even compare a laughable experience to something as serious as rape is disgusting.

Encouraging people to laugh at rape jokes also encourages them to take rape with a grain of salt. And when rape victims are surrounded by people who don’t take rape seriously, they feel as though they have no one to go to for help. Do you really think it’s appropriate to convey this message in a college campus setting? According to the RAINN, 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. Think about how many people in the audience of Last Laker Standing that statistic applies to before you make the judgment call on what’s “funny” or not.

Its comments like yours that completely belittle the instances of sexual assault and rape. And though it is so easy to be angry with you, we must remember that you are ignorant of topics, which you have made so blatantly clear through your complete disregard of the issue. Rape and sexual assault should never ever be seen as comedic and each time you or someone else makes them into a joke you take away from someone who has actually experienced this. I also find it completely disgusting that you feel making jokes about pedophilia is funny. I guess my best suggestion to you would be to educate yourself before you open your mouth to speak. It is absolutely appalling that you actually believe what you are saying to be true, seriously think about it what on earth is funny about rape?

I am that female comedian in which you referred to as ever so less than lady-like.

As a comedian, I wholeheartedly disagree with your viewpoints. Our time on stage as comedians is not a time for us to disregard social courtesies, and say “whatever we want to say”. You say that Comedy is an art, and I find it difficult to believe your belief in that statement. Comedy is an art because of its fine ability to get the audience to view the world around us in a different way. To go on stage and get the audience to view rape as comedy is a pretty disgusting thing to do. A great comedian offered me the advice “Comedy derives from honesty”, as said by Ricky Gervais. Honestly, rape is not funny. Honestly, if you think that rape and bowel movements are comparable, you have a lot of things to think through.

I also don’t appreciate the fact that you seem to think Samantha Butcher, an audience member, needs to attend a certain amount of comedy shows in order to understand what is funny and what is not. Good comedy is self-evident.

As a female comedian, I would like to remind you that society is not longer offended when I switch in my dress for a pair of pants. I am embarrassed, and not for my stool joke, but for being in the same group of Last Laker Finalists as someone as out of line about comedy as you are.

Sincerely,
Sophie

I didn’t see your show; I wish I had, but I didn’t, and now, after reading all this, I regret not driving two and a half hours downstate to see my friends, to enjoy myself, and to enlighten myself for the purpose of this argument and to personally be ‘shocked’ – as I often need to be – into a realization of how society has failed to morally educate yet another poor soul.

As much as I’d like not to put all the direct blame on you (your thoughts and values are in no small way a reflection of those impressed upon you, after all – “it takes a village to raise a child,” so it goes), that’s the grade-school teacher part of me thinking. You are not in grade school. You are in college. I have no idea how old you are (you might be seventeen and in your first or second semester, you might be twenty-freaking-seven – the age I was when I finished school – or older), but it shouldn’t really matter, either. It’s a safe assumption that a seventeen-year-old is going to think and say a good deal more uninformed, uneducated things than (hopefully) most people ten years older, because after all, you usually learn a few things as you go through life. Moreso if you’re in an educational environment – like Grand Valley State. We all slip up, sometimes, and make dumb mistakes. For example, just last week, a few people were discussing how they were sick of people using the word “gay” to describe “things [they] don’t like”. I’m a bit sick of it, too, but whenever it comes up, I’m always tickled to remember reading about the etymology of the word, so I thought it’d be “fun” and “amusing” to tell everybody about it, even though I agreed wholeheartedly with what they were all saying. Long story short, after pointing out the word’s origins – which actually supported the side that was being argued against – I upset several people and was essentially booed off-stage.

I said something stupid – regardless of belief or intent – because I’m an insufferable know-it-all with a big mouth. It’s not the first time it’s happened, it probably won’t be the last, but I learned from it. I’m a bit humiliated, sure, but I learned from that stupid little thing that I did.

I think your best excuse, here, is just naivete. It’s not a good one, but there you have it. You did something stupid because you didn’t know any better. Happens to everybody.

Oh, but, wait! Something came later; not only did you make a tasteless joke that offended a lot of people, but, apparently refusing to accept your mistake and just let it die, you – because of pride, arrogance, stupidity, or whatever – followed it up with a (very, very poorly-written and poorly-informed) defence of your poor choice of words. In doing so, you essentially threw out your best excuse for letting it happen in the first place.

Your critics, by and large, could have forgotten about your dumb little quip. Then you wrote this. You turned what could’ve just been a mistake in judgement into a belief, and in doing so, turned it into an identifying principle of your personality. Of you. In defending your tasteless little joke, you became the joke, yourself. Your message, in so many words, was that whoever criticises the joke, is criticising you, and, moreover, is criticising comedy as an art. Which, as we all know better, is not what’s going on.

Congratulations on turning yourself into a caricature of bad comedy. I hope you don’t think it was worth it. I hope you’ve at least learned something by this point.

Let’s talk about rape for a moment. Rape is not what George Lucas did to your childhood. Rape is not what happens when a sports team beats another sports team by a wide margin. Rape is not what happens when your electric bill is higher this month than it was last month. Rape is when a person violates another person in the most despicable, degrading way imaginable and among the myriad of terrible things humans can do to one another, rape is among the worst. I think the casual misappropriation of the concept of rape extending all the way to its widespread comical usage is disgusting even by Internet standards.

I AM SO ANGRY!!!!! I CANT BELIEVE THIS!! I AM OUTRAGED! I AM SO VERY ANGRY THAT I AM GOING TO WRITE AN ALL TOO LONG COMMENT ON THIS WEBSITE SO ALL 15 OF YOU PEOPLE CAN SEE HOW ANGRY I AM!

I agree with Mr. Fart. He has some really good opinions on the whole “rape” issue. Rape is not a laughing matter, nor is anything. If someone tells a joke about anything that isnt 100% positive, then they are just horrible people at their core. I mean, honestly. Don’t you people get what comedy is? It certainly isn’t supposed to be about things that entire halls of people laugh about. It’s about nice things that aren’t offensive to anybody ever.

I agree with my esteemed colleague above. You see you should be able to joke about anything I mean to be perfectly honest you should be able to do anything. Rape? Murder? Those things being wrong is in the eye of the beholder. Some people think those things are perfectly alright and who are we to hold them back?

Legalize homicide and sexual assault or you hate freedom.