Daniel Tosh Versus The Age Of Outrage
by Chez Pazienza
There are a few subjects that I feel like I’ve written about so often that when they inevitably come up again, I’m at a loss to say anything about them that I haven’t said before. It’s one of the occupational hazards of blogging steadily for six years: You just run out of clever twists to put on the subjects you’re passionate about and which inspire you to speak up and so you essentially wind up recycling all your previous points and arguments while hoping no one notices how tedious you’ve become. (This is known as “Greenwalding.”) Among my cast of rotating regular topics, there’s Nancy Grace doing something despicable, Fox News doing something unethical and not giving a damn what anyone thinks about it, and the subject I’ve been embroiled in an ongoing online debate over for the past few days: a comedian or entertainer saying something offensive and the whole world losing its fucking mind.
By now you’re probably well aware of the person and incident at the center of the latest episode of the long-running pop culture series, “You’re Not Allowed To Say That Because It’ll Make Me Cry.” Last week, stand-up comic, wildly popular TV host and all-around snarky asshole Daniel Tosh made a crack about how “rape jokes are always funny” during a set at the Laugh Factory in L.A. when an apparently offended woman in the audience spoke up and took him to task for it, reportedly saying that “rape jokes are never funny.” Supposedly, Tosh’s response was something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her.” For the record, that’s the most times the word “rape” has appeared in any single paragraph I’ve ever written. (The previous record was three.)
Read the rest of this article here.
