This week in the War on Women: Wanna hear a joke? You should be raped! Hahaha!

I'm pretty sure if I sat down with a woman who's been [raped], and I said, "Can you describe what this was like, going through this?" she's not gonna look at me and go, "Have you ever played Halo?"

See that? That's a funny joke about rape. Kate Harding collected 15 of them, in fact. That's right: 15 hilarious jokes about rape. Even Dane Cook, she points out, "can construct a funny rape joke. This means no one else, anywhere, ever, has an excuse to screw this up."

Now here's a joke about rape from so-called comedian Daniel Tosh (yeah, I'd never heard of him before this week either), that isn't funny:

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?

It's hard to imagine a universe in which a woman being gang-raped by five men passes for knee-slapping humor. So what was the set-up that provoked such a "joke"? While performing at a comedy club, Tosh had a riff about how hilarious jokes about rape are. After quite a while of this rape-is-funny rant, a woman in the audience yelled "Actually, rape jokes are never funny!" So Tosh showed her just how funny rape jokes could be by suggesting that five men raping her would be hysterical. Get it? Because gang-raping a woman for the crime of interrupting a comedian in a comedy club is a perfectly suitable'not to mention entertaining'consequence. Hahaha. Don't you get it?

Many have explained why actually, no, telling a woman she should be gang-raped isn't funny. Lindy West at Jezebel, for example, gives a very clear explanation:

The world is full of terrible things, including rape, and it is okay to joke about them. But the best comics use their art to call bullshit on those terrible parts of life and make them better, not worse. The key'unless you want to be called a garbage-flavored dick on the internet by me and other humans with souls and brains'is to be a responsible person when you construct your jokes.

Tosh's defenders are pulling out all the standard lines: It was just a joke. Can't you take a joke? Damn humorless feminists! That's what comedy's all about! It's edgy! You can't criticize a comedian because then you're just the thought police oppressing that comedian's First Amendment right to tell a woman she should be raped'but, you know, as a joke.

Ms. West, who should be given a Pulitzer just for the delightful phrase "garbage-flavored dick," has an answer to that one too.

(Continue reading below the fold.)