How to Talk to Anyone (Junior Talker #5), DeYtH Banger [tohfa e dulha read online .txt] 📗

is cultish. It's also cheap to produce and, relative to other live performance like Shakespeare and all that made-up garbage, inexpensive to attend. The masses are gathering, stumbling like zombies towards comedy clubs. Online bookings are more prevalent, shouldering out loyal locals and enticing lazy hen parties and other terrorists that travel in packs and have seen McIntyre, so they know what comedy is, mate.

But I don't want me to be liked by a pack of strangers. If they want a clown they can afford, they should storm a children's party. And tolerating a comic is demeaning. If an audience member has an idea they want to share, then bring it, but griping about one's feelings? I'm not wearing a white coat and I have a husband, so one's feelings should be saved for lucky friends.

Just last weekend a woman barked 'racist' at me in a room of 200 otherwise well-behaving audience members. I was joking about the Koran and the bigotry of radical Muslim fundamentalism, so her remark might've been welcomed had it not been directed at me. The crowd, already a bit tense over my mentioning the Koran and Big Mo, grew quiet, nervous, which made my loins twitch with excitement. What might happen next? The beauty of live performance is anticipation.

'All Americans are racist,' she then stupidly continued, ruining both her argument and the room's anxiety. Two hundred laughed at her expense, and I was reminded how tenuous is a comic's grip of control on that tiny, wooden stage. The heckler approached after the show and asked me if I'd like to discuss the misogyny of my act with her female friends, gathered like a coven in the back of the club.

'You mentioned rape. We're uncomfortable.'

I had mentioned rape, but my husband's rape of me, which I then said was impossible because you cannot rape a gay. 'You're married. Don't you want to have children?' She asked this with true concern. 'No, not all gay men are paedophiles,' I responded, then removed her hand from my knee, ushered her away and suggested she try to have fun. 'I'm too drunk,' was her response. 'But I know comedy. I used to work in a comedy club!' One shudders.

'Your moral compass is just right,' a man told me after my set last month, privately, at the bar of a lovely, sprawling comedy room near Leicester Square, while his girlfriend visited the ladies.

That made me uncomfortable. I don't ever want the audience to know what side I'm on. I've got no sides. I'm trying to deliver more than one argument. I'm like the US Army: I don't take a position, I'm just there to help clear up this mess of confusion about political correctness, because there is none. Everyone's boundaries are different, thank Goddess. If we all agreed, nothing would be funny.

If at least parts of the crowd aren't shaking or angry by the end of my set, they haven't got their money's worth and I feel a bit dirty, like I've let down the contingency of cantankerous, crabby, clarifying comics by smothering myself in sticky, gooey kindness. Yech!

There's a threshold I must pass, even in a brief 30-minute set, where the crowd realises 'queers' can be something other than lonely, sexless, mincing, prissy, overweight, wall-eyed elves with one joke and no friends. We can also be varied, like any ambitious voice on the comedy circuit.

So I'm argumentative, disagreeable, miserly, confrontational, sexual, manipulative, affable, frank and self-abusive. I'm also fast, so those with reservations have little time to ponder. I'm not just a cocksucker; I'm a grinning idiot with barbs. I'm a comic who reveals hypocrisy and helps tragedies fade.

Comics shed light. We're as necessary as a lightbulb, yet harder to replace.

 

 

 

Anatomy of a Successful Rape Joke

 

 

 

 

Yes, jokes about rape can be funny. Daniel Tosh’s wasn’t.

 

 

 

elieve it or not, jokes about rape can be funny. (Yes, even feminists think so.) But Daniel Tosh’s hotly debated “joke” aimed at a female heckler was far from humorous—in fact, it was a perfect example of how not to joke about rape.

Tosh has come under fire this week after a woman blogged about her experience seeing Tosh at a comedy club. According to her, Tosh was talking about how rape jokes were always “hilarious.” She called out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “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…”

Her post has since gone viral, prompting Tosh to write a tepid apology on his Twitter account:

all the out of context misquotes aside, i’d like to sincerely apologize j.mp/PJ8bNs

— daniel tosh (@danieltosh) July 10, 2012

In the meantime, hordes of fans and other comedianshave come to his defense, some in the most violentlymisogynist way possible.

Elissa Bassist at The Daily Beast gets to the heart of why what Tosh said wasn’t funny—in fact, why it wasn’t a joke at all.

Tosh says he was joking. Comedians make rape jokes every day, so why is this one getting so much attention? Because Tosh was more than “just kidding.” He was angry. His “joke” was reactive to the so-called heckler who called him out in front of an audience. He used humor to cut her down, to remind her of own vulnerability, to emphasize who was in control. The “joke” ignited a backlash because it was not a joke; it was vastly different from other jokes about rape.

Jokes about rape that work—those that subvert rather than terrify—do exist. Sarah Silverman has one about being raped by a doctor: “…so bittersweet for a Jewish girl,” she says. And Wanda Sykes has an amazing routine (you can watch the video at the bottom of this post) about having a “detachable pussy.” 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our pussies were detachable? Just think about it. You get home from work, it’s getting a little dark outside, and you’re like, ‘I’d like to go for a jog…but it’s getting too dark, oh! I’ll just leave it at home!’… [There’s] just so much freedom—you could do anything. You could go visit a professional ball player’s hotel room at two in the morning. Sex? My pussy’s not even in the building!

George Carlin actually explained quite well why jokes about rape can be funny:

Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd. See, hey why do you think they call him “Porky,” eh? I know what you’re going to say. “Elmer was asking for it. Elmer was coming on to Porky. Porky couldn’t help himself, he got a hard-on, he got horny, he lost control, he went out of his mind.” A lot of men talk like that. A lot of men think that way. They think it’s the woman’s fault. They like to blame the rape on the woman. Say, “she had it coming, she was wearing a short skirt.” These guys think women ought to go to prison for being cock teasers. Don’t seem fair to me.

These jokes point out absurdity, they shed light on what’s wrong with rape—what they don’t do is threaten. And that’s what Tosh did. Just because it was uttered by a comedian doesn’t make it any less of a verbal assault.

Indeed, that’s exactly how this woman felt:

[H]aving to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophic [sic] room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place.

Those supporting Tosh are outraged that anyone would dare tell a comedian how to be funny. (There’s also been a lot of “if you can’t take the heat” sentiment aimed at this woman, given that she heckled Tosh.) Many of his defenders insist that his joke—and other jokes about rape—are simply edgy and controversial, which is what a comedian is supposed to be.

But here’s the thing: threatening women with rape, making light of rape, and suggesting that women who speak up be raped is not edgy or controversial. It’s the norm. This is what women deal with every day. Maintaining the status quo around violence against women isn’t exactly revolutionary. 

It’s also telling that the vast majority of people defending Tosh’s comments are men—and that they’re being incredibly sexist in their responses to boot. I’d ask these guys why it is they’re so virulently fighting for the right to tell rape jokes. Why is it so important to them that Tosh be able to “joke” about a woman who loudly criticized him being gang raped? (Video blogger Jay Smooth asked a similar question about Gwyneth Paltrow’s using the “n-word.”)

If you are this attached to jokes about raping women—if they mean this much to you—it’s time to look inward and think about why that is.

Because at the end of the day, the misogynist fervor behind the defense of Tosh doesn’t isn’t an impassioned debate over free speech or the nature of humor. It’s men who feel entitled to say whatever they want—no matter how violent—to women, and who are angry to have that long standing privilege challenged. I guess they don’t find that funny. Well, neither do I.

Chapter 5 - Harsh Enviroment (Part 3)

How To Make A Girl Think About You Non-Stop (And Fall In Love With You)

 

By John Alex Clark

 

 

 

 

 

Want to know how to make a girl think about you? To the point where she becomes obsessed with you? And can’t help but feel drawn to you emotionally?

 

Let’s suppose I met you on a bus one day and we got talking. During the course of our conversation together we began talking about the other people on the bus and I began telling you that I could read their minds.

I then proceed to prove this by pointing out to you the people that were most likely to press the signal button to get off at the next stop …and, sure enough, each one I point out gets off on cue as we proceed along the route.

Now, what would be going through your mind at this? Most likely you would be intrigued by my ability to read minds. You’d begin wondering if I had some kind of magic powers …and the result is that I would stick in your mind afterward. You would keep thinking about me.

 

So what just happened?

 

Well, let’s just back up a second. I can’t really read minds. I was just pretending to for fun. What I didn’t tell you was that I am a body language expert. And all I was doing was analyzing each person’s body posture to judge their state of mind …and what they were most likely to do next.

For example, you can tell with a fair degree of accuracy the people on a bus that are most likely to get off at the next stop by analyzing their body posture.

People who:

Are seated upright Intently looking ahead Slightly leaning forward Have their body slightly angled towards the signal button Or a combination of these

…are all people that are likely to be looking to get off at the next stop or two. It becomes easier to tell who is most likely to get off next by eliminating the people who are least likely to get off next (such as those looking out the