What We Laugh About: When Jokes Go Too Far

When I attended the Open Mic stand-up comedy night held in Coffee Grounds this past Wednesday, I was expecting an evening of laughter and lighthearted entertainment to distract myself from schoolwork for an hour or two.  And while a number of the performers, including the host, were indeed funny and entertaining, I was taken aback by the great number of performances that not only weren’t funny, but were also outright offensive.

I would consider myself to have a good sense of humor; I understand sarcasm, parodies and black humor. However, there are certain topics and ways of making jokes that simply overstep the line. Though I want to stress that not all performers were guilty of overstepping that line, the comedians of the evening (all of whom were male) largely focused their jokes on drunk hookups, masturbation, porn and in many ways spoke of women in a solely objectifying manner.

One joke went as follows: “My girlfriend recently broke up with me. I don’t really mind that part so much, it’s more the reasons that she gave: ‘I didn’t stay in often enough on weekends, I didn’t like her friends, and all the bruises.’ I should add that this one got noticeably few laughs overall, but domestic violence is not something to joke about in such a crude fashion, nor is it something we should laugh about. The same performer proceeded to make necrophilic jokes, as well as presenting a description of the perfect girlfriend as “paralyzed from the neck down.”
I do not wish to pick on any one performer, but I do want to contextualize some of these jokes for those students who did not attend the open mic night.  There were others who discussed how they love the Saturday nights at Conn because of the abundance of skimpily dressed drunk girls. Another skit began with “I love porn, I grew up on porn.”  A freshman’s performance centered on his hookup strategies for nights out on campus, including his pickup line: “Nice shoes. Wanna fuck?”

Overall, the messages that these jokes send highlight an objectification of and attitude towards women that I think is highly problematic.

The point of discussing this issue is really not simply to criticize the stand-up show. One could argue that these jokes are tasteless, or a kind of humor not everyone can appreciate. But I think the problem is far more than that. It reflects the kinds of topics that we as students are able to make fun of, and subsequently not take seriously. This sends the message that topics relating to the treatment of women in society and on college campuses are easy to laugh off, make fun of or dismiss. This is extremely dangerous, particularly given the recent discussions about sexual assault at colleges, the attitude of administration and students towards rape (as presented by Angie Epifano of Amherst, among others), and the ‘policy of shame’.

In a Letter to the Editor from last week, Juan Pablo Pacheco discussed how to reduce sexual assault on campus, and opposed the idea of simply increasing campus safety. Instead, we should seek to create change in behavior and our environment to ultimately reduce sexual assault and offensive behavior, not just increase security through imposing outside measures.
This idea is critical, because in order to achieve this, a change in attitude has to come first. And this has to come from within the student body and the community. A good first step would be to look at how we see these issues of hookups, sexual assault and objectification of women, and to realize that the way we view and talk about them will affect their prevalence in our society. Given what we are joking and laughing about, is it any wonder that these topics have been taken very lightly, and that there is such a shockingly high (and often untold) prevalence?

I hope that we will realize the subversive nature that comments and jokes, like many of the ones seen at the open mic night, for it is behaviors like these that hinder us in changing our attitudes towards sexual assault, objectification of and more equal treatment of women. •