On the Nature of Offensive Jokes

the point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. #deadbabies
— daniel tosh (@danieltosh) July 10, 2012

A heckler at one of the recent shows of comedian Daniel Tosh was appalled when, after she told him that rape jokes weren't funny, he began laying out a scenario in which she was raped:

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…” and I, completely stunned and finding it hard to process what was happening but knowing i needed to get out of there, immediately nudged my friend, who was also completely stunned, and we high-tailed it out of there. It was humiliating, of course, especially as the audience guffawed in response to Tosh, their eyes following us as we made our way out of there. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said about me.

Afterwards, he 'apologized' via Twitter. Alyssa Rosenberg maintains that Tosh completely misses the point of making jokes about 'awful things', and says that jokes about things as bad as rape ought to have a point to them, or they had better not be made:

Jokes about sexual assault seem, to me, to fall into a category that requires heightened scrutiny. Reveling in someone else’s vulnerability or humiliation is not an inherently funny thing, and it’s upsetting to a lot of people. If you’re going to upset a lot of people, and defend upsetting a lot of people, you have to have more than a pedestrian joke to offer up. You have to have a point, and you have to execute it with a high degree of precision.