On Wednesday, I wrote about Jezebel writer Lindy West’s rather remarkable chronicle of the vicious sexual harassment she’s received since appearing on W. Kamau Bell’s Totally Biased to talk about rape jokes with Jim Norton, a comedian who disagrees with her about how they should be approached, but respectfully. I argued that West’s decision to make public the kinds of vitriol being slung her way was a good decision, not just because it mobilized support for her, but because it was good for business: Jezebel’s raking in traffic and ad dollars off of the incoherent rage-slinging of people who are angry at her.

But I also think the comments West posted reveal something interesting and important: the people who are threatening and harassing West have absolutely no idea what rape actually is. Over and over again, they’re variations on the same theme, that West doesn’t have to worry about being raped because she is sexually unappealing. It’s an idea that’s the inverse of an old theme, that rape happens because a woman’s good looks, or the way she dresses, are simply so provocative that she deprives a man of his reason. Rape is a form of sex, and something that only beautiful women can be victims of. And even then, they’re not victims because they were withholding or denying something that a man has a right to. By this reasoning, West should be grateful to be raped, or be seen as rape-able.

Needless to say, all of these ideas are profoundly wrongheaded, but powerfully persistent. But their persistence, and seeing them aggregated here, makes it clear why these conversations disintegrate so quickly. If we’re not operating on a common understanding of what rape is, it’s impossible to explain why, for example, Louis C.K.’s jokes about a rapist’s entitled mentality, or why it might be effective to rape rather than kill Hitler, are funnier than Daniel Tosh’s suggestion that it might be hilarious to see a woman get raped in the crowd at a comedy show. The first Louis C.K. joke mocks precisely the mentality West’s harassers exhibit, that rape is an exercise of sexual rights, and the latter an explication of rape’s power to degrade and inflict emotional suffering. The latter is an affirmation of the idea that rape is a means of putting women back in their proper relationship to men. But of course Louis C.K. reads as funnier to those of us who understand rape as a weapon, and Tosh’s to those who understand rape as a tool or a complement. We can’t get on the same page about what’s funny, and what’s hurtful, until we arrive at the same understanding of rape.

Because I read everything that Film Crit Hulk writes, I was particularly eager to see his take on the debates about what makes something funny, or not, in the wake of Sunday’s Oscar-related controversies. I was particularly struck by this section, and the question Hulk poses in it, after which he goes on to discuss the creation of comedic personas and the balance of revelation and harm in individual jokes, but that I wanted to take in a different direction:

COMEDY CREATES INHERENT DIVISIONS OF THOSE INSIDE THE JOKE AND THOSE OUTSIDE. AND QUITE FRANKLY, YOUR REACTION LARGELY DEPENDS ON WHETHER YOU RELATE MORE TO THE MAKER OF THE JOKE OR THE VICTIM. OFTEN COMEDY IS CONSIDERED THE MOST PALATABLE BY SOCIETY WHEN IT’S IN THE FORM OF LIGHT RIBBING AND INCLUSIVE LAUGHTER, A COMIC RAKING OF THEMSELVES OVER THE SAME COALS AS YOU OR HULK. BUT ALSO WITH PURPOSE IS THE COMEDY OF SCATHING INDICTMENT, WHETHER DIRECTED AT SOCIAL MORES OR SOCIETY AT LARGE. BUT WHAT RESONATES WITH AN AUDIENCE IS LARGELY DEPENDENT ON THE COMEDIAN’S INTENT.

SO IN A WORLD WHERE WE ARE FREQUENTLY BOTH PERPETRATORS OR VICTIMS OF COMEDY DEPENDING ON THE IDEOLOGY, WHAT UNIVERSAL APTITUDE DO WE HAVE TO TELLS US WHEN A LINE OF COMEDY IS OKAY? HULK KNOWS WE CAN’T DICTATE THE TERMS OF “WHAT” CAN ACTUALLY BE SAID, BUT WHAT MAKES OFFENSE PALATABLE?

One thing I’ve been thinking about a great deal recently is the unique and contradictory ways in which we seem to react to jokes. I think we generally understand that there is not a normative definition of what is frightening and what is not because most of us have been exposed to the lessons of Room 101, the place in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where prisoners are exposed to “the worst thing in the world”—which happens to be different for everybody. When we look at paintings in a museum, no one has a problem with the idea that some of us are going to respond more strongly to Michaelangelo or to Robert Rauschenberg. And internet commenters aside, we tend to recognize that there are a lot of kinds of physical beauty it’s possible to respond to.

But we also recognize that if a movie, television show, or book fails to achieve what the author seems to have intended, including in cases where those pieces of art—be it intentional or unintentional—glorify sexual assault, racism, or violence, we’re allowed to critique its creator without being accused of violating the First Amendment. But criticize a comedian, whether he’s standing on a club stage, soft-shoeing in front of the Dolby Theater audience on Oscar night, or Tweeting from an institutional account, and a different set of rules seem to apply. The act of criticism is taken as proof that the critic speaking lacks critical judgement. We’re told that comedians get a pass because their job isn’t to make people comfortable, but to speak difficult truths—but if that is their privilege, we’re also not allowed to ask questions about whether or not they’re fulfilling that responsibility. Criticisms that suggest that jokes were cliche, ineffective, or fail to live up to the standards that are invoked to argue that comedians deserve special protection get recast as evidence of bias or humorlessness. A perfect example of this is how frequently feminist calls for rape jokes to be constructed precisely and their targets to be chosen with care are recast as evidence that feminists don’t understand comedy. Unlike every other form of pop culture, comedy seems to have a special status. At one stroke, the idea that people are allowed to have multiple opinions is invalidated, and replaced by the idea that there is an objective correct view of any joke—that it’s funny, and the comedian was correct to make it.

This is a rotten state of affairs for any number of reasons. It’s an incorrect and unproductive interpretation of the First Amendment, one that suggests that the right to speak also includes the right to be free from judgement and criticism, a profound distortion of the functioning of the marketplace of ideas. A related problem, as my friend, Salon TV critic Willa Paskin, put it a conversation between us, is the presumption in many of these discussions that it’s a normative good that we shatter all taboos, simply for the sake of shattering them. It’s an attempt to shut down discussion, which is always a sign of intellectual anxiety. And it denies people who are doing comedy a discussion of efficacy and joke construction that could help sharpen their material, which you’d think would be sad for them, or for any artist. Immunity is rarely a helpful state for people who want to grow in any professional capacity. And if we’re going to give a class of people extra credit for calling out societal hypocrisy and harm—an argument defenders of comedians under fire often employ—of course we have an interest in making sure that they’re actually doing that job, not just hiding behind the job description, and doing it well.
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Nikki Finke, the secretive and mercurial editor of Deadline Hollywood, usually sticks to reporting the news about casting, box office, or personnel movies in the entertainment industry. But ever so often, as she did while liveblogging the Emmys this weekend, she ventures into criticism. The results are…mixed. Her latest opinion? Beautiful women (and men) can’t possibly be funny. She wrote:

Listen-up, Hollywood: Beautiful actresses are not funny. They don’t know how to do comedy. (As Bowen demonstrated with her acceptance speech that repeated the phrase ‘nipple covers’ 3 dozen times. To zero laughter.) Only women who grew up ugly and stayed ugly, or through plastic surgery became beautiful, can pull off sitcoms or standups. Bowen isn’t a comedienne just like Brooke Shields wasn’t and a zillion more. Because it’s all about emotional pain and humiliation and rising above both by making people laugh with you instead of at you. So stop casting beautiful actresses when you should be giving ugly women a chance. (Tina Fey always points out she looked like a troglodyte when she was younger.) This also applies to handsome men, by the way. Now argue amongst yourselves.

Which, though Finke styles herself a Hollywood feminist, actually sounds a lot like Adam Carolla’s declaration earlier this year that women are, on the aggregate, not as funny as men, and those rare few who he judges to be actually amusing are some kind of Aberration From Nature. They’re both totalizing statements that make the people in question sound parochial. And they’re both based on the idea that there is one essential way to be funny.

This is the problem about almost all of our conversations about comedy: they keep devolving into always and never statements. Rape is inherently funny. Rape is never funny. Men are funnier than women because they’re more willing to go for the gut, because they’re more willing to be gross, because they’re less sensitive, because it’s always funnier to be insensitive, because dominance is funny, because the differences between people are inherent and it’s inherently funny to point them out, because the most important thing humor can do is puncture political correctness. It goes on and on. But these discussions always blow up when someone tries to divine a hierarchy of comedy, a platonic form of it, something that suggests that some kinds of humor are better than others and ends up implying that there’s little or no value to be found beyond a narrow bit of spectrum.

And I also think that these conversations go wrong in part because they come from some places of real anxiety, be they realistic or not. Men like Carolla, who have some of the more marginal jobs available to comedians, start feeling pressure from the success of women. Chris Rock feels that recording at shows and distribution platforms like YouTube have made it nigh-impossible for stand-ups to work out their material in front of crowds in the recognition that it’s flawed and may improve. And…well, I’m not going to even try to speculate about what Nikki Finke’s motivations are, though as Glamour accurately points out, there are basically no women working in television comedy who are not, by any standards, quite pretty. But a point at which people feel that they have something to lose can be a bad basis for important conversations, or for welcoming innovation and innovators rather than pushing them out. And while I don’t have the answers for Chris Rock, I mostly feel bad for anyone who’s shutting themselves off from kinds of funny and different kinds of purveyors of it.

When I talked to Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the stars of the sketch and standup show on Comedy Central that bears their name, in February, they were about to start airing for the first time, and they laid out their approach to everything from code switching, to Christianity, to Michelle Obama. Their second season begins tomorrow, and I checked back in with Key and Peele to talk about how meeting the President has changed their very funny sketches about Luther, Obama’s Anger Translator, what they think Giancarlo Esposito’s performances on Revolution and Breaking Bad mean for our understanding of race in America, and how to nail a potentially offensive joke without getting in trouble. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

As you say in the first episode of the new season, you met the president! What was your conversation with him like? And how has seeing him in person affected the Anger Translator sketches?

Jordan: One of the impresisons we had was that he was just very funny. That little bit you’re talking about, where he took a bottle of water form an aide when he had a cough in his throat, and he checked with the Secret Service jokingly, saying “We trust her?” We couldn’t believe that. He said, “I need Luther…He said to Keegan, I need Luther. I need him”. That was cool.

Keegan: I think also, it was more of a confirmation of things already assumed than it was anything else. I did have an impresison of him that he was more in real life than I expected him to be. He was taller, he was better looking. For as cool as he comes across, there was a very palpable warmth that he has about him that, frankly, I didn’t know that I was expecting. He’s right there, he’s with you, he’s talking to you. He has such a calming energy to him.

Jordan: That little sense of humor we’re talking about. You can tell it sneaks out now and then, even though he knows he needs to be the master and commander and dignified and together, so when it slips out and he says something funny, you can see him regather his posture a little. It felt like we hit [what] he may kind of be thinking on the head…I think he knows he can’t exactly align himself with the sentiments we explore. Whether or not it affects the comedy we do, our take on him has always been based on how we feel and what we feel are the unspoken truths that will get a laugh because they ring true. Nothing’s changed…we do a sketch where I play him back in college when he’s in Occidental College, and we do it as if it was found footage of him smoking weed, and more than smoking weed, but owning the party. And what if he brought his charisma and his people together to organize a party on the Occidental College campus. That was the premise of the scene. We felt a little bit rascally about it, especially having met him, to point out the fun side of Obama when he needs to bring his seriousness to a lot of the issues. It’s something that rings true and it’s funny. And at the end of the day…He brings that gravitas and that sense of American ideals to every little exchange.

Since your first season, FX has started airing Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, and BET has announced the launch of TJ Holmes’ late-night show. I’m curious what you think of this mini-boom in late-night shows built around African-American men, and where you think Key & Peele fits in this new landscape?

Keegan: I’m not aware of these programs. I think probably a lot of it has to do with we have our foot on the throttle right now because we’re coming so close to the premiere.

Jordan: I do think that this is sort of a continuation of the evolution of things from, with Obama as a catalyst, even four years ago. It was very interesting, the way African-Americans have been in culture in general. Sidney Poitier back in the day…When I was growing up, there was Denzel Washington, and the idea of a black president came around, Morgan Freeman was cast as a president all of a sudden. The ideas of African-Americans as a leading man has sort of conjealed. What’s fascinating to me is these characters like Giancarlo Esposito, his character in Revolution seems kind of allegorical to Obama. They’re trying to do that somehow. There’s this refined black man who is in charge and somehow mysterious, and he plays it as a good guy.
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In The Campaign, out this weekend, Will Ferrell plays an incumbent Congressman who’s running what’s supposed to be an uncontested race, when a pair of wealth brothers by the name of Motch put up a genial dummy, played by Zach Galifianakis, to run against him. Unsurprisingly, Galifianakis confirmed that the brothers, played in the movie by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, are meant to be a stand-in for the real-life industrialists and right-wing political funders Charles and David Koch, and mentioned in a recent interview that he found the pair “creepy.”

Other public figures might consider the movie, and Galifianakis’ uneasiness about their influence to be a tribute to their effectiveness. But the Kochs don’t seem to be taking it that way. Phillip Ellender, Koch Industries’ president for government affairs, issued a statement on the brothers’ behalf, saying:

Last we checked, the movie is a comedy. Maybe more to the point is that it’s laughable to take political guidance or moral instruction from a guy who makes obscene gestures with a monkey on a bus in Bangkok…We disagree with his uninformed characterization of Koch and our beliefs. His comments, which appear to be based on false attacks made by our political opponents, demonstrate a lack of understanding of our longstanding support of individual freedom, freedom of expression, and constitutional rights.

While the Koch brothers have become a staple of political coverage, it’s taken longer for them to become fixtures in popular culture, and Ellender’s response suggests they’re not enjoying the attention. This summer, they’ve made an appearance by name in Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama The Newsroom, when anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) attacked guests on his show who were members of Tea Party groups for not being aware of who their funders were. His coverage earned a rebuke from network owner Leona Lansing (a scenery-munching Jane Fonda), who cautioned Will’s producer against further coverage of the Kochs lest they pull their brands’ advertisements from the company. declared “I got where I am by knowing who to fear,” she said. “They drop Brinks trucks on people they disagree with.” It was a weirdly sinister portrayal, in contrast to the lighter satire The Campaign is expected to offer up.

But as long as the Koch brothers are making heavy investments in political campaigns and grass-roots organizing, they’re probably going to keep popping up in movies and television, at least until someone gets the idea of painting casino magnate Sheldon Adelson as a malevolent power behind the throne, which will probably take Adelson deciding to support someone more credible than Newt Gingrich. Until then, Charles and David Koch might as well enjoy the spectacle of liberals fearing them, and the debate over which one of them Aykroyd and Lithgow are each meant to be.

This weekend, Comedy Central will air its roast of Rosanne Barr. The timing for the comedienne seems simultaneously painful and fortuitous. Her NBC pilot Downwardly Mobile, an attempt to recreate the magic of Roseanne with its portrait of recession-wracked resident of a trailer park, wasn’t picked up. Her previous show, a reality program about her macadamia nut farm in Hawaii, was an embarrassment and failed to earn a renewal. Twitter’s provided Barr with a platform she’s frequently used in service of obscene and counterproductive political rants. And her campaign for president’s continued long past the point when it could be either a career-revitalizing stunt or a sharp jab at the major-party contenders. The roast will either be an embarrassment, or a chance for Barr to demonstrate a gameness that could revitalize her public persona.

But leading up to the taping and in the aftermath of it, the coverage has been dominated by insult comic and Friar’s Club Roastmaster General Jeffrey Ross, who showed up to the red carpet dressed as Joe Paterno and then joked that Seth Green, who is a redhead, hadn’t “gotten this much attention since you shot all those people in Aurora.” (Comedy Central subsequently said it would cut the joke.) I understand that the schtick is meant to be offensive, but in both cases they’re so anemic and grasping that it’s hard for me to muster much in the way of reaction to them. Especially given that they’re sort of lame by the kind of standards Ross has laid out for himself.

I’ve been spending some time with Ross’s I Only Roast the Ones I Love: How to Bust Balls Without Burning Bridges, in part because I recognize that insult comedy is not a form that I feel naturally comfortable assessing. And his intentions in it, as stated, make a lot of sense. “It is the Roastmaster’s belief that gracing someone you admire with unfiltered honesty is the highest form of respect you can pay them—especially when it’s delivered in the form of a well-crafted joke,” he writes.”When I was asked about producing a roast for boxer Mike Tyson I felt like I had to decline because under my own criteria he just didn’t seem a worthy recipient. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around honoring a convicted rapist and part-time cannibal.” That’s a really interesting intention, especially partnered with the mandate Ross lays out to insert some deep and genuine kindness in a roast, both to hammer down that the event is an honor, and because in the midst of peeling the skin off someone, saying what you love best about them has a greater impact.

The problem comes for insult comics, I think, when their jokes don’t live up to those intentions, which themselves lay out really rich and sensitive comedic territory. It’s not actually true, I don’t think, to say that Seth Green doesn’t have a lot of fun, because he seems to have a pretty awesome job for a grown person and a generally satisfactory life, and the joke doesn’t get at anything about either him, or the man who killed twelve people in Aurora, Colorado. Similarly, Ross cites Larry the Cable guy’s joke as part of what he’s learned to armor himself against, “I get a lot of flak from critics for being homophobic, but lemme tell you somethin’…I think having invited Jeff Ross here tonight proves how much I love the queers,” fails to live up to Ross’s roast standards. What ends up being revealing about that joke is precisely its dishonesty: Larry isn’t willing to declare himself either gay-friendly or a homophobobe, so he employs a “some of my best friends are” ruse that ALSO doesn’t reveal anything true about its subject.

I really think most comedy that fails and ends up being offensive or hurtful is reaching, in its tellers’ intentions, for some kind of truth, and fails when people have profoundly different visions of what’s true, or what the comic wants to argue against. Daniel Tosh set himself up to battle a straw feminist in suggesting that rape always is funny when all he had to argue is that under certain circumstances, jokes about sexual assault can be funny and powerful. He ended up singed, and apparently, rethinking his act. I think Dane Cook wanted to say something true about the awful mundanity of the Aurora shootings, but didn’t ground the routine in commonly-held feelings about The Dark Knight Rises, and was too soon besides. The mistake in situations like these is thinking the truth is obvious or close by, when in reality, it tends to require more careful excavation. That doesn’t mean comedians can’t play a part in that process, but that they sometimes deny themselves a useful role in it.

When word came down that Daniel Tosh, not precisely known for his cutting-edge or sexually sophisticated humor, had used the specter of gang rape to mock an audience member at one of his shows, it kicked off a perpetually-simmering debate about whether jokes about sexual assault can ever be funny. I think that they can be, if they target attackers rather than victims, and if they expose the absurdities behind the idea that anyone is entitled to sex, or that anyone is asking to be assaulted. And that’s why I love this video from Sasheer Zamata, where she goes inside the mind of a guy who flashed her, breaking down the ridiculousness of the impulse that leads anyone to expose themselves to a stranger—and ending with an uncomfortable but sharp insight on how that ugly incident compares to the rest of her dating life:

It’s worth comparing that video to the promotion for Tosh’s new show Brickleberry, an animated show about a state park. To his credit, Tosh scrapped what were apparently numerous and not very thoughtful rape jokes from the pilot after the controversy. That, however, appears to have left him with animals having sex like humans. It’s not entirely bankrupt—I find the idea of moose in reverse cowgirl kind of amusing—but it’s not even a joke that’s funny over a full minute of content:

If Tosh wants to retool his schtick, something that would be both legitimately difficult—excellent material is hard to come by—and kind of seismic, I’m all for supporting him in that effort. Artistic growth, especially when it means leaving behind something that’s made you very successful, is an easy imperative to ignore, but it’s a compelling one, particularly if that growth means setting aside your power to suggest that damaging, aberrant behavior is normal or funny. Hopefully some of the comedians who defended Tosh’s right to say whatever he wants will help him figure out what he wants to say next.