It's funny! Get it!?
When I was around 8 years old, I remember learning a joke once. My friend came over and said that he'd just learned it and started in:
Get it? Hormone, but like “whore”, “moan?” I know that certainly got it, and at the time thought it was hilarious. Plus, it was even funnier because my friend learned it from his mom."How do you make a hormone?"
"You hit her with a 2x4."
There was another joke from that same time. First you'd make sure the person agreed to repeat the words, "ketchup, rubber buns, and liquor" after every question you asked. Then you'd begin by asking the questions rather quickly:
Q: What did you have for breakfast?"
A: Ketchup, rubber buns and liquor.
Q: What did you have for lunch?
A: Ketchup, rubber buns and liquor.
Q: What did you have for dinner?
A: Ketchup, rubber buns and liquor.
Q: What do you do when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?
A: Ketchup, rubber buns and liquor.
Get it? Of course you do! “Catch up! Rub her buns! Lick her!” It's hilarious, right? Best of all, one could even consider it clean enough for sunday school since it doesn't have dirty words. After all, that's where I learned it.
I remember back in the early aughts. I was in college, and Comicview on BET was still fairly hot. One of the funniest bits that my friend Gregg was was a huge fan of came from a comic named Lil' Duval. The bit was a ridiculous rewrite of a Musiq Soulchild song that was popular at the time called "Just Friends." In the song, Musiq approaches a young woman to complement her while letting her know that despite him being totally into her, he’s completely secure enough for her not to feel the same and want to be just friends.
Well Lil' Duval's version took the same cadence and tone and changed the lyrics to being all about buying drinks for a girl and letting her know what's up. Know what I mean?! What’s up!
You can watch it here:
Girl I know this might sound strange,
But let me kno if I'm outta order, steppin to you this way
See I been byin you drinks for a while
And I'll let you kno...BITCH YOU MINE!,
So you need to give me your your name, and I'll leave you my numba and you better call a nigga today
As a matter of fact just give me yours too and bitch I'll call you(THIS BETTA BE YOU BITCH!)
(Chorus)
Cause who you think you just mislead,
Is boo-boo written on my forehead,
I bought them drinks..Bitch you my girlfriend!,
I don't wanna hear that shit bout just came out to have a nice time and just chill,
(Verse 2)
Damn! Didn't I tell you to call,
You tried to give me the wrong number,
And you thought you wasn't gone see me no mo,
But, SURPRISE! Here I am in the flesh,
Oh, now you you egging me,
Bitch, last night you was diggin me,
Let me calm down,
Here's what we doin tonight,
I'll probably go pick up my peeps, when I'm through i probably stop by,
Then we gone chill,
Oh, bitch you gone chill with me!,
And you're gonna be comfortable, you'll feel secure, cuz you wit me now,
(Chorus 2)
Who you think you fuckin with,
You must want your shit flipped,
I just brought them drinks, Bitch you is my girlfriend,
Get it? I know we certainly did. We thought it was so funny to make such a sweet song and turn it completely on its head by making it into a hilarious stalker song. Plus you get to call a woman a bitch, and if the 90’s taught us anything, that’s the average male’s gateway to empowerment!
Now I'm not trying to call out Lil' Duval or anything, it’s a solid bit from way back in the day, and I’m glad he’s still working. I'm just trying to point out how "funny" sexual assault has been for such a long time. How quickly we take something like harassment and violence against women and turn it into a joke, then how quickly we want to defend our right to make “jokes” that harm others. How easy it is for us as a culture to undercut the significance of anyone struggling with unwanted advances of someone in a position of great power to them?
Remember how in the 2011 film Horrible Bosses, Charlie Day's character was being completely and utterly inappropriately sexually dominated by his boss, a dentist played by Jennifer Anniston? It was played for laughs because Anniston is widely considered to be both attractive and a woman. While listening to Shade 45 on Sirius/XM I heard one of the hosts bring up this very subplot from the film framed as, "If you a man, and your female boss is harassing you, do you deal with it like a man, or be a "bitchass" and report it?" As a male dealing with sexual harassment from an employer, those are your options... you can be a “bitchass” and go through proper channels, or be a man and... I guess do what the characters in Horrible Bosses do, and attempt a murder. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the first caller to the show when they opened a line completely agreed with the “bitchass” theory. Of course, Horrible Bosses, is still a pretty funny movie though.
Remember how in 1999's American Pie, goofball Jim gets the gorgeous Nadia in his room to change her clothes? Planning for this, Jim and his homies leave an active webcam hidden in the room so they can see her awesome body in all its nubile splendor from the safety of Kevin’s house. But uh oh, bungling Jim accidentally sends the signal out to the entire school! Naturally, when left alone too long Nadia finds Jim’s dirty magazines and begins to masturbate. Next thing you know, Jim is back in the room trying to seal the deal with this hot, masturbating girl in his room. Gasp! And she’s into it! Unfortunately, Jim being Jim, has multiple unfortunate and embarrassing premature mishaps before getting walked in on by his parents. Oh Jim! Later on, we find out that embarrassment Nadia gets deported over all this! On the other hand poor Jim is left without a prom date. Luckily for Jim, in 1999, the worst penalty for the illegal filming of women could net a high school kid was a very stern fist bump from his father.
We can make this renaissance of sexual harassment whistleblowing and actual reactions all about the men at the center of it. All about Weinstein, and Louis CK, and Kevin Spacey, and Bill Cosby, and Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, Brock Turner, and George H.W. Bush, and Bill O'Reilly, and Roy Moore, and Roger Ayers, and Brett Ratner, and Bryan Singer, and R. Kelly, and Woody Allen, and Jimmy Page, and more... But it's about us. It's about who we protect, what we enjoy, and even what we laugh at.
While these past moments in my comedy past are long gone, they brought a lot of perverse joy to many us. So I think it's time we started looking real hard at the media we consume and what it means. What does it turn us into? What does it turn our kids and siblings into when they think rape is funny or that men are entitled to a sexual conquest because they’re successful at something? Unfortunately, it turns them into us - who we are right now. And as 1 out of every 6 women is a victim of an “attempted or completed rape” as well as 1 out of every 10 men (that we know about) with untold amounts of violence being meted out to our transgender brothers and sisters on an hourly basis, more of us is a real fucking problem.
Every day, more and more women are triggered by some new allegation come to light (Charlie Rose) and many of us relive the untold plethora of memories from the times we did nor said nothing as sexually inappropriate actions happened in front of us. Personally, I get to think of the times we laughed when we heard about how NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders reached down her pants and touched our friend a bar without consent, or the inappropriate place NFL Hall of Famer Earl Campbell put his hand during a rather routine greeting with a woman he was meeting for the first time.
Get it? It was funny because it was just like those kinds of characters in the movies! We didn’t write letters, or start a petition, or even encourage our friends to report it for all the good it would have done. We just expected this kind of behavior from those kind of men… And we laughed about it.
Maybe it’s time we stop thinking this shit is so funny.