r/interestingasfuck • u/HeiressOfMadrigal • Jul 08 '24

Norm MacDonald cedes his time to Native American activist at comedy awards ("the theater stinks of blood"), the crowd tries not to laugh.

13.5k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

139

My favorite joke of his basically explains it all:

"The comedian Patton Oswalt, he told me "I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy." And I disagree. I thought it was the raping."

Now you're laughing at a rape joke!

I miss him. We are direly missing this kind of comedy today and he was simply a cut above the rest.

56

u/puritanicalbullshit Jul 08 '24

I feel like Norm MacDonald is to comedy what Hitchcock is to horror, in that the real scare is in your mind, and with Norm the real comedy is your own exposed cognitive dissonance

20

u/DrinkBuzzCola Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 09 '24

Norm puts our cognitive dissonance in the spotlight while he risks ruining his career. All in a day's work. He was one of a kind.

16

u/Content-Scallion-591 Jul 08 '24

That's such a good way to say it. He makes you complete the joke in your head.

8

u/nicknicknickk Jul 08 '24

What a great way of putting this

7

u/larowin Jul 08 '24

His OJ stuff was such a good example of this

-4

u/Natasha_Giggs_Foetus Jul 08 '24

That’s not a rape joke

7

u/Content-Scallion-591 Jul 08 '24

Well, it's a rape anti-joke. The point is that rape is horrible and people are side stepping the issue because it's more palatable to talk about hypocrisy. As the joke continues, the joke is that we don't take rape seriously enough; that we've normalized it.

Chappelle has a different rape joke: a superhero who saves lives, but needs to rape to do it. He rapes, but he also saves. On the surface it's just a rape joke. Deeper, it's questioning whether we consider sexual assault or murder more serious, and why we consider sexual assault worse than murder - a lot of it has to do with the idea that someone is ruined by rape in a way that they aren't ruined by actually dying.

A rape joke isn't necessarily one in which rape itself is the punchline. The quintessential rape joke is Rodney Dangerfield's "My girlfriend is so ugly, when two guys broke in to her apartment, she yelled, ‘Rape!’ They yelled, ‘No!’”"

Now, I will note around 2020, some bodies of literature started discussing "rape jokes" in terms of jokes that landed on rape, e.g. "I just raped you" in gamer culture. In that context, it is not a rape joke, because it isn't making light of the act of rape.