Freedom of speech is a valued ideal, but is making jokes about the physical and mental devastation of women the best we can do with that right? For her part, Schumer has admitted a certain ambiguity in the representation of rape and its effects, saying that ”You can maybe look at that scene and think we’re making light of something serious, but we really are trying to educate, but that’s not always clear. Rape proclivity among men high in hostile sexism did not differ as a function of the gender of the joke teller.

The jokes' lack of specificity makes them infectious, like they could morph to fit and then violate in any context, given the chance.Although I’ve told most of those closest to me about what happened, many in my life are still unaware of what I went through.

As Garry Trudeau ("Doonesbury") famously reminded us last year: The best jokes "punch up," never down. It’s followed by an excellent, appalling scene in which middle-aged ladies spit at the coach for not letting “our boys” have their rightful rapes. If you offend a victim, and they explain why your words have hurt them, what you do next is what's important. Adrienne Truscott: ‘People say we can’t “normalize” what [Trump] says – but heaven forbid someone suggests that a genre of comedy could be considered contributing to the “normalizing” of rape. Seriously, though, we can either lament our age and stage in life or we can laugh about it, and people are grateful to the Holdernesses for assisting with the latter.Snarky: Even if the motivation is almost entirely sexual, the act still requires the rapist to ignore the victim's resistances and cries for them to stop. Alan just described a rape joke: a comment that ridicules the act of sexual assault or rape in an effort to be humorous. No wonder the best films about holocaust are also comedies; sometimes, laughter is the most authentic way to admit our perplexity and despair.