You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes

by Vanessa Place, Dave Hickey (Foreword), Natasha Stagg (Afterword)

This book is a text version of Vanessa Place's live performance I've got this really great joke about rape, in which the artist recites rape jokes for 45 minutes to a seated audience in a gallery or from a small stage. It is art performance, not stand-up comedy. Many of the jokes were found on various English-language websites dedicated to offensive jokes; inspired by the form, the artist has improved some of the jokes, and written some herself.

Place decided to work with rape jokes several years ago after various stand-up comics were rebuked for making rape jokes on and off-stage; the gist of the criticism being that "rape jokes aren't funny," and that a rape joke is tantamount to rape itself. But Place's work shows that rape jokes aren't rape and considers why rape jokes are very funny to very many people, and persistently so. As Place's audiences have demonstrated, those categorically opposed to the rape joke tend to find themselves straining not to laugh, just as those usually thrilled by such raw language find themselves gagging on something hard to swallow. What then proves interesting is the activation of the when, why, and how of such charged words being funny, being revolting, becoming sound, fashioning suspense. To experience this language that hangs thick in the air; to see where, in each of us, the joke sticks.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 2, 2018

About the author

Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press/Random House. Information As Material will be publishing her trilogy: Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument. Statement of Facts will also be published in France by éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits. Place is described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”

Author Interviews:

--http://avantwomenwriters.blogspot.com...

--http://www.joshmaday.com/2009/04/blak...

Reviews

[Jonathan]

- you can watch part of her reading here:

https://vimeo.com/210518243

[Jodie Kindell · Rating 4 out of 5]

An uncomfortable read but a perfect reflection on rape culture jokes that still very much exist in life.

[Jeanett Sirland · Rating 3 out of 5]

A find from the grab-a-book-give-a-book shelf outside the local library.

[Mark Robison · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's probably not fair to review this book as a book. It's really a performance art piece that needs to be seen (maybe). If the exact same content had been put in book form by, say, Donald Trump Jr., well, it couldn't have been published and if it had, it would've been denounced worldwide. But when an edgy artist does it, it's art?

The author trolls the internet for rape jokes and compiles them here. Some are so awful, they make the reader sick. Some are funny. Some are so shocking, the surprise pries laughs out of the reader. It reminds me of "dead baby" jokes I used to think were funny when I was 12 years old.

The author even sneaks in some jokes to show she doesn't really mean it. ("If you didn't want to hear a rape joke, why are you dressed like you want to hear a rape joke?" and "Only 6% of all rape cases end in conviction. Anyone else like those odds?")

Even though the print size is giant (much bigger than "large print" books) and the pages are only printed on one side — and the book is still short — this was tough to get through. It's ugly and awful and it forces the reader to sometimes laugh at the ugliness and awfulness. Maybe admire the concept of it, but don't read it.

The afterword by Natasha Stagg is essential to not wanting to burn the book.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rape jokes purportedly reveal violent or hostile biases in our society. Racism, sexism, pedophilia, bestiality—expressed via rape and murder. In addition to women and girls, men and boys also get raped here—by strangers, siblings, parents, dogs, and priests. Weapons sometimes are sometimes part of the joke. In short, the book consists of atrocious acts described using the rhetoric of comedy . . SPOILER ALERT: In addition to the offensiveness, the vast majority of these jokes are just plain bad. But Vanessa Place is interested in the jokes that *do* make us laugh—when, and why. Even among the otherwise offended, do they find the same jokes funny, or do different absurdities described in the jokes appeal to different people, and why might that be? People do laugh at what they know to be fundamentally wrong. Why, what is going on in our heads to make that so?

Definitely on the "conceptual art" side of the lit continuum, overlapping with Peter Sotos and Kenneth Goldsmith.

[Peter Schutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Can one act within a system without perpetuating it?
Reading this book is participating in a joke, and the joke is on the reader. It mirrors other acts of engagement that may intend to enlighten us but also make us complicit in a narrative that, in search of a definition or a defamation, perpetuates obscurity.”

“I prefer to work with ‘hot’ language, difficult and/or violent words, because they make their own frictions and resistances. Because language is easily mistaken for the event itself. And because art is violent.”

[Brittany Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

fucking devastating

[Keith Christen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A textual violation. A document of our darkest corners of society told in a way that cuts deeper than anything else: humor.

[Cierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Effective, left me wondering why I laughed at some jokes and not others. You could say it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.

[Syd Lazarus]

I still don't know if I have anything worthwhile to say about this book.