“Open Letter to White Male Comedians” Critical Summary and Research Questions

• “I have more experience doing comedy than you have being a woman.”
• “But you dohave to live with the consequences of what you say, and how your words color people’s perceptions of what kind of human being you are.”
• “You can do whatever you want, but you can’t stop me and everyone else who hears you from telling you when you’re full of shit.”

 

Lindy West a writer, comedian, and activist speaks very strongly on the topic of male oppression of women and their role in comedy and society in her blog post Open Letter to White Male Comedians. Many of the issues that she speaks on such as rape jokes, female oppression in comedian groups, and white male comedians downright belittling them in general are argued in her post. West starts off with a strong argument of, “I have more experience doing comedy than you have being a woman.” Analyzing this you can see she means men who make jokes and oppress women no matter what the situation can not possibly put themselves in a women’s shoes and understand how that makes them feel. However, West, and other women in comedy have the experience of being a comedian, and so they have they understanding of why certain jokes would want to be made, but don’t agree with how they are executed. This is something that the men who make the jokes about women must understand about the affect these jokes make on rape victims and other people who listen to their jokes.

West makes this clear by saying “But you do have to live with the consequences of what you say, and how your words color people’s perceptions of what kind of human being you are.” Thinking about the affect jokes have on people in this way, there will be people who reevaluate the way they make jokes, but you will also have people without a care in the world who will not change no matter what. What I gathered from Wests’ argument on this is that when people finally take in this thought it will separate the good people from the bad people. The men who truly want to do comedy to make people feel good will at least attempt to alter their ways, however the men who just want to go up there and say whatever they want will never change. These are the men who constantly argue they are being told what they can and can not say, and that people are too sensitive. That is not the case though, these men are just asses.

You must understand that West really isn’t saying that all these men can’t make rape jokes or jokes about gender or race. She is simply saying “You can do whatever you want, but you can’t stop me and everyone else who hears you from telling you when you’re full of shit.” You don’t have to be mean when making jokes about people and things they have no control over in their lives, you just have to think about ways to make the jokes funny without hurting the people who have gone through traumatic experiences. I believe that that would show how great the comedians truly are. However, West makes it very clear that if they aren’t willing to change then they should be expecting quite a bit a scrutiny from the people it affects.

 

Research questions that have come up during these readings are related to a few different topics. For example, when a person of influence is publicized as being involved in sexual assault is there a change in rape victims coming forward in the country as a whole? Another one would be, how has the type of jokes changed over the last 25 years in relation to public controversy? My last question can be thought about in two different ways. One, why have rape jokes become so popular over the years? The other being, what has changed in society that make jokes on topics like rape okay to talk about? I tried to think about questions that could be easy to look up as well as ones that would require a bit more digging.