There’s been a lot of noise in the news about comedy lately, and the battle lines are clear: “it’s just a joke” versus “comedy has a power that can be wielded for both good and evil”.
As both a comedian and a comedy fan, I do not care about offence. As a feminist in the public eye I’m sometimes called upon by BBC researchers who seem to want me to say we should “ban this filth”, because Mary Whitehouse isn’t around to do it. But I’m a gen-X comic and writer. I wrote a whole chapter in my latest book about freedom of speech in comedy and why it’s paramount in a democracy. We are all offended by different things at different times and, frankly, it passes. Offence is usually about taste. However, I seriously call upon all comedians, both pros on telly and amateurs in the pub, to look hard at the evidence for how comedy materially shapes our societal views and norms, especially when it comes to violence against women. Because comedy is a speedy, sticky way to send an idea around the world, and make no mistake: a punchline can pack a punch.
During a “roast” (a show in which comedians subject each other to comic insults) Northern Irish comedian Vittorio Angelone told a horrible rape and incest joke that he now calls “completely pathetic”. It was filmed, and the clip sat behind a Patreon paywall for a year. In a spectacular act of self-sabotage, Angelone chose to post the clip on his Instagram grid last week.
Vittorio Angelone. Photo: Getty
Rebecca Goodwin, a fellow performer, was the target of the joke. I won’t repeat it here but it implied a male comedian, who was being “roasted” at the time, was a rapist and that he had or would assault Goodwin, but also that she had been assaulted by her father. She is currently the complainant in an ongoing rape trial (not to do with her father or the comedian in question) and she made a video expressing how distressed and angry the joke had made her.
Comedian Daniel Sloss, also participating in the roast, was filmed laughing at the joke. Sloss has garnered a lot of female fans following a routine in 2019 that encouraged men to speak up when one of their number makes a misogynistic joke. He explained that he had failed to do that in the past and a man he knew had gone on to hurt a woman. The routine has been clipped by his fans and gone viral multiple times. In it he says he's determined to do better.
Both men have apologised. I do not wish to pillory individuals here who I believe regret their actions, but rather to examine the culture of misogyny in comedy and what power these jokes might have.
Vittorio Angelone’s apology on Instagram
Comedian and writer Katy Brand posted on her Instagram recently that "comedy is not a meritocracy, it's a fraternity". I agree. Recently, I wrote a column for the Nerve on the Cornell case of alleged gang sexual assault in a fraternity house. In it, I quoted a study that demonstrated young men who pledged a frat were three times more likely to sexually assault someone in their first year of college than those who didn't. But it was not that the most violent men were drawn to "Greek life", as they call it. Those same young men were no more likely to hurt a woman the year before they got to college. It was the environment of the fraternity that changed who they were and what they were capable of doing.
How? Well, the fraternities' brutal hazing rituals are designed to dehumanise. Swallow a live goldfish. Run through the campus naked, painted blue. Play Edward Fortyhands (a game in which someone duct-tapes bottles of booze to both hands of a new recruit until he’s chugged them). If you think this sounds like harmless fun, there have been 128 hazing deaths in American college fraternities since 2000 and the number of fatalities has risen significantly every decade since the 1990s. (Compare 18 deaths in the 1960s to 63 deaths in the 2010s.)
Assuming you survive, you’ve paid the price of admission to an elite network. Once you've been dehumanised, you get to do it to someone else. If you're on the bottom rung of the fraternity, you probably have to bring in someone from outside the club. A woman who's incapacitated, for example. Then you can message the group chat and tell them you've brought someone in for everyone to abuse, like a keg of beer.
How can verbal jokes operate on a similar model, and where can the consequences become physically harmful? Recently American comedian Shane Gillis delivered the opening monologue for Saturday Night Live. He joked "I haven't been to the gym in so long, I didn't know women just dress like whores now" and complained about not being allowed to look at their "artificial bait coloured” shorts that "puckered around the butthole”, but admitted he was doing it anyway. There was a seething reaction from women, as expected, who couldn’t understand his motive for this nasty, punchline-free observation. But I think the clue was in plain sight.
In the monologue he told us something else that had just happened to him. He was in Joe Rogan's sauna when Theo Von, another comic, told Rogan that Gillis looked like "a gas station egg”. Rogan came and opened the door just to look at him in only a towel, taunt him with that insult and run away. "A wet, bagged, hard-boiled egg... One of the meanest things anyone's told me."
Joe Rogan has Spotify's number one podcast in the world. Theo Von's is top five in America. Shane Gillis is a very wealthy, extremely successful comedian, but I’d suggest that, in that trio, he's the little brother. When the Alpha came to point and humiliate him, the junior wanted to find someone with even less status and mock their appearance in turn.
Studies show that violent men believe that most men are violent to women or want to be. It's the joke that tells them they might be right and the laugh that confirms it
Who has less status in their world? Women. And, in a frat house, what is the worst insult for a woman? She's sexually autonomous and adventurous. She initiates. Perhaps she even solicits. She's not ashamed of her sexuality. She's not comatose or incapacitated. She's not unwilling. In short, she's "a whore". Or at least she dresses like one.
Gillis opened the gym door, shouted that and ran away. And he did it without a punchline. He took that enormous platform (where he could have said something subversive and original, or at least done some reliable material that worked) and he chose to do exactly what Rogan did to him. Some men online defended his comedy as “edgy”. If that’s edgy, my high school was full of comic visionaries, and give the inside of the lavatory door an Emmy.
I believe that Vittorio Angelone's roast joke was more powerful than Gillis's routine, precisely because it was better constructed. It had tension, taboo, surprise and a shocking twist. All of that can make an audience laugh from the gut, even if they find the subject matter distasteful and ugly. It sounded to me like Gillis's audience was tittering politely.
Why does this make a difference? Because according to social scientists, the laugh is more dangerous than the joke. Dr Mónica Romero-Sánchez, a respected Spanish academic, has spent her career analysing the causality between comedy and active real-world violence against women. In an interview she told me it is important to remember that "a sexist joke does not possess an 'active ingredient' that transforms a man into an abuser. Humour itself is not the generator of prejudice, but rather a facilitating channel for its expression and a catalyst that increases tolerance for discriminatory or violent acts.”
She explained that jokes activate "a rule of lightness", so they can undermine the seriousness of violence and trivialise it. When it’s laughed off by other men as inconsequential, it can embolden a man to act on his most violent instincts and feel like his male peers would not care and might even approve.
In other words, a joke alone won't make a man violent, but it can absolutely give permission to a man who harbours attitudes of hostile sexism (animosity, resentment, or a drive for dominance over women). Romero-Sánchez says those kind of jokes “perform a prejudice-releasing function, acting as a trigger for tendencies that [potentially violent] men would otherwise keep suppressed, due to social desirability”.
It is the laugh that grants a man with violent tendencies "moral amnesty", she explains. It gives him "a green light" and backing to act, without fear of rejection from those around him. It eliminates the fear of social sanctions and backs the expression of derogatory behaviour toward women. In other words, when it comes to violence against women, there is no such thing as "just a joke". The comedian telling the joke may well be completely anti-violence and just revelling in the taboo-breaking construction of the gag, but the violent men in the audience will still be endorsed.
Astoundingly, Romero-Sánchez’s 2009 study demonstrated that men exposed to sexist jokes who didn't find them offensive "self-reported higher rape proclivities".
Men with sexist attitudes tend to regulate their behaviour based on the risk of social retaliation. So booing in a comedy club (even if you laughed out of shock at first) or saying to someone in a pub "hey mate, that's horrible – don’t talk about women like that," can work to curb violent men, in the same way that laughter can encourage violent acts.
I believe the exception to Romero-Sánchez’s point about jokes not being able to make a non-violent man violent may well be full community immersion. Why?
Let's revisit fraternities. There are no serious lectures, printed manuals or instructional videos on how to prey on women in a frat house. How do these young men end up three times more likely to hurt a woman? How do we get to the state of the Cornell group chat, with men messaging the whole group to say “Free pussy upstairs”?
What is the training programme? It is entirely constructed of jokes. Every practical joke, prank and belittling of the freshmen is presented as "a laugh", as is holding up signs in the quad rating women’s attractiveness from 0 to 10. If a woman complains she is told that she can't take… a what? A joke.
Of course, not every rape joke leads to an assault, but I don’t believe any assault is committed by a man who hasn’t participated in those jokes first. After former Met police officer Wayne Couzens brutally raped and murdered Sarah Everard in London in 2021, it came to light that the police group chat was full of graphic rape jokes, each one giving Couzens more and more community endorsement for his most evil desires. Six officers involved in the chat were sacked or barred from policing and two were given a 12-week prison sentence. Couzens's nickname on the force was “the rapist”. That was a joke, until it wasn’t. It meant “we all know what he’s like and we all look away”.
If a frat house teaches through comedy, comedy can become a frat house.
Daniel Sloss. Photo: Getty
Daniel Sloss’s viral video on this subject makes this exact point. He issued a full apology for his part in laughing at the roast joke, and later, in response to further online criticism, he made a follow-up statement in which he provided more context. He discussed the culture of the event: “I was... stoned out of my fucking mind during the roast. And very drunk. Doing horrible jokes about fellow comedians, while they're in the room, is a nerve wracking experience. So it's not unusual for acts to smoke weed and drink copiously all the way through a comedy roast... I honestly didn't remember much of the night at all."
Sloss ends this section with "And that's on me", but it does rather feel like a bus driver saying: "I did drive the bus into a wall and some people got hurt, but to be fair I was smashed. It’s a very stressful job, so that’s how we roll.”
He’s explaining the norms of the culture and they really do seem ordinary to him, but to me they’re quite scary. If comedians are wielding roast jokes that deliver a "moral amnesty" and perform a "prejudice-releasing function" to the men in the audience (and these days the whole of the internet), that is surely when they need to be at their most sober and most precise. For me, that kind of roast, like hazing, should get off the bus and go back to the 70s. There are affectionate, jocular roasts between friends, but not like this. I think what troubles me most is that no one seems to have even commented that a man was effectively called a rapist during the roast – and it doesn’t even seem to have been enough of an insult in that community that anyone has felt they had to apologise to him or retract it.
A sexist joke does not possess an 'active ingredient' that transforms a man into an abuser. Humour itself is not the generator of prejudice, but rather a facilitating channel for its expression
That is extremely concerning, because studies show that violent men believe that most men are violent to women or want to be but aren't "man enough to do it". It's the joke that tells them they might be right and the laugh that confirms it.
The good news is that Romero-Sánchez told me subversive humour against sexism can play a powerful role in lowering defences, "making it easier for the audience to process criticism of the patriarchal system in a less threatening manner". I’ve had experience of this on The Guilty Feminist. I once received a letter from a man called Lawrence who said: “I started listening to your podcast because I wanted to find out what the enemy was up to, but I have to say after 18 months, you’ve worn me down. I realise now, I do ‘other’ everyone who isn’t a white straight man. Sometimes what you say still annoys me, but keep saying it because it’s working.” When I asked him why he’d stuck around for so long, he answered: “Because it’s funny and even though sometimes the jokes are about views like mine, I couldn’t help laughing.” His defences came down.
I have seen both Vittorio Angelone and Daniel Sloss do really positive comedy that challenges the misuse of power, as well as silly, joyful stuff. I have to believe they both understand the significance of their platforms and will use their considerable talents purposefully and not carelessly. I hope they just got caught up in the frat-house of it all and this has enabled them to take a step back and see more of the picture. They are both part of a culture which won't change without many men looking at the evidence and saying: "OK, this stuff shifts the dial. I want to use my profile and ability to make the world better. There's enough violence, misogyny and humiliation in the world."
I truly believe this could be an epoch-changing moment for British comedy. Other comedians look up to them both and they could pave the way. I want to publicly offer them both the opportunity to come on The Guilty Feminist and maybe discuss it with Dr Romero-Sánchez. I have no desire for gotchas and every wish for bridges to be built and changes made.
Meantime, as I often say to new comedians, "if you're not very good, your jokes won’t be very sticky or powerful. You have to worry more if you're really funny. That's when what you say can truly change the culture." I find every one of them believes they should be more careful then.
Deborah Frances-White hosts The Guilty Feminist podcast. Her latest book, Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have, is published in paperback by Virago. Buy at a discounted price in the Nerve’s bookshop here