Writing “How to Make a Rape Joke”

Writing “How to Make a Rape Joke” was Lindy West’s attempt to turn a public dispute about Daniel Tosh into a constructive argument about comedy’s power and responsibilities. Rather than treating the choice as comedy versus censorship, she asked what a joke targets, whose experience it reinforces, and whether it makes the world better or worse. The essay became one of her most widely circulated pieces and gave female comedy fans a voice in a debate that had often treated their objections as proof that they did not understand humor.

Assignment and context

In the summer of 2012, several months into her work at Jezebel, West was assigned to respond to an incident involving Daniel Tosh at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. She felt suited to the task: she had written straightforward humor since the beginning of her career and believed she understood both comedy’s mechanics and its history. She also saw herself as able to speak across a divide between comedy clubs and feminist communities, rather than simply denouncing one side to reassure the other.

That confidence took shape against a comedy culture whose celebrated founders and contemporary leaders were overwhelmingly men. West questioned why women should assume their interests were represented by a tradition built largely by male comedians, especially when the idea that women were not funny remained conventional wisdom. Her concern was not only who got to perform, but who was presumed to have authority to explain what comedy meant and what audiences should accept as a joke.

The assignment also arrived within a broader climate in which West was challenging public narratives that treated vulnerable groups as fair targets. In the mid-to-late 2000s, as she began to question the stigma attached to her own fatness, Dan Savage promoted arguments about the so-called obesity epidemic that she considered harmful. West’s critique of that climate emphasized how readily individual people were blamed for structural problems, from poverty and inadequate healthcare to food access and unsafe public spaces. This context informs her wider insistence that jokes and public arguments do not float free of the power relations around them; it does not, however, make the Tosh incident an extension of the dispute with Savage.

The Laugh Factory incident

Tosh was performing a set built around deliberately offensive material when an audience member objected to his general claim that rape jokes were always funny. Tosh responded by suggesting that she might be raped by several men. The woman left the club frightened and later described the threat as intimidating even though she did not believe the scenario was likely to occur. Her account made the stakes of the exchange legible: the joke did not merely name sexual violence as an abstract subject; it directed that threat at a woman who had challenged the performer.

The episode spread online. Tosh issued what West characterized as a weak apology, while several comedians defended him. West’s essay did not rest on the claim that comedy must avoid terrible subjects. Instead, she took up Tosh’s own stated defense that awful things can be joked about and separated that proposition from the assumption that any treatment of them is equally effective or harmless. A comic can address rape, she argued, while choosing whether the joke challenges the conditions that permit it or deepens the contempt directed at its victims.

The essay’s argument and method

West rejected the idea that refusing to censor oneself is automatically a virtue. Comedy, in her account, already depends on selection: a comic chooses words and shapes them to produce an effect. A performer who treats every restraint as an attack on artistic freedom mistakes unfiltered provocation for craft. Likewise, the claim to offend everyone equally ignores unequal positions of power. A joke does not become fair simply because its maker also targets other people; the targets do not all face the same consequences in the world beyond the stage.

To make that distinction concrete, West examined four jokes she believed worked because they aimed at rape culture rather than rape victims. She later judged that she should have scrutinized Louis CK more critically instead of letting him off on what she called a technicality. That qualification matters to the essay’s method: West was not presenting a sealed list of acceptable comics or claiming that her own analysis was beyond revision. She was offering a way to ask what a joke does, while acknowledging that applying the test requires judgment and can expose weaknesses in the critic’s own choices.

The essay framed comedy as both a reflection of social life and a force capable of changing it. West pointed to the influence of Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression during the 2008 election and to the role of The Daily Show as a news source for many viewers. These examples supported her claim that comic speech is not politically weightless. In writing about rape, a comedian chooses whether to make rapists or victims the object of ridicule, and whether the performance reinforces or challenges the surrounding culture. For West, that choice—not a demand that speech be forcibly restricted—was the heart of the debate.

Social stakes and audience

West connected the argument to conditions outside comedy clubs: sexual assault is often unreported and frequently not taken seriously; victims may be blamed for their clothing, location, or behavior; and the social and emotional costs of reporting can be severe. She also described a culture that narrows the definition of assault, excuses misogyny, and treats false accusations as a greater public threat than actual assaults. Less than five percent of rape cases that go to trial result in conviction, she noted. Against that background, assurances that everyone already hates rape could not settle the question of what a victim-directed joke communicates.

The essay also answered a familiar account of feminist objections: that women oppose rape jokes because they are humorless, uptight, or unable to understand comedy. West countered it with the urgency of a different reality, in which sexual violence is common and women’s vulnerability is not merely a fictional premise. She argued that Tosh’s threat reminded his target of that vulnerability and reinforced the sense that comedy belonged to men, who could then claim the authority to define the terms of the debate.

Reception and significance

“How to Make a Rape Joke” went viral on a scale West had not previously experienced. She regarded it as imperfect but successful in bridging the distance between feminists and shock comics through a reasoned argument. Responses came from both sides of that divide, and many female comedy fans told her they were relieved to have their perspectives represented in a debate where they had long been made to feel unwelcome. Some readers said the essay had finally settled the argument, while Patton Oswalt retweeted it.

West also received a smaller amount of hostile, dismissive abuse from Tosh’s supporters, including comments that attacked her credibility while insisting that rape was funny. She was able to shrug off that reaction in the face of the essay’s broader reception. Its significance lies not in claiming that every joke can be sorted into a perfect formula, but in replacing the blunt defense of offensiveness with questions of target, power, craft, and consequence. The piece treated audience members not as obstacles to comedy but as people whose lived conditions help determine what a joke does.