As a former standup comedian, I’ve looked on the great Daniel Tosh rape controversy of 2012 with some interest.  After a week, I had to.  At first, it was barely a blip on my radar, another insensitive frat boy saying something out loud in public that didn’t play as well as it did at the last basement kegger with his bros.

I’ll admit I was a little surprised.  I’ve never watched a whole episode of Tosh.O, but in the snippets I’ve caught, Tosh seemed like a snarky yet inoffensive boy next door.  He was the kid who was funny because he wasn’t quite as handsome or athletic as his older brother, while still being far more part of the regular crowd than the rest of us in the comedy world.  That’s the reminder that network and basic cable hardly give us a sense of what goes on in comedy clubs or in the theater, where there is no family hour and no one has to worry about giving grandma a heart attack with strong language.  Often the difference is striking.

All that said, the major discussion to come out of Tosh’s remark about how funny it would be if one of his female audience members were gang raped is whether rape jokes are funny.  The answer is the same as it is for any other topic:  They can be.

Comedy is never really about the subject.  It’s about what you do with it.  I’ve been a huge Ellen DeGeneres fan for years, laughing like crazy at whole routines about Scrabble, mud baths and the dangers of chewing gum.  None of these is offensive, of course, but neither are they inherently funny.  The funny came from Ellen doing something special with them.  You have to work to find an angle, a new way of approaching a subject.  Otherwise, you’re just boring or mean.

It’s important to know your time, too.  When I started out in comedy, the stereotypical fag was a stock character.  A comic could go on stage with an opener like:  “I order a pizza the other night.  And when it came, the delivery guy was a fag!”  Not only would that get a laugh, every mincing, lisping action or word he attributed to the fag would bring the house down.  Sometimes the stories would be darker and more violent, but the crowd would still laugh.  We’ve come a long way since then, but I have a good idea how the woman in Tosh’s audience felt.

Later, as I was working on my routines, I knew many of my audiences wouldn’t be open to a fag on stage.  I knew I had to address that and that I had to do it in a way that drew them in all while being true to myself.  My approach was always “Here’s something funny I’ve observed” rather than “Here’s something stupid you assholes do.”  One of my best memories is coming off the stage in a pool hall in a logging town in Washington State where I was pretty sure I was going to be killed and being stopped by a local who shook my hand and said, “You’re funny man.”  Woo-hoo!  Success!  You have to connect with the audience in some way.  They have to understand you and it helps if they don’t hate you.

With that in mind, you can address almost anything and make it funny.  Correction:  You can address anything.  An African American comedian I knew did a routine that began with him spouting all the old negative stereotypes about blacks and how he agreed with them (not funny), then would escalate to the point that he was trying to join the KKK and was chasing down frightened Klanners shouting, “But I’m one of you!”  It wasn’t just absurd, it was hysterical.  Another white comedian did a piece that started out in much the same way, which brought a horrified WTF hush to the room, but as he was speaking he actually devolved into a Neanderthal.  It brought the house down.  I used to do one about coming on to straight guys in public bathrooms, but I did it while singing “Hey Big Spender” from “Sweet Charity” – with choreography, naturally.  (If none of these seems too funny here, chalk that up to the magic of performance.  If you were in the room, you’d definitely laugh.)

Of course the “rules” of comedy are more like guidelines and breaking them sometimes makes for the funniest stuff.  And that’s what all comedians are ultimately looking for – the funniest stuff.  Good, bad, or offensive, club comedy is free form.  That’s part of the fun.  You’re not always on and sometimes you say something stupid, like Tosh did.  I hope he takes away the relatively narrow lesson that he needs to rethink his ideas about rape – and perhaps some other old-school “guy” topics, not the broader one that he needs to generally rein himself in.  Comedy with no spontaneity is a lecture, which is really not funny.