I have a low tolerance for rape jokes. Even as someone who believes that comedy should take no prisoners, and that everyone and everything should be fair game for humor, I mostly find rape and molestation jokes abhorrent and not funny. Why? Because of incidents like these.
That’s why I really hate it when sitcoms have characters lying about being raped or molested for the sake of gaining sympathy. Incidents like the above happen all the time. Rape victims of both sexes are constantly accused of lying about what happened to them. I’m very disappointed in Community for having a story where Troy lies about being molested in an acting class in order to a) gain sympathy from his fellow students, and b) get into Britta’s pants.
This show is better than that. It’s also funnier than that. Community is a show that keeps the viewers on their toes, with plot twists and clever jokes coming out of nowhere. As soon as Troy lied, I rolled my eyes and groaned because I knew exactly how the rest of the episode would go: Britta would be attracted, Troy would continue with the lie, Britta would tell others, Troy would confess the truth, and the acting teacher would applaud him for tapping into real emotion. And that’s exactly what happened. This show is too good to rely on cheap, tired sitcom tropes like that. Not even Kevin Corrigan’s return as Professor Professorson, or Troy describing his emotions as “My heart is at war with my kidneys!” could save it.
I did enjoy the show’s two other plots, with Pierce finding a soulmate in a woman just as offensive and horrible as he. I also laughed for about five minutes in the hilarious conclusion to Abed’s “Who’s the Boss” subplot: Stephen Tobolowsky, upon realizing that his life’s work is discredited, opens the drawer to his desk and we see a gun…until he pulls it out further to find a copy of What WAS Happening? and starts reading it. THAT was a delightful fakeout worth this show.
The Troy subplot, however, was offensive, not funny, and a waste of Donald Glover. This episode was disappointing.
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Agreed. That was the most blah episode of Community in a long time, and that particular subplot married boring and offensive in a way that…is actually pretty horrifying when you stop and think about it: how is it that a “joke” so completely disgusting is so normalized that its trajectory is entirely predictable?
(Answer: rape culture, that’s how.)
(We did get some primo Donald Glover goodness in the tag, though. “It’s hard to be Jewish in Russia, yo!”)
how is it that a “joke” so completely disgusting is so normalized that its trajectory is entirely predictable?
It really is disturbing, isn’t it?
I did enjoy the all-black version of Fiddler on the Roof. Mostly, though, the Troy subplot tainted the whole episode for me. It made him look bad, it made Britta look bad, it made the show look bad, and I expect better from these writers.
All my friends said I’d like Community, though the only other time I caught it, it also included a rape “joke.”
So I decided to give it a chance last night, since I was going to watch the new Parks & Rec.
And…yeah. This is what I get. Great job, Community. Seriously.
I’m a big, BIG fan of Community and the show doesn’t make a habit of using that kind of humor. But, if you’ve only seen it twice, and both of those times it did make insensitive jokes like that…I can understand why that would be a dealbreaker for you.
I don’t object to rape jokes per se, but I understand why people do, The same way I understand my grandmother’s refusal to watch “The Producers.” She and her family were all in America, so it wasn’t a personal survivor thing, more a view that some topics were off limits and that it would be laughed at by “the wrong people,” the same worry that caused Dave Chapelle to quit his show. And I imagine if a relative of mine had killed themselves recently, I would have found the joke with the professsor’s drawer intolerable. Certain jokes about torture are intolerable to me in a culture where it’s ongoing right now, and we’re all in some way complicit in it.
I found Troy’s plot stupid and standard sitcom, though not actively offensive. I never really connected to it to the doubts thrown up at real-life rape survivors, and thinking about it now, I don’t feel that it. Even what I consider a funny version of the same joke (a throwaway bit in The Office a few years ago) doesn’t make me feel that rape is anything but underreported and that the system makes it very difficult for victims for to be believes, let alone get justice. And I feel uncomfortable with the argument that other people will feel persuaded, or that it’ll give aid and comfort to those who enjoy and benefit from that difficulty. But like I said, I don’t have a good answer.
I want to respond because I half-agree with everything you said here while the other half of me is still uncomfortable with this episode. I’ll probably write a separate post dealing with this issue. My very, very short answer: for me, the issue isn’t so much what’s being joked about as the way it’s joked about.
I do want to add another reason why the episode didn’t work for me: Troy and Abed are two of the most innocent characters on the show, very sweet and unassuming and almost childlike in their beliefs. I wouldn’t have liked this plot no matter which character it concerned, but the fact that it involved Troy made it even worse. He’s not an opportunistic, scheming character, even if he’s attracted to a woman. This is the kind of thing Jeff or Pierce or maybe Britta would do.
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