Cameron Esposito's 'Rape Jokes' comedy special is a challenge to do better

In 2012, Daniel Tosh made a rape joke during a standup set in California. A woman in the audience stood up and had a problem with it, being a victim of sexual assault herself. Tosh saw a heckler, and reacted immediately. He said "Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now?"

Response to the episode was divisive, with many supporting the woman's blog post about her experience, and many comics arguing for the industry's freedom of speech (but also, freedom from heckling). It's interesting to wonder how the same scene would play out now – or if a comic would even go there in the first place.

"I don’t think all comics feel the same way about all topics," says Cameron Esposito, whose brilliant new special Rape Jokes premiered Monday. "There’s this presumed 'comics feel this way,' ‘women feel this way’ – as if those are two separate groups and as if all comics line up. We are not a uniform group of people and I think debate among people in the same profession is really positive."

In Rape Jokes, Esposito examines the culture that led us to 2017's #MeToo revolution, including hilarious anecdotes about her childhood at Catholic school and abstinence-only sex education. She shares the story of her own sexual assault in the same hour as a colorful poop emergency, and she makes it look easy.

Esposito worked on Rape Jokes for six months, about half the time she'd usually have for a special. She woke up in the middle of the night with the title and worked from there.

"I’m not trying to make rape culture a pleasant experience, but I am trying to make education a pleasant experience," Esposito told Mashable via a phone interview. "For an audience I would want the folks to learn, and I would want folks to come away with maybe a slightly different perspective."

Comedy has a bit of a reputation for rejecting "PC culture," as Esposito notes in the special, and she questions why, since it really just means using different words than the ones we used to use.

Indeed, in the age of Trump, there is an epidemic of provocation for provocations' sake (and not limited to comedians). Nothing is supposed to be off-limits, which then creates a level playing field, but the issue with rape jokes has always been that they could potentially alienate a significant part of the audience.

"When you’re dealing with something that really affects and is a lived experience for so many people in your audience and so many comics...this is like such a common experience, so we shouldn’t act as if or joke about it as if it’s an abstract concept but more as if it’s a real thing," Esposito says.

When audiences reject a joke, Esposito says that's feedback, not censorship, and comics can challenge themselves to come at the joke differently – to, you know, learn and improve.

"If other comics feel attacked or trolled when they don’t take a topic seriously, I would just challenge comics to maybe be a little more serious about our craft," she said.

"I hope that stand up continues to evolve as a medium," Esposito says. "I wouldn’t ever want to commit so much time, energy and love to an art that I thought was not...evolving, or didn’t need to change every day."

The special is a master class, and one of those that pushes audiences to think critically (while also laughing a ton). Esposito also puts her money where her mouth is – there's a reason this isn't in Netflix's growing library of stand up comedy, and that's because it's only available on Esposito's website, where optional donations benefit RAINN.

"The point in the set is that we can talk about individuals who have done terrible things, and we should talk about that, and at the same time we have to talk about the way in which culture creates the perfect conditions for this to happen," Esposito says. "I think that working on those conditions is perhaps the way to create the most change."

Rape Jokes is now streaming (watch above).