After Conan O’Brien tweeted a joke about Team USA weightlifter Holley Mangold, many were outraged at the insult against the athlete’s weight. Danny digs a little bit deeper.
Sometimes comedy can feel like a minefield. It seems like no matter what a comedian says there’s a high chance that they are going to tap onto some topic or subject that will rub some people the wrong way.
A few days ago comedian Conan O’Brien made a prediction on the performance of weightlifter Holley Mangold at the 2012 Olympics, in London. The tweet goes like this:
I predict 350 lb. weight lifter Holley Mangold will bring home the gold and 4 guys against their will.
This tweet presents us with two things. There is a matter of making fun of Holley’s size and making light of the idea of raping men. In fact, in an email exchange Noah Brand gave a rather nice breakdown of what’s happening in the joke:
“She is fat and therefore no man would ever consent to sex with her. However, she is also strong, therefore their consent becomes irrelevant!”
Holley is doing something with her female body that has traditionally been frowned up for women. Her choice to pursue weightlifting has supposedly made her unattractive to men but she can remedy that by using her superior strength to make guys have sex with her whether they want to or not. This makes her out to be some terrible woman that just can’t get a man unless she becomes a rapist. Holley is going against the flow and doing something that women “aren’t supposed to do”. What is funny about that?
Who said a woman has to build her life around the ability to attract men? Maybe she’s doing this for herself, which should be all that matters?
Did this joke bother you? Were you able to laugh at it and keep going? Additionally I wonder about a few other things as well.
Is this the fate of comedy? An art bound to leave some frowning as others are smiling?
What could be done to remedy this?
Is it possible that various types of social justice could bring about the end of making jokes out of topics that rub people the wrong way?
Or perhaps there is nothing that needs to be “fixed”?
AP Photo/Victoria Will
About Danny
So… My guess is that this will get a lot less outrage than Tosh’s joke…
Conan should man up and give a public apology. Conan is the only one that can remedy it. It was his bad.
I think people are overthinking this. It is a joke. If you do not find it funny, ignore it and move on. Every comment or joke people make is not some thinly veiled attack on someone.
Easier said than done to many in the social justice game. While I doubt this joke, and most jokes, are attacks on individuals, they can contribute to attacks on individuals. How? The fact is, while the majority of people can recognize a joke as just something about society to laugh at, there are a select few (usually those already with risk factors for committing violence) that will take a rape/racist/homophobic joke as reinforcement to sexist/racist/homophobic worldview. So when we joke about rape, 99% of people will laugh or ignore it and move on, but some will see it as societal permission to rape, because rape can’t be so serious if so many people are joking about it.
Maybe the next question is whether or not we let these select few dictate what is funny for society or not. I don’t know.
Do you have any evidence to support that? To my knowledge, people who want commit a crime do not look for societal permission to do it, let alone look to jokes for said permission.
There is so much wrong with that argument it’s hard to pick where to focus. The pulled-out-of-thin-air statistic looks juicy, but that’s too easy. The link between a joke and “permission to rape” is also tempting, since it rest on the premise that humor always condones and approves of the subject matter being laughed at, when the opposite is often the case. I guess my biggest problem is the more subtle argument that if 1% (to use your stat) can misinterpret something that the other 99% get, then that something should be eliminated in the interest of public safety. All sorts of things would follow from that, so for starters, let’s eliminate all movies and TV, because I’ve heard that stalkers have been known to think that every time they see a celebrity, they’re secretly communicating with them about how much they love and want to meet them. Alcohol and many prescription drugs are also out, because we know that probably more than 1% manage to wreck lives with those, despite the much higher percentages who don’t.
This isn’t a thinly-veiled attack at all. I’d say it’s a very blatant attack. The whole point of the joke is that he’s insulting her appearance. He mentions her weight, so clearly her weight is supposed to be a factor in her lack of sexual appeal. Fat jokes are generally shitty and deserve some pushback. Fat jokes about incredibly accomplished athletes who are representing their country at an international level is just low and mean. It’s effectively saying “It doesn’t matter how successful you are in your chosen sport, you’re a woman, therefore your appearance is up for critique, therefore LOL YOU’RE FAT.”
It’s also a really bad rape joke. If the genders were reversed, and this was a joke about a male weightlifter taking home four women against their will, there’d be uproar. This effectively denies the experiences of male victims of rape, which is a destructive thing to do in context of a society which largely denies the fact that men can be raped at all.
Good point on the reversal. Although to tweak it a bit I would imagine said joke if swapped would be about a male athlete in some event that brings his machoness into question that won the gold but was still too weak to take any women home against their will or something.
I disagree, for two reasons. First, the joke wouldn’t be a joke anymore with genders reversed, because the basis for this joke wasn’t rape, it was simultaneously ridiculing a woman for being non-feminine and for being masculine (because she’s big and strong), with the intended punchline being that she’d only get sex in the masculine way that unattractive men get it – force it. The joke is in the unexpected reversal of gender stereotypes at every way, so to “reverse the genders” and keep it a joke, it would have to be about a non-masculine, feminine man coercing sex through some stereotypically feminine means, like maybe an effiminate figure skater wooing women with his sequin collection.
Second, Conan’s joke was very mean to the young woman, but did not approach the point of mocking male rape victims, real or imagined. Anyone who laughed laughed because it was an “ugly” joke, not because it made light of rape victims.
Exactly. Thank you.
Points taken! I totally agree that if the genders were reversed it would not be a joke, but it would be a supremely rape-y comment. However, I didn’t the tweet is mocking male rape victims nor do I think anyone laughed at it for that reason. I said it denies the experience of male rape victims. Rape is used as a device in this joke but no one bats an eyelid at it or indeed even sees it as a rape joke, which to me illustrates exactly how invisible male rape is in the minds of the general public.
I am with Marianne. There really is an element to this joke that denies the reality that men can be raped, or even just forcefully made to do anything.
Okay, sorry for paraphrasing incorrectly, but I still disagree that Conan’s joke denies the experience of male rape victims, or that there’s an element to it that denies the reality that men can be raped or forcefully made to do anything. To the extent there’s anything rape-y about it, it was that men *can* be forced against their will to do something. If you want to read rape into it, the joke is literally saying men can be raped (as long as the rapist is a hyper-masculine woman, har har.) The punch isn’t about men getting raped, though, it’s about making a superficially non-feminine woman out to be an unattractive freak.
I thought it was a mean joke and it didn’t strike me as funny, but I think the only way to turn this joke into an example of male rape denialism or “normalizing rape” (to paraphrase other commenters) is to put it through the Gender Studies Humor Grinder, which has a disconcerting tendency to destroy any humor or irony that a joke might have going in, while spitting out rape sausage on the other side.
Marcus: You almost got it with this sentence:
I’ll give you a further hint; it’s between the parentheses.
You don’t think this sentence in any way downplay or even denies the reality that men can be raped not only by hyper-masculine women, but also by conventionally attractive women?
Correct. I don’t think a mean tweet by Conan O’Brien that makes fun of a non-feminine female weightlifter makes any statement about rape or male rape unless you’re determined to make rape sausage out of everything, and if you are, that only shows that you have a knack for making rape sausage, not that Conan’s joke was rape denialism.
Watch, I can make rape sausage out of this, too…
You choose to look at the “as long as the rapist is hyper-masculine” aspect of the joke as male rape denialism because it suggests conventionally attractive women can’t (or don’t) rape. Another interpretation is that it suggests all masculine people rape. It turns rape itself into a masculine trait – that’s what masculine people do, and the “har har” comes from the unexpected gender reversal that in this case, the man is a woman. So, when it comes to the rape part, this joke insults masculine people by calling them all rapists.
There. I think that’s as good as your interpretation, but just as bogus ultimately, because the joke wasn’t about rape, it was about laughing at a woman for not being feminine. Still wrong, but not rape wrong.
Jacob, perhaps we do overthink some topics sometimes. And perhaps it’s good to be more thoughtful of the way we talk about others. Even in jokes. I’m not sure comments should get a free pass just because the intent was suppose to be laughter. One could argue that if you have an issue with people taking an issue on a certain subject, that you could also ignore it and move on to topics that you actually find important. Instead of telling others what should or shouldn’t concern them. Although, I don’t think either way would really accomplish much.
However, it’s proof positive that male rape victims are rarely taken seriously.
There is a moment in her NPR coverage- http://www.npr.org/2012/07/05/156292980/at-last-superheavyweight-finds-her-olympic-niche – where she frets over her makeup regimen and doesn’t want to be too cheap looking.
Got me right where I live- as a father of a daughter who wears a size 4.
HS football starter & a girl all in one….
Jesus weeps, I pray she medals and appears on Conan in a dress she feels flatters her.
Maybe the guys lifting weights on TV are wearing blush- but then the Russians probably have coaches for this as well.
Drew.
Amazing comment.
amen, drew, amen.
Holley is an awesome athlete and even though I doubt she will medal this year (the threshold is a bit above her total… Sarah Robles seems more likely to medal for the USA in her weight class, to me, due to her much greater experience). Both men and women in the 105+ kg class (“super-heavyweight”) are often treated as if they are not “real” athletes because their bodies are larger and their percentage of body-fat somewhat higher. In weightlifting at least, though, it has to do with height and what the body can do with certain weight compositions at certain heights. Most of the smaller (58kg) women, for example, are very tiny. Li Xuying, the 58kg gold medalist, is only a little bit over five feet tall. The much closer to six foot tall Holley would probably flounder at that weight. Some body-fat can also be very helpful during ballistic movements, like the catch phase of the snatch and clean and jerk, because of the way it can cushion the joints. Kinda funny that Mr. O’Brien made this joke, in some ways, since an interview with Holley has her offhand mentioning that she has, ever since she has been a little more in the spotlight, been receiving more male attention than a shy young women like her is entirely comfortable with.
Maybe it’s me, but Holley doesn’t look “fat”- she looks big, but “fat” has connotations like, “needing to be trimmed” or “sloppy” and Holley does not seem either.
When I read the tweet posted above- at first took it to mean that them men did not want to come to America- not that abducting four people is better then raping four people. I guess it stems from me seeing a proud athlete and not a misfit.
Perhaps it would be more fitting to have called it a size joke then?
Either way the comment is a nod to her size and how it means the only way she could have sex is to take someone against their will.
Oh my lord. get over it people, it was joke. She’s fat. so what. Im fat, I hear jokes about me all the time. They’re jokes. No different than “skinny jokes” or “little” jokes. All this PC policing crap is getting out of hand in this country. Wake up to reality people, there are 6 billin people on this planet all different, tall, short, fat, skinny, beautiful, fugly, rich, poor, and everything in between, and guess what? Theyve all been and are sources for jokes, and if you sit here and tell me that you have never or do not ever make a less than tasteful joke about someones “imperfection”, than you are a liar and a hypocrite.
It’s interesting to hear others take on a comment. When you live on the fringe- any extreme is seen as so queer. I’d like to think that Holley set a goal for herself , and went for it. With that, she is a young lady, one minute she’ll think that she is the shit and at other times, ugly. All women have these highs and lows. And she chose this body, she worked hard for it. She be sexy as hell , firm young skin, strong, curved, pretty blonde hair. Ceribrally, I’d rather dive into a lush proud lover who worked for their body rather then one who had surgery, implants, insecuritiies..
This ‘joke’ is personal. It’s directed at a specific person for a specific reason. Not to say that ‘fat’ jokes are ok at all. However that’s what comedians do, they make fun of people in a generic fashion, or at least they used to. I remember when stand-ups used to tell stories about themselves, friends and family members that were largely made up, called material. It seems as though this art form is changing into insulting personal remarks.
Also, my husband read the ‘joke’ and he (no stranger to tasteless, offensive jokes.. don’t ask), said it wasn’t funny.
Conan is pretty brave, Holley could tear him a new one if she wanted to.
Nobody makes jokes about NFL offensive linemen, who have the footwork of a dancer and have to act as human shields against freakishly quick and strong defensive players and make split-second ad hoc changes to their blocks – all the while weighing 350 or so. That doesn’t mean we can’t make jokes about them – sumo wrestlers seem like easier targets, with their hairdos and loincloths. Plus they’re Japanes. Ha, ha. But big, athletic women are “fairer” game? Hmm. R. Crumb made a career out of that sort of thing, but his “redemption” (to use that word Olympics announcers are always using) was the rather silly fact that he liked and fetishized that type of woman IRL. And, he was at best a niche artist, not a tv millionaire.
So while I think there is fertile ground for humor here, it calls for a higher standard of joke. Why not swing for the triple entendre?
She’s a lovely girl, by the way.
People don’t make fun of gigantic men in purple spandex pants? (football)
And wrestling’s even worse,,, a spandex onesie, and you can’t tell me the rear mount position doesn’t look a little funny.
And then there’s the “good game” butt slaps, the locker room communal showers, etc. Basically everything in hypermasculine sports is just one huge running gay joke.
Now, I tend to think if someone’s gonna try for a fat joke or a rape joke, that’s okay. But it had better be good. Fat jokes are generally tasteless, and rape is a serious issue so if you want to make people laugh at it you better have a real ringer in the works.
This is a tweet with no lead in, just a punchline. And it was exactly a creative punchline, either. If we’re gonna hang Conan for anything, it should be for failing utterly at his job and not some abstract social concept. I mean, I’m all for social commentary, but this was just too stupid to merit serious contemplation.
Just my two cents.
I think we should get Holley to lift Conan up in the air on national TV and see how he wants to come back to the ground…
And then shake hands later and yuck it up later….
(sort of like an Andy Koufman mock wrestling scenario)
Would he also apologize for the rape part of the joke?
I don’t think rape jokes are verboten across the board. Louis CK has a hilarious bit — and if you don’t think it’s funny, you don’t have a human soul — about how he’d go back in time not to kill Hitler, but “only” to rape him, so his [Hitler's] self esteem would subsequently be too low to invade Poland. And Sarah Silverman has a great rape bit — “I was raped by a doctor, which is a bittersweet experience for a Jewish girl” — which combined the daily double of rape and anti-semetism. AND IT, TOO, IS INDISPUTABLY FUNNY.
Now, everyone has different definitions of funny, which explains the baffling existence of Carlos Mencia, Jeff Foxworthy and/or Two and a Half Men. And I’m sure there are some who believe rape, no matter what the context, is 1,000,000% off-limits as a subject. And that’s fine. But please watch this first; you might reconsider that stance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu9q4sM1vmc
Or this from George Carlin, who, as always, nails it, with the twist that most “anti-rape joke” kneejerkers fail to see: he’s making fun of the nutso, idiotic, misguided “she was asking for it” mentality of the rapist, not the act of rape itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUVjZPVj1Pk&feature=related
All that said, I think Conan’s tweet — and I say this as a big Conan fan — came up well short of Louie CK’s/Silverman’s/Carlin’s.
Thanks for this. I think once people assume “attack” the original context/premise of “joke” is long gone. The punchline in Conan’s tweet is Holley carrying the four guys over her shoulder. I’m just imagining two dudes on each shoulder with a gold medal around her neck and a smile on her face. But once I’m told it’s an attack on Holley, I suddenly assume an evil girl who’s using her strength to intimidate. But I suppose that if you don’t assume the context of “joke” from Conan from the start, you will assume something quite different.
And besides, her last name is Mangold. Maybe that’s where he got the joke from!
You guys might like this GMP article I did a while back about Louis CK and what makes a joke funny. Part of it is that CK is SO FUNNY that almost everything he says is okay. But that’s because every big of CK’s jokes are well-crafted and well-honed.
http://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/louis-ck-and-the-brilliantly-crafted-feminism-vs-comedy-joke/
Yeah, I read that one. I thought it was really good.
Initially when I read this, I didn’t interpret it as an attack on her weight. She is a titan of a woman, damned impressive, if you ask me. It came across to me as a hamfisted, somewhat low-brow remark of astonishment above all else, not that she was fat and requires rape in order to have a sexual relationship.
Holley Mangold is a world class athlete, and Conan O’Brien’s tweets are the very least of her concerns. Check out her interview with Julie Faudy on ESPN to get a good example of exactly how many craps she does not give about attacks on her superficial appearance.
The problem I had with the joke was that male rape is merely a punchline to an issue that has been minimized and uninvestigated for much too long. I think that our society has buried its head in the sand when it comes to having a serious discussion sexual assault against males. I learned recently that an aspect of Rape Culture is the marginalization of men who are victimized. Marginalization comes in many forms, including an unwillingness to report an assault to the police out of fear of being outed or harassed by the authorities. Prison rape is also a regular punch line in television and movies, even though in reality it is rarely ever prosecuted, and often results in the transmission of HIV, Hepatitis, and Syphilis. Further, in those situations, sexual assaults are almost never prosecuted, which again marginalizes male victims of rape.
By trivializing the experience of male rape victims, O’Brien perpetuates a systemic order that consistently overlooks the full consequences of sexual assault. That is what I think was wrong with his joke. In a ~dark~ way, it was funny, but that by no means gives us as a society permission to continue ignoring the problem. It is happening. We know it is happening. The health consequences are quantifiable. It just seems like many people think there is something less wrong about the rape of males. To be absolutely clear on my stance: sexual assault can be equally destructive regardless of the sex of the victim and the sex of the assailant.
Conan O’Brien is not helping to improve the situation. But being able to open a dialogue about it is important, and it is good that the topic of male sexual assault has been mentioned on this site a more regular basis.
Sorry folks, but I think a part of the joke is a bit of a compliment. The implication is: “Hey, this woman’s so damn strong, that no matter what other plans men might have had that evening, they’re coming back with her whether they like it or not.”
I would buy that if it went, “with a gold medal around her neck and 4 men on her shoulders”, but the “against their will part” pretty much makes it an insult to her attractiveness. Like if someone said, “That guy is so charming and rich I bet he could get any prostitute he wants,” it wouldn’t be a complement to his charm and wealth.
If that’s the case then a simple, “She’s so strong she’ll have no problem picking up guys.” would have sufficed. See what I did there?
Danny: If that’s the case then a simple, “She’s so strong she’ll have no problem picking up guys.” would have sufficed.”
Or putting them up for the night for that matter.
RIM-SHOT
Yep. And I find it hard to believe that Conan O’Brien could not have come up with a more appropriate way to say that. O’Brien has been active in the comedy industry since the late 80s when he was writing for SNL. That would remove the implication that guys are being taken against their will and (as far as I can tell) would also remove the implication that she is so unattractive that no guys would go out with her. All the while still making a nod to her strength. But hey maybe Hollley would still not like it even then.
One thing that’s worth pointing out is that weighlifting is a marginal sport, and female participation is doubly marginal. If you took a poll, it’s probably considered freakish. Nobody is getting rich off it – if nobody got rich off of pro football, NCAA football would disappear into obscurity. The last weightlifter who casual viewers remembers is Yuri Alexeyev. So if you’re doing it for love of the sport, country, &cetera, people should just stfu.
Sarah Robles, iirc, has been a regular at food banks because she doesn’t come from a family that can deal with the huge soccer mom-style overhead of getting a youngster up to Olympic caliber, and I doubt there are any sponsorships available in the sport.
I don’t understand how everyone came to be so dead sure that the joke was about sex at all let alone rape. Call me naive but the picture I got was of this KingKong-like giant woman saying “me like you” kidnaping men she thought were attractive. KingKong didn’t rape that lady! He kept her like a pet. The joke seemed more like an exaggeration meant to poke fun at her actual size. It’s a mean joke only if Ms. Mangold is unhappy about her appearance (which I seriously doubt given the fact that she’s an Olympian who size and success are positively correlated and she’s actually a cute girl) .
It’s noble to stand up for others especially those who are at a disadvantage. But we have to think before we go on these quests for justice and end up saving people who don’t need saving. It looks to me like public sensitivity to this particular joke says more about US than it does about Conan or Holly. If you got worked up about sex, rape, or obesity, over THIS that’s all you right there. You can deal with that in your own way/time. But THIS is really not that serious.
Btw what was everyone hoping to accomplish anyway? Did someone think discouraging jokes about female aggression against men was going to lower the incidence of male rape? Somehow that’s doesn’t seem likely. Fruitless efforts ftw?
This seems to be a thing with the Olympics this year, or maybe I’m just noticing it more… but it’s the constant critiquing of female athletes’ bodies. It’s driving me a little crazy, actually. You don’t hear anything about the male athletes’ bodies. The women are either sexy or too masculine or not feminine enough or fat or not pretty or their hair is too messy…. please! [the rape joke aside, which has its own problems] I’m sick of everyone deciding that these women are somehow less than amazing athletes because they’re either too hot or not good looking enough to attract men. THEY ARE FREAKING OLYMPIANS!!!! They are elite athletes doing things that the majority of us couldn’t even touch. Just please stop already. Stop.
/rant over
OK, I’ve tried REALLY hard to like Conan. Something about his “geeky-guy/fish out of water/hey! I can’t believe I actually got this gig!” shtick was kind of endearing at first. But he just keeps stepping in it. Rape jokes/fat comments/PC rhetoric aside, the guy’s just a putz.
Conan, I give up, buddy. You’re a lost cause.
Apologize. Mean it. Move on.
Like maybe, off the airwaves altogether…
What disgusts me is not the the supremely offensive content of Conan’s ‘joke,’ but the fact that it seems that people still don’t realize that his success is built upon a foundation of literally being a talking a$$hole. Look at all the attention he’s getting over this! It’s important to speak up about injustices, but *please* remember: All press is good press when it comes to promoting a train wreck. He’s probably upped his ratings over this. Reminder: Ratings do not mean quality but the number of people watching. The money in network television is not the content of the show, but the commercials every 5-10 minutes. Celebrities, corporations, television networks, and other entities will use social media to roofie your attention so they can date-rape you all night long. There’s nothing to see here. There’s no discussion about which aspects of our dysfunctional culture Conan’s joke represents except the fact that our entertainment has mostly gone completely in the toilet and we’re paying for it in more ways than most people can imagine. Turn Conan off. Turn off his twat-feed. Do not acknowledge his crap if you want it to end. Go outside & play.
ITS A JOKE!
If you don’t like it, then you should have shut the door to your cave.
The joke was not about you. And even if it was do you really think it would matter?
If your okay with who you are as a person it shouldn’t matter what anyone says about you.
Especially if it’s a joke.
Not every joke made is going to be found funny by every person on earth. We all have our own taste.
So to be insulted on behalf of someone is a waste of time, mostly yours.
You may find something funny that I wouldn’t, it doesn’t mean I’m going to read into it or post my comment on how wrong it all is.
I read what happened, then read this long comments form, and at the end of did anyone get that hurt from it? Did someone die? Are millions protesting? No.
A joke. That’s it. I didn’t even find it funny. But I knew it was a joke.
How in the hell did this get turned into a rape joke? Being brought home “Against one’s will” is not rape and to conclude that the sole outcome of being taking by force to one’s home only means rape is complete crap.
It has to do with the fact that she could easily overpower most men and, in no way, does it mention, imply or even hint that she would rape them.
Jesus, people…get an effing grip.