Let me preface this by saying that I’m sorry to all who are offended by the mention of rape. We appreciate everyone’s readership and we respect our audience and humanity in general and, no, we don’t think rape is funny. Duh. Like, seriously, duh. But everyone should also know that nothing will ever come from saying to us “please stop making jokes about X, because they offend me personally.” If things like that affected our content or perspective, then eventually we couldn’t mention anything and we might as well just post photocopies of pages from “101 Dinosaur Jokes”, because something will always offend someone. Even paleontologists, eventually.
Let me continue this by saying that mentioning rape in a joke does not equal a rape joke. Mentioning race, religion, or any other touchy subject doesn’t necessarily mean that the joke is about or making fun of said touchy subject. In this case, the joke isn’t “rape is funny lulz”. The joke is about the character’s obliviousness to how words work, and the character’s obliviousness to how he is perceived by others. Rape is not the joke here. Tobias Fünke is the joke.
To those who are still offended that we posted an Arrested Development reference with the word “rapist” in it, we’re sorry. We don’t think rape is funny, but we still think Tobias Fünke is hilarious. To those who are still offended by how we dealt with this situation… I guess, you know, deal with it? You can keep sending us messages that we’re jerks and that we should never post things like this again and that we should shut the fuck up, but clearly that won’t do anything but make you angrier. To those of you who are yucking it up right now because you aren’t offended, please don’t go to these people’s blogs and harass them. They are people and they are just very passionate and vocal and they don’t deserve to be abused or trolled just because they got offended. To those of you who didn’t read this, nothing.
Let me close this by saying that referring to Arrested Development as a “stupid show” really offends me, so please stop saying it.
Cracked handled that very well in my opinion.
