You Had to Be There: Rape Jokes

This book is a text version of Vanessa Place's live performance 'I've got this really great joke about rape', in which the artist recites rape jokes for 45 minutes to a seated audience in a gallery or from a small stage. It is art performance, not stand-up comedy. Place decided to work with rape jokes several years ago after various stand-up comics were rebuked for making rape jokes on and off-stage; the gist of the criticism being that 'rape jokes aren't funny,' and that a rape joke is tantamount to rape itself. But Place's work shows that rape jokes aren't rape and considers why rape jokes are very funny to very many people, and persistently so.