Satire is a great weapon when wielded against the powerful. When wielded against the weak or oppressed, e.g, rape victims, it needs to be done with an undercurrent of empathy, not to mention fine wit. This idiotic sketch did neither.

Times change, too. That Blazing Saddles bit *might* have been funny back when rape was actually often dismissed as not a big deal, but today the joke falls flat. My 90-something Uncle still lets slip the occasional rape joke which was probably new in the Rat Pack days; the jokes aren't funny at all.

This is what the Rightwing tends to get wrong. Creeps like Rush Limbaugh specialize in mocking the weak, the poor, the oppressed. Theirs is the humor of sadists and the morally bankrupt. By contrast, the skit in question is the humor of the mentally dull.

Thanks for telling us what the column was about and also for setting limits on how letter writers can respond.

I believe in free speech, so nothing is off limits. However, there is a difference between having the freedom to do something, and doing it, regardless of how destructive that something is. For example, a person is free to walk around town making fun of, people with disabilities, but should he? And if he does, he should be willing to face the consequences, which will probably include but not be limited to being told he's an asshole.

Lastly, I'm not a humorless prig. I find you funny.

TCF, the question you pose detracts from the more serious point. You ask if rape is off-limits for laughs? What does "off-limits" mean? In a society with free speech rights, nothing is off-limits. Further, for any subject, no matter how tragic, you can always find someone who thinks it is funny. The better question is whether we should condone such "humor," or denounce it.

Two years ago some people at an apartment complex threw a kitten into a barbeque grill and laughed while it screamed and thrashed. A woman rescued the kitten, but was cursed at by the onlookers (the kitten unfortunately later died from his injuries). No doubt, had someone in this crowd known the words, they would have called her a "humorless prig." After all, they thought it was funny to watch the kitten burn alive. What was the uptight bitch's problem? Why was she so rigid, so bound by conventional thinking? Nothing's off-limits for free thinkers.

Call me a prig, but I've witnessed cruelty to animals up close and tended to the victims, and I can't find any humor in the suffering. I believe it's the same with rape. I've read accounts of rape survivors, both female and male. There's nothing amusing about what they went through, or about what they still go through mentally, years after their ordeal. Let Will Ferrell et al attempt to explain to a rape victim why rape really can be mined for humor. I doubt they would win that argument.

It's been said that comedy is often based on other people's pain, physical or otherwise, and while that's true, conscientious and aware adults are able to see the difference between humor and callousness. A man slipping on a banana peel, landing on his ass, and cursing is funny; he can joke about it later with his friends. A man slipping on a banana peel and breaking his neck might be funny for a second, but then it's ceases to be funny, and empathetic and aware people stop laughing at that point. The people who keep laughing are not people I would want to be around. They're the ones who laugh at burning kittens.

Anything is possible, and I suppose it is possible to wring a funny joke out of awful things like rape (or burning kittens, or the murder of children, or the Holocaust), but such successful jokes are the exceptions which prove the rule.

Human progress demands that we continuously reevaluate where we have been, and change our understanding when necessary. How long did it take for women (and some men) to finally get rape to be taken seriously as a crime in this country? It was considered a joke, or at most a minor crime, until only the past few decades. Are we now going to slide backwards and counsel the victim to just lie back and enjoy it?

No doubt about it, and watching Moe poke Curly is always good for a laugh. Some shit, though, just doesn't lend itself to humor, and if you're going to make a joke about it, you better be damned good (take note, Emily -- this video isn't funny because among other things, the humor is lame as hell).

I've got a whole series of cartoon books by John Callahan, who is quadraplegic. He makes lots of jokes about people with disabilities, and most of them are really funny. For example, a sheriff's posse in the desert looking at an abandoned wheelchair and declaring, "He won't get far on foot."

Being paralyzed isn't funny, but the difference here is that Callahan approaches the subject with empathy. This underlies the unspoken rule that you can't tell ethnic jokes, etc., unless you're a member of that group. Even more, Callahan's creating an absurd situation, and absurdity can be very funny.

Sarah Silverman has a good joke (one of her few) about rape: "I was raped by a Jewish doctor. It was bittersweet." Sick joke, sure, but funny. She's riffing on her (and my) fellow Jews' historic obsession with either marrying doctors or becoming one. If you're not Jewish or familiar with that trait, is the joke funny? Probably not. There's both empathy and absurdity in that joke.

So what's funny about the rape joke in this video? Ha ha, they're so committed to the cause that they raped a woman. Unless you're in junior high, that's pretty lame.

Lerpa, you're trying too hard.