Last week, Daniel Tosh got into a spot of trouble for a joke he made at the expense of a female audience member at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. It sent the Internet into a tizzy, riling up a lot of people into re-tweeting and repeating the same argument in ALL CAPS or with a lot of exclamation points!!!!

For those of you who prefer to get your pop-culture news in The Diamondback’s weekly summer edition (so much more convenient and timely than Twitter!), here’s a quick recap of what went down.

Daniel Tosh (of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0) was making rape jokes during a set when a woman in the audience interrupted saying, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” – which he countered with a comment about said woman being raped “by like, five guys right now.” The incident quickly created an Internet firestorm, with a lot of women coming to the defense of the audience member and a lot of comedians berating her for heckling.

I think we can all agree the way Tosh handled the situation was grossly inappropriate. As Lindy West pointed out in a July 12 piece on Jezebel, “How to Make a Rape Joke,” any dark or taboo humor that makes marginalized person(s) the butt of the joke is bound to be ineffective and unproductive. Tosh managed to be ineffective, unproductive and(very) offensive with his retort, but has since apologized. And since there seems to be a general consensus he was in the wrong, let’s move on to a more interesting angle.

Was the woman in the audience also wrong?

Comedy – like all other art – is often effectively used to push social progress, and it can be easily used as a tool for revealing the absurdity inherent in much of our own cultural prejudices. In her article, West assert jokes about rape can work if they are used in this progressive manner – in short, to ridicule rapists and not rape victims. Thus “rape jokes are never funny” needs to be qualified with “if they make fun of people who have been raped.”

But without the qualifier, the claim “rape jokes are never funny” is problematic. The woman in Tosh’s audience said, in regards to her reaction, “I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape.” In his set, Tosh said rape jokes are funny, which this woman cited as an invasion of her right to have her own autonomous feelings about the issue of rape. She did not want to be told rape was funny, because, as a modern woman rightly concerned with an issue so scary and sexualized, she thought her feelings should be up to her.

The irony here is her reaction – “Actually, rape jokes are never funny” – also invades upon a woman’s right to have an individual and distinct engagement with the issue of rape. By saying jokes about rape are never funny, she is inevitably also saying it is wrong to think a joke about rape can be funny, and that this is an immoral way to feel about rape.

There is no correct way to feel about rape. It is a social issue that becomes a deep and painful issue on a personal level, and it is not OK to tell a woman she is not allowed to deal with the trauma of rape in whatever way makes sense to her. Most women will not laugh at even the most socially critical rape joke. But some might want to. That should be OK.

Alex Leston is a sophomore English major. She can be reached at leston@umdbk.com.