Gurba

    Thinking back to the readings we did for last class, looking at how humor functions in conversations surrounding death or depression, humor was often used to act as a relief from the anguish or dread that surrounds the topic. Making yourself or your audience laugh redirects and alleviates some of the uncomfortable feelings. While Gurba doesn’t cite this as her primary purpose when writing about her experience being sexually assaulted, I do think that it serves a similar role in her article. While recounting her own experience she ends the paragraph by telling the reader that she “wasn’t really dressed for rape” and recounts the sound of her leopard print wedges on the sidewalk. It's observation that is tonally in stark contrast to the previous description of the encounter. This use of humor provides relief to the reader and the writer while addressing the event.

    Gurba also writes that the reason she uses humor in her writing is to push back on society’s image of the perfect victim. Humor, she argues, should be something people who have experienced sexual assault can use because it can restore humanity to the person. The current (acceptable) way people tell stories about their sexual assault dictates how someone should feel about their own experience and casts sexual assault as something outside of the natural world by using religious language and solemnity. I think her description and reasoning for why she uses humor in this way perfectly explains why her making jokes around her experience is different than someone joking about someone else’s sexual assault. Her humor serves to humanize the experience and remind the readers that this is something that is occurring everyday—joking about someone else’s assault does the exact opposite (turning rape into a concept that removes the victim’s humanity from the situation).