by Jake Espinoza
Daniel Tosh is a star. You’ve heard of him.
He is as offensive as he is witty. His show, Tosh.0 on Comedy Central, dominates the Male 18-34 market, has over 2 million viewers per episode and an online blog that receives traffic from over 660k visitors monthly. If you aren’t offended by jokes about rape, terrorism and starving people in Africa, there is nobody funnier.
I’m not much of a fan of his show–watching someone banter about the videos of idiots online isn’t really my thing–but his stand up is hilarious.
Last night he performed two shows in Salem at the Elsinore Theater. I was a bit surprised that I didn’t see anyone walk out of the theater during his performance because of how offensive he is. There are usually a few people at these type of events that have no idea what they are getting themselves in to, and decide to show up because they heard people talking about it and were fortunate to get tickets.
Salem seemed to fully understand who Daniel Tosh was and the type of humor they were in for (There were also a lot of people wearing flip flop and basketball shorts #OutHereSLM). The show was funny throughout, filled with original material, and covered topics ranging from Amy Winehouse, death’s in the family, and child abuse.
He had one joke about how women who couldn’t get pregnant weren’t able to because they didn’t deserve a baby. He then followed the joke up with saying that the reason he told the joke was because he knew that there would be at least two women in the audience who would fit the description and it would ruin her night.
I feel like I’m a pretty tough person to offend, and as far as I know my wife will be able to become pregnant when we decided to have a child, but that is fucking offensive.
I still half laughed as I shook my head because I give comedians a pass while they are on stage as long as they are being clever with their offensive humor and aren’t just on stage being assholes.
I feel as people, it is our duty to find a balance between understanding how absurd our existence is and showing compassion for others. But comedians have the opportunity to completely ignore this balance while they are on stage. It is their job to poke fun at all of the things that stress us out during the day and show us that there is something funny and/or pleasant about every situation.
For example: The attacks of 9/11 were horrible, but at least now–thanks to fortified airport security in response to the attacks–I can drop my wife off at the gate and don’t have to walk her to the plane.
Because in the grand spectrum of things we are just a dot on an infinitely big universe. Your problems don’t matter because your/my/our existence doesn’t matter. I understand that terrible things happen and people feel the need to mourn, but I also feel that in a lot of ways we can either laugh at everything or laugh at nothing.
“If you’ve ever said, ‘There’s nothing funny about blank,’ and no matter what you filled that blank in with, we can’t be friends and I fucking hate everything about you,” Tosh said. “Because there is something funny about it as long as you can write good jokes.”