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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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"I can't wait to take Kage back to Hell

I'm gonna fill him with my hot demon gel"

Their second most popular song jokes about a protagonist potentially being raped for eternity by Satan.

This isn’t a “dark joke” in the mold of Jimmy Carr or Anthony Jeselnik, because approximately zero of Tenacious D’s listeners actually believe in Satan or hell, and therefore this joke isn’t rubbing up against any of their actual moral sensibilities. Yeah, it’s puerile, homoerotic, and makes light of Satan, so it would certainly be a “dark joke” if said by, for example, a Catholic priest in the course of a church service, but in the context of a Tenacious D song it’s a very “light joke”.

What made the Trump joke different is that political humor, especially of the violent nature, is absolutely not part of their act (even if, as others have pointed out, the members have made political comments outside of their capacity as Tenacious D) and therefore it actually is shocking to the political sensibilities of some listeners.

The rape element is as shocking in a modern polite society context as the Satan element is in a Christian one.

I don’t think that’s true. I hear people make prison rape “don’t drop the soap” jokes all the time. Men raping women is something it’s taboo to joke about. A man (or, in this case, a male deity) raping another man - especially when the context is this over-the-top and obviously tongue-in-cheek - is far, far less taboo to joke about, especially to this particular audience.

For a more recent pop-culture example, I've heard there's a scene in a recent episode of The Boys where one of the main characters infiltrates a villian's sex-dungeon, and get violated in various ways for his trouble, which is played for laughs.