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Comedian, Basket Mouth recently posted a joke about rape online, and he got the
opposite reaction from people. Rather than laugh at his joke, they took offence
because of the subject of the joke which was rape. Though the husband and
father immediately took down the joke and apologized for it, he talks about the
incident in an interview with Vox Africa.
See
excerpts of the interview after the cut:
“Definitely
I am sorry about what happened. The people that it offended…I won’t say the
people that misunderstood but the people that it offended. Now it limits the
type of jokes
I’m
going to be cracking right now.
Sadly,
every joke hits people the wrong way. If I crack jokes about food, there are
people in third world countries saying, ‘Why is he cracking jokes about food?
Have I chop na?’ They will just go on twitter and say ‘This guy should stop
cracking jokes about food, I haven’t eaten’.
If you’re a comedian, you have the power to
crack jokes because the truth is humour has no limits. You can crack jokes
about death, living, anything you want to crack jokes about. Everything in life
is funny, there is humour in everything that we do. “
“
The truth about jokes is no matter what type of joke you crack there are people
in the audience that won’t find it funny. People get offended for different
reasons.
Wale
Gates was telling me about a joke he cracked about his wife and how someone was
upset and said, ‘Why would you crack a joke about your wife.’ And he said
‘Look, she’s my wife. If anyone is going to be upset, can you let her be
upset?’ And she heard the joke before and she wasn’t upset.
People
take jokes in different ways, unfortunately everybody made it look like it’s
the first joke that I’m cracking. I cracked a joke about “Two things involved”
and it ended up being a positive angle and nobody talked about it. The only
joke that people like that I’ve cracked right now is about me dying. I cracked
a joke about my funeral and they loved it.”
Personally,
I feel that there’s a limit to everything. Basket Mouth meant no harm, but you
certainly don’t joke about a delicate subject like rape and expect people to
laugh sheepishly.