This week comedian Ragan Fox ventured into the abortion-for-laughs arena.
Fox is a "gay poet and performance artist," according to Wikipedia, most well known for his Sirius Radio podcast, Fox and the City. CBS announced on June 30 that Fox will soon do a stint on its reality show, Big Brother 12.
WiredUpdate.com described Fox's most recent podcast (Warning: PG-13):
Today we are going to highlight even more disturbing "jokes" that Ragan has written and performed within the same podcast....
Ragan begins by saying he adores singer/songwriter Courtney Love and he's excited for the release of her new album. He then takes the conversation to a dark place while joking about abortions and battered women.
In the clip Ragan says he can imagine Courtney performing an "inappropriate song about feminism" that involves performing a live abortion on stage....
He goes on, "'Nobody's Daughter' (Courtney's album title) is a reference to every abortion she has had. Let's call a spade a space, Courtney Love has got to be the MacGyver of abortion."
Ragan then begins speaking in a drunken high pitch voice which is supposed to be his Courtney Love impersonation. As Courtney, Ragan says, "I give myself an abortion with pills, my pill abortion. I throw myself down the stairs, stair abortion. I douche with Clorox on a Sunday morning after a long Saturday night. Sometimes when I'm partying I'll drink a Red Bull and Vodka abortion and like a trampoline abortion."
"One time I was going to shoot myself in the p***** (gunshot sound effect). I thought up of this abortion when I was married to Curt [sic] (Cobain) and I accidently shot him in the head. But I had to tell everybody he shot himself in the head. Who wants to hear my new song?"
You can hear the unedited clip at Wired.
And so we see abortion humor on the rise - and getting darker all the time.
It started with a Chris Rock bit in 2005, which I actually thought was good, despite the raunchiness, because it contained truth.
Then came not-so-funny Sarah Silverman in 2007 and The Family Guy (graphic right) in 2009.
But all abortion humor has value, according to pro-abort Sarah Seltzer at RH Reality Check, because it takes the negative, untouchable edge off it...
[T]he lack of abortion jokes creates this hyped-up atmosphere of tragedy and controversy around something that is quite common and needs to be discussed more. Even if Seth McFarlane and the Family Guy team failed miserably to be funny or edgy in their attempts to milk humor from abortion, even if they were crass and sexist, I'd hope the episode would be an opening salvo for more comics, artists and others to talk about this reality in women's lives that, like all realities, has to contain fodder for humor.
Wired would disagree: As many Big Brother fans have pointed out, Ragan Fox is a satirist and comedian. However racism, and now abortions and battered women topics should not be something anyone should joke around with. All 3 topics are serious issues that everyday people have to overcome. The jokes come off as vile and vulgar and no where near humorous.... Pro-abortion feminists have a decision to make. Was Ragan's abortion humor funny, or should they defend Love (and Cobain) and decry Fox's bit as over the line? Interesting that he took comedic aim at them, too, saying they have so little trouble with abortion they'll commit one in public. Liberal feminists have 3 choices: laugh, condemn, or ignore. My guess is they'll go with #3. They'll want to avoid getting into a conversation explaining why abortion isn't necessarily funny. Indeed, to this point no liberal feminist has condemned Fox - which is an example of one of the many differences between pro-choice and pro-life feminists.
