Basic Trope: A joke or comedy routine is poorly-received by its audience, usually because it breaks some sort of taboo.
- Straight: Bob tells a rape joke. Instead of finding it funny, the audience were disturbed.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is chased by an angry mob wielding Torches and Pitchforks after telling a slightly adventurous joke.
- Bob gets booed offstage for discussing the matter, even when no joking whatsoever was involved.
- Alice tells a rape joke about a guy being gang raped. She got beaten to a pulp by the audience.
- Downplayed:
- Bob tells a joke that his audience is simply tired of.
- Bob tells a joke about a man whose life is ruined by a False Rape Accusation. Rather than being offended, the audience is saddened by the fact that it does happen.
- Justified:
- The subject of the joke is very serious and sensitive.
- Bob was stupid enough to tell the joke at a place where it's inappropriate.
- Bob was writing a bit of Satire, and some Misaimed Fandom didn't realize it was supposed to be satirical.
- Bob told the joke, and the audience consists of many friends and relatives of Alice, who was raped on the way home from work a few days ago.
- Bob told the joke about Alice being raped, and everyone hated to hear him Kick the Dog.
- Bob's audience was Alice's family.
- Bob's joke was unfunny on top of being offensive, causing his audience to simply be disgusted.
- It's possible to make a taboo joke, as long as you stay away from the facts that horrify people. As Roger Ebert put it, a musical number with a dim-witted, stoned, Camp Gay Adolf Hitler is funny, as long as nobody mentions The Holocaust.
- Inverted:
- Bob tells a (perfectly G-rated) knock-knock joke, and people felt he insulted their maturity.
- Bob writes a story in which a rape is Played for Drama, but because he told it poorly, the audience finds it rather funny.
- Actually Pretty Funny
- Subverted: The audience stares in shock, but when one of them starts to giggle they all burst out laughing.
- Double Subverted: The laughter trails off and the audience feels ashamed for laughing.
- Parodied: Harmless jokes are seen as offensive and obscene but jokes about racism and rape are a-okay.
- Zig Zagged: The audience seems ashamed for laughing, only to decide to continue laughing.
- Averted:
- Bob does not joke about or discuss any sticky subject matter, or at least doesn't tell any rape jokes.
- Alternatively: Everyone found Bob’s joke funny regardless of how the fact that Bob joked about rape.
- Enforced:
- "The audience finds Bob's jokes offensive. We need to address this by having a crowd not find his joke funny."
- Members of the cast and/or test audiences didn't find the joke funny either, so they decided to have it called out on in-universe.
- Lampshaded: "Dude, don't even joke about that!"
- Invoked: After a few too many beers, Bob remembers an off-color joke he heard a comedian tell.
- Exploited:
- Charlie, who is out for Bob, tells everyone about the incident, while adding many juicy non-realistic details to tarnish Bob's reputation to the fullest.
- Bob intentionally tells the joke to gain attention.
- Bob writes a Satire, meant not so much to get the audience to laugh, but to get them thinking about the Elephant in the Room.
- Defied:
- Bob decides that there are too many people that would be offended and decides to keep his mouth shut.
- Bob decides to say the joke and to hell if nobody else finds it funny (often because of N-Word Privileges).
- Bob points out to everybody else the moments they were insensitive themselves and thus that they have no moral high ground to stand on.
- Discussed: "What's so bad about rape jokes? It's not like Bob would actually rape someone."
- Conversed: "They hit too close to home for too many people, and such jokes are usually very crass."
- Implied: Bob is banned from entering a stand-up comedy.
- Deconstructed: Bob is shunned by his friends, even though he was just trying to be funny and had no bad intentions.
- Reconstructed: It is played in a way to show that most of the audience is victim of Political Correctness, while Bob can enjoy such jokes without thinking in the least that Black Humor's topics are acceptable in real life.
- Plotted A Good Waste: This is used to hint that Bob doesn't think about rape as a serious crime.
- Played For Laughs: A new law is decreed to forbid Bob of telling any new jokes, fearing he might spout something offensive again.
- Played For Drama: Bob, and by extent his close loved ones, are shunned and demonized by society around them, after the audience tells everyone of Bob's act, some even making it sound worse than what actually happened.
- Played For Horror: Bob the rapist doing a rape joke is not funny for many reasons, mostly because it's hard to tell whether or not when he says he feels like raping you an actual rape will soon follow.
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