From Date Rape Jeopardy to (Not) Drinking Tea: Consent Humour, Ridicule and Cultural Change

Abstract

Abstract This article traces a cultural shift in ‘consent humour’ by contrasting a Saturday Night Live skit that aired in 1993 mocking affirmative consent with the 2015 ‘Tea and Consent’ video produced by the Thames Valley police, in 2015, which insists that ‘consent is everything’. By reflecting on the cultural contexts and the ‘humour ideologies’ that underlie these examples, the article rejects a simple teleological interpretation of cultural change. It asks who and what is subject to ridicule in these jokes, contrasting the figure of the disruptive ‘victim feminist’ in the 1993 sketch with the ignorant subject who is ‘still struggling’ with consent in the 2015 clip. The article argues that both rely on a class-based politics of cultural capital to defend ideological constructions of ‘appropriate knowledge’ about consent. Where the SNL skit insists that consent is marked by its complexity, the ‘Tea and Consent’ video insists on its simplicity. The humour in both, however, rests on a sexually sophisticated middle-class subject laughing at those who do not possess the appropriate cultural capital in relation to sex and consent. In both cases, the ‘problem’ of consent is deflected away from normative heterosexuality and towards the ignorant other.