The Laugh Factory, the world-famous comedy club in Los Angeles, has never been a stranger to controversy.

Two years ago, Seinfeld star Michael Richards was vilified for screaming the “n-word” at a black heckler there. Last week, history repeated itself when Comedy Central’s Daniel Tosh suggested it would be hilarious if a female heckler was “raped by like, 5 guys right now.”

It’s once again opened up the discussion about what is and isn’t acceptable in comedy – especially rape jokes.

So are rape jokes ever funny?

According to the audience member at the receiving end of Tosh’s tirade, the answer is a definitive “no.”

On her blog Cookies for Breakfast, in which she describes the incident, she writes:

“Tosh starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have.”

But there are plenty of people who disagree – including Tosh himself. On his Twitter account, he offered a squirmingly defensive apology a politician would be proud of, and then argued that “there are awful things in the world, but you can still make jokes about them.” Followed by the hashtag #deadbabies.

And not defending Daniel’s Tosh’s tirade...but he’s right.

A huge proportion of comedy is deliberately offensive and inflammatory – from the grisly “dead baby” jokes he mentioned (Google “dead baby jokes” and prepare to be offended) to the much-touted episodes of South Park and Family Guy that deal with depicting the prophet Muhammad on screen, or a character’s decision whether or not to have an abortion.

So what makes rape jokes so different?

From a feminist point of view, there’s the very convincing argument that a tolerance of rape jokes contributes to the existence of “rape culture” – the concept that modern society normalizes, excuses or even condones sexual violence against women. One article even claimed that “rape is one of the most joked about things in our society” and another linked to a video by Women In Media & News that featured a “supercut” of rape jokes, including many by Daniel Tosh.

Initially, I’d thought that this was hyperbole, but during research for this article, I realized that rape jokes are actually more mainstream than even I’d considered. Alyssa Soren compiled a list of rape jokes featured in Family Guy that was actually astonishingly long.

But do these jokes actually contribute to rape culture?

I was initially going to argue “no.” But one of the things I’ve become increasingly aware of in writing this column is that just because I hold a belief – that rape is unacceptable, for example – doesn’t mean other people do, and I can think of one example where rape jokes have created a complicit acceptance of sexual violence.

Rape jokes about female victims are – despite the links I’ve pointed to above – fairly rare. Rape jokes about male victims – especially in prison – are practically ubiquitous. For example, when I went to see Seth MacFarlance’s Ted the other night, it was preceded by a trailer for Hit & Run which featured a running gag about the ethnicity of the man who raped Bradley Cooper in jail.

(Even one of Daniel Tosh’s detractors – herself a so-called “feminist” – was reduced to the old “prison rape” trope in her response to him.)

And how does this translate into the world of rape culture? Well, I would argue that it’s certainly created a society in which prison rape has been completely normalized.

An estimated 300,000 rapes occur in the prison system every year (with the vast majority being man-on-man) and we live in a society in which this isn’t just tolerated and accepted, but even sometimes encouraged. Check out these Tweets about the incarceration of convicted child rapist Jerry Sundusky.

If prison rape jokes normalized rape in jail, could you argue that regular rape jokes normalize rape elsewhere in society?

It makes me deeply uncomfortable to say it – it’s kind of the antithesis of the argument you might expect to see in Devil’s Advocate – but I think they just might.

We condone prison rape because “he’s a crook, he deserved it,” but how far away is that from “she was dressed like a slut, she deserved it”? I’d like to say light years, but the more I look into the issue, the more I’m aware that I might be very, very wrong about that.

So what do we do? If there’s a valid belief that rape jokes contribute to rape culture, how do we deal with comedians like Daniel Tosh? Should we ban rape jokes?

Of course not. That would be idiotic, not to mention pretty much unenforceable. It would also open the doors to everybody else with an axe to grind deciding to “ban” jokes at their expense. Despite the fact that I am an out and loud Militant Ginger, I’d be the first to argue that the world would be a bleaker place without jokes about how “gingers have no souls.”

We’ve already seen executives at Comedy Central bow to pressure to censor jokes about Muhammad and Scientology. Fox News scrapped plans to show the controversial “abortion” episode of Family Guy. Comedy is already getting watered down, and if we only joke about stuff that’s considered “acceptable” we’re not going to have much to laugh about in the not-too-distant future.

I even think that the act which triggered Tosh’s tirade – a woman yelling “rape jokes are never funny” from the audience – isn’t cool. There’s a time and a place to discuss the politics of rape jokes, and a comedy club is not it. As Louis C.K. argues in this clip: “I'm paid to talk and say stuff and people laugh. You're not supposed to say anything. It's a show.”

To my mind, we should vote with our dollars – or our laughs. For example, Daniel Tosh is already pretty well known for making rape jokes, so if we want him to change his act, perhaps we should stop giving him our money in the first place.

There are plenty of other deserving comedians out there to support, after all.