Chartastic.

leeroyjenkins:

A woman walks into a rape, uh, bar.

She rapes the rapist, “Hey, rape kind of rape do you think I should rape?” The rapist rapes, “Don’t ask rape! I’m just a rapist!”

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Welcome to a post about rape jokes.

Let me tell you a thing you might not know: the inability to hear rape…

At the risk of making this a very serious post you won’t read in between the pictures of cats you’re scrolling through, I want to talk about how this reminded me of that time my brother got shot.

Everyone laughs when I tell them my older brother Andrew was shot once. Maybe they don’t do it immediately, but they will. I mean it gets BIG LAUGHS. Once a friend of mine nearly crashed the car he was driving he was laughing so hard after I told him. Strangers at parties laugh, teachers laugh, his friends laugh, our family members laugh. No matter what, people will find something hilarious about the story.

Lately I can’t remember who even knows it happened or not, so I’ll be talking about something and then I’ll say something like “and then after my brother got shot…” Then it comes:

“HAHAHA WHAT YOUR BROTHER GOT SHOT?”

Yeah.

“HOLY SHIT WHAT HAHAHA”

Yeah he got shot in the hip like a few years ago.

“WHO SHOT HIM?”

A random drug dealer.

It might start out with just shocked, nervous laughter. The laughter that comes when I surprise tell you my big brother was shot once. Then it gets really funny as I’m going into the full details of it. Here’s some reasons why it’s super funny.

1. He was fine. No “yeah well he died” will ever have to come in the story and ruin the funny. He was on crutches for awhile, but can walk just fine now and even hiked the entire Appalachian Trail a year after the shooting.

2. He got shot in the hip and the bullet didn’t go through, but settled in one of his butt cheeks. They couldn’t take it out until the leg healed some more so for like a month he had a bullet in his butt. Butts are fucking hilarious, think of the first funny thing you can remember laughing at. There was a butt involved, right? My brother couldn’t even sit down.

3. My brother is an asshole. People don’t have tremendous amounts of sympathy when they’re being told stories about some douche bag getting shot. Depending on what crowd I’m in, I’ll include another part of the story. About how after he was shot and the people who shot him were running away, my brother shouted “GET BACK HERE YOU FUCKING NIGGERS!” Boom. You just lost some sympathy, right? My brother is a racist. Though, you might give him some leeway to drop the “n-bomb” since, ya know, he just got fucking shot. However, you might also be kind of glad a person like him would get shot.

4. My attitude about it. Usually one of my punch lines in the “time my brother got shot anecdote” is when I say “Well someone was going to shoot him eventually!” I say this early on in the story, to set the tone as a light one. If you weren’t laughing yet, I’ve just shown you it’s 100% okay to start laughing. I keep my attitude light and laugh a lot myself. I include parts of the story like how he got shot the weekend of my 16th birthday so I can say stuff like “I mean how rude is that?! Getting shot on my Sweet 16! Way to steal my thunder!”

5. The other funny little extras! I might tell you how when I got home that night, my parents were running out the door “Your brother is in the hospital.” “UGH again?!” He was just in like a week ago for a concussion he had suffered while biking to a party drunk. We all assumed it was for something equally as silly. I could tell you how, while my parents were at the hospital, I sneaked my boyfriend back in the house so we could make out while they were gone. I could say how I used my brother getting shot to get out of doing homework that week and got skip school if I went to visit him in the hospital. Funny little details to keep you laughing at this funny little story.

6. No one knows anyone that’s been shot. I lived in Richmond, VA which usually makes those “Top Murders per Capita” lists. Still, even though it can be a pretty rough town, let’s face it, the people who get shot are mostly just pictures of black people on the news. It’s not a “real thing” that would ever dare to effect “real people”. I remember a year later going to visit my boyfriend at his college. His college is several miles north of “murder capital” Richmond and in a sleepy college town called Ashland, that (no shit) makes “most boring towns in America” lists. My boyfriend’s roommate was from Middle of Nowhere, Delaware and was talking about how he was scared to enter the city of Richmond. One of the reasons he sited was that “doesn’t everyone get, like, shot… down there?” Oh how we Richmonders laughed! What a ridiculous thing to say! It was so ridiculous that after I said “no, people don’t really get shot” I forgot to add, “except for my brother…” I just completely forgot about it. Also, bare in mind that I’m a fairly pretty, white, cis-gendered girl, who was private school educated. If you had to pick the girl in the room with the brother that got shot, you probably wouldn’t point your finger in my direction.

All of these factors make this whole story pretty hilarious when you add them up. It’s one of my best bits, really. But reading the linked essay (which you should read if you’ve managed to make it this far with my lame essay) made me think about how this story could change and why I always tell it as a funny story.

1. What if he hadn’t been okay? I mean, what if hadn’t been in an area of town where police cars showed up a mere 30 seconds after gunshots were heard? He could have bled to death for all we know. This was almost 5 years ago, so nearly everyone I know now would never have met my brother.

2. The bullet was centimeters away from doing real damage. The doctors told us that he could have easily been paralyzed. You can take that as luck or God or bad aim or whatever, but that’s just the fact. He could have ended up in a lot worse than a few months on crutches. I usually leave this out of the story since it might make the story too real. As part of his full recovery, I like to mention how he went on the hike the Appalachian Trail not too long after. However, I never tell people this one kind of a downer bit. When he came back from his 6 months on the trail, he was filled with purpose. To join the military! He was gonna make something of his life! Boy was family super proud! Every branch of military turned him down. Red tape. His medical records would show “shot in the hip!” and never followed up with “yeah, but he’s super better now! shit can this boy walk!” It didn’t look good that he had been arrested more than a few times, either.

3. My brother is an asshole. You could theorize that this incident was just another stepping stone into my brother’s deviant lifestyle. Wanna know what the very first thing my idiot brother did on the day he got off his crutches? He tried to buy a gun. He didn’t get one (that I know of ugh) but you’d think getting shot might turn him guns altogether. Back to being turned down the military, I’m pretty sure that made him just hate society. Whether it was joking “fuck da police” kind of stuff or whatever, it still made him end up in the same place. He’s sitting in jail right now because he did this.

4. My attitude about it. When I’m telling anyone this story, my attitude can change it from “lol so my brother got once” to “my brother was shot once and it affected him this way :( and my family this way :( and I feel :( about it all…” I could cry as I opened up to you about my poor big brothers troubles. And you’d cry and it could be a nice big cry fest :( And it happened so close to my birthday too! Such a tragedy to happen to a girl who had just turned 16 to face! Come on, you’d cry.

5. Oh all the sad little extras! :( I never tell anyone about what happened when my mother came home and told me why my brother was in the hospital. How scared and uncertain we were about it. How my mother and I cried and held each other. Worried if he would be okay. Worried about the actions that had led him to end up like this. It didn’t last long, but it happened.

6. So people really do get shot sometimes, huh. Man idk how this wasn’t on the national news. 18 y/o Virginia College Freshman Shot Down By Murderous Drug Dealer While Walking To His VCU Dormitory; How it Could Happen to Your Children! They could have lumped it in with the story that had happened a year before about how a freshman at the same college met a guy on the internet and was killed by him. Oh god, how sensational, right?

So yeah, everyone laughs at the hilarious story of when my brother was shot. Why shouldn’t they? Sob story potential, aside, it’s a damn funny story and that’s why I’ll always try to make people laugh with it. Sure, I could always bum people out with the downer version, but who really wants me to burden them with it? It will always be easier to be the funny girl with the funny story, than Debbie Downer trying ruin your day. And that’s how we like it.