There are two kinds of rape jokes. The ones that make the victim the brunt of the joke should be banned from our collective sense of humor, because they aren't funny unless you are the type of person who considers rape an acceptable action.
There is another way to structure the joke, however, and this is the humor of which Margaret Atwood's short story "Rape Fantasies" makes good use.
The narrator speaks in a rambling, conversational voice to describe an office break in which several female co-workers describe their "rape fantasies." The narrator, Estelle, recognizes that her co-worker's fantasies are closer to an unexpected one-night-stand than rape, complete with a handsome stranger and, well, consensual sex. "I mean, you aren't getting raped," she tells them, "it's just some guy you haven't met formally ... and you have a good time. Rape is when they've got a knife or something and you don't want to." She believes that with rape comes anxiety and fear and uncertainty, not arousal.
And then she describes her own version of a rape fantasy to the group, as well as several other stories and possibilities to the reader.
In one, she tells the man to wait and makes him hold her extra things so she can search through her bag to find a plastic lemon to squirt him in the eyes. In another, the man's zipper gets stuck, and then he starts to cry because he never gets anything right and he has too much acne, so she gives him the number of her dermatologist. In the next they both have a cold and end up watching the Late Show together. She connects herself to her attacker in come way, identifies with him, sees him as more than an animal and talks and acts until he sees her as more than a body. Even in some of her scarier ones, she manages to talk or fight her way out of it with twisted logic or imagined Kung-Fu expertise.
The best kinds of rape fantasies don't end in sex, they end in safety. Both individuals have power; no one is helpless. We aren't laughing at the victim, and we aren't supposed to.
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