The Internet has exploded. Or at least that’s what it seemed like starting the evening of Friday, July 6.

Daniel Tosh, a well-known comedian, performed at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. He is known for being witty and edgy, so most audience members could have anticipated a few off-color jokes and maybe even a little squirming in their seats. What they got was a bombshell ricocheting off the walls of our social norms, and an opportunity to question what is “OK” and how as a society we can continue to learn and grow.

On July 6, Tosh stepped across a thin and volatile line. As part of his set he included a series of “rape jokes,” and as happens in comedy, an audience member responded vocally (this is known traditionally as “heckling”), purportedly shouting out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny.”

Here is where the controversy begins.

After pausing, Tosh responded to the heckler, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl (meaning the girl who spoke out) got raped by, like, five guys right now? Like right now what if a bunch of guys just raped her?”

Twitter, in all its deep wisdom, lit up, while the woman targeted by Tosh quickly left the theater. According to witness accounts, a surprising percentage of the audience guffawed at the idea that she should be raped in response to questioning a comic’s choice of fodder.

By the time the set ended that night, an Internet firestorm was born, with impassioned arguments hitting the pages of blogs, and Internet news sources arguing unabashedly about Tosh’s choice of language and his response to a heckler.

Supporters of Tosh accuse people upset with the “joke” of being “thought police,” and those who believe he stepped way over of line have pointed out that a white male comic joking about rape — especially in such personal and derogatory terms — is an incredibly socially irresponsible thing to do.

Tosh has since explained his remarks by reminding the world he was joking, and the debate roars on about whether a comic’s right to “free speech” outweighs the social cost of taking aim at victims in order to get a quick laugh.

A subtler point, and one that perhaps has not been fully addressed, is the idea that it was not Tosh’s insistence on telling “rape jokes” that ignited the firestorm, but rather it was the manner in which he chose to do it, and who became the butt of his joke.

Comedy has long been a means for taking aim at the most sensitive issues of our society, a venue to question social norms, point out the ridiculousness of our systems and beliefs, and look at ourselves through a less serious lens — a lens that allows for the flaws of being human to glow in all their glory.

Great comics can make a joke about almost anything, and more importantly great comics can do it in such a way that they are not dehumanizing the victims in the scenarios they are subtly mocking.

Lindy West, a well-known comic and writer for the blog Jezebel, points out she has heard and told rape jokes dozens of times without igniting a firestorm of criticism. The key difference is that in many of those jokes the idea of rape itself being acceptable or rape culture was the butt of the joke. Not the victim.

Tosh responded in anger to one sentence of heckling and pushed “edgy” comedy from inappropriate and not funny to cruel and not at all funny by using the heckler’s sexuality and identity against her.

In asking the audience to laugh at the idea of her being raped then and there, he was not asking them to laugh at a “rape joke” — he was asking the audience to laugh at the idea that a woman in the room should be attacked for stepping out of line.

What makes this instance touch a public nerve so much more than the plethora of politically incorrect jokes that are told every day is the fact that Tosh used his place in society, as a white male, to draw on imagery of a type of violence that is primarily targeted at women, to put his heckler back in her place.

The larger issue of whether or not rape jokes can be funny is a question we as a society are still struggling to answer. But Tosh is not being publicly called out for simply making a rape joke; in fact, if he had not responded to a heckler, this would never have made more waves than a single heckling or any other inappropriate joke.

What makes this incident boil the waters of social cohesion is how blatantly it demonstrates that no matter how far we have come, some people are still safe, others are not, and that a lack of safety is something that can be “funny” if it’s used against you.

Callie Vandewiele, formerly of Estacada, writes a monthly column for The Outlook, Sandy Post and Estacada News.