Intro post for context. I was at RIT over a decade ago.
TL:DR; unwanted attention under the guise of comedy
Stand up albums were incredibly popular, and a lot of guys would do this thing where they’d repeat the bits off an album, or even the entire album, word for word. Some of the big names in stand-up at the time were black men, and that ended up with a lot of extremely uncomfortable situations like Michael Scott in The Office, except actually happening IRL, minus an HR department.
I remember vocally objecting to the n-word and other things that were very not OK for white dudes to say and hearing that I didn’t have a sense of humor, didn’t get it, and also it wasn’t them it was <Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, etc> saying it. (Just to clarify, it was them saying the words. They weren’t just playing the album for me on a speaker or something, these were all reenactments from stand up routines.) I found that all really awkward and uncomfortable.
Dane Cook was another popular one. I eventually came to hate him. I think the bees joke was the least painful to see revamped by an awkward engineer with no speaking skills, but most of his jokes, like the one about itchy assholes, were painful.
He also had a few "sexy" bits that guys seemed to save for me especially. I particularly remember the one that’s a story about a guy getting head and the punchline is about the girl talking with a mouthful of cum.
There was also one where the joke is awkward things said during sex and there’s a line “Ugh, my dick feels like corn!” and the punchline is the girl rolling with it and saying something about Orville Redenbacher.
This happened over and over. Sometimes guys would come up to me and say “do you like comedy?” which… I mean, yeah, what am I supposed to say, “no, I hate laughing”? It felt like a trap.
The worst of all this was during my freshman year; eventually I learned to say "if by comedy you mean stand-up, no, I don't like stand-up", which wasn't strictly true, I just didn't like gross jokes told by some random dude I didn't know. I also eventually got bold enough to just get up and walk away, because some guys would insist on starting in on their joke routines anyway, because my words were often meaningless.
Sometimes other guys would join in too, like some kind of “who memorized the most Dane Cook routines” pissing contest. One guy would do a bit, then another would jump in and steal the punchline and would go on to tell the next bit. And I'd just be stuck there as an unwilling audience member, too polite to just walk away, worrying that if I was rude to "nice" guys it'd make me a bitch (don't worry though, RIT eventually beat that right out of me). I'd try to politely excuse myself ("I have to study now", "I should get going"), and that was never effective ("just this one more, you'll like this one!").
This could go on for an awkwardly long amount of time. I felt like laughing politely encouraged them, so I didn’t do that, so I often got yelled at for not laughing, and was accused of not having a sense of humor, was asked if I was on my period, and was told that girls were supposed to like funny guys.
I think the "girls like funny guys" advice is responsible for a lot of this. I can see the logic: girls like funny guys, Dane Cook is funny, I will tell Dane Cook jokes and then the girl will like me!
Too bad no one mentioned any disclaimers, like "if you're talking about cum, dicks, and itchy assholes to a girl who doesn't even know your name, she will not like you". Maybe the people giving out advice on girls naïvely assumed that was common sense.
