Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 200 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab

And join the lively conversation on the Culturefest Facebook page here:

The sponsors of today’s show are Audible.com and Grisly Meter, Amazon’s collection of gruesome summer reads. Get a free audiobook from Audible’s collection of more than 100,000 titles and a subscription to a daily audio digest when you sign up for a 30-day free trial at www.audiblepodcast.com/culturefest. For a selection of frightful summer reads, visit Grisly Meter.

Join Slate’s Culture Editor John Swansburg this Thursday, July 19 at the 92^nd Street Y downtown in Tribeca, as he hosts a screening of The Karate Kid followed by a live Q&A with its star Ralph Macchio. Get tickets here.

On this week’s Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the USA Network’s miniseries Political Animals and whether it succeeds as a roman à clef about the Clintons. The Gabfesters then discuss Daniel Tosh’s tangle with a heckler over a joke about rape, whether rape jokes can ever be funny, and that inscrutable element that makes a joke work. Finally, they discuss Dana’s lifelong indifference to competitive games and why we bother playing them at all.

Here are some links to the things we discussed this week:

• USA Network’s miniseries Political Animals
• Joe Klein’s novel based on Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics and its movie adaptation
• American Wife: A Novel, Curtis Sittenfeld’s account of the life of a fictional Laura Bush-esque first lady
• Amy Chozick on the creation of Political Animals for the New York Times
• The blogged secondhand account of the Daniel Tosh rape joke controversy
• Tosh’s apology via Twitter
• The comedians who have come to Tosh’s defense
• Patton Oswalt’s tweet in response to the Tosh-heckler fracas
• Louis CK’s appearance on The Daily Show in which he discusses his post-controversy tweet
• Louis CK’s “Kill or rape Hitler” bit
• Dane Cook’s “Raped on Halo” bit
• Jezebel’s Lindy West on how to make a rape joke
• Kate Harding’s rundown of rape jokes that work
• Megan Carpentier’s 2008 Jezebel post that asks if a rape joke is ever funny
• The Onion’s take on the Daniel Tosh controversy
• The subversive stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce
• The shock comic Andrew Dice Clay
• Dana’s abhorrence of rule-based zero sum competition for Slate
• Sam Anderson on addictive “stupid games” for the New York Times Magazine and the interview with Anderson that ran as its companion piece
• Slate’s John Swansburg on why he stopped being a sports fan
• The New York Times on taking play seriously
• The game Pounce (although the Turner family has alternate rules.)

Endorsements:

Dana’s pick: My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, the online repository of hotties of yesteryear

Julia’s pick: Banana pudding, the ultimate summer dessert concoction of bananas, pudding, Nilla wafers, and whipped cream

Stephen’s pick: Dusty Springfield’s album Dusty in Memphis

Outro: Dusty Springfield’s “Just One Smile”

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Dan Pashman. Our intern is Sally Tamarkin.

Follow us on the new Culturefest Twitter feed. And please Like the Culture Gabfest on Facebook.