Are rape jokes the last taboo, or a line that should never be breached?

Jokes about rape are almost always vile. The rarest of humorists can
ride the line of provocative and thought-provoking, but more often,
rape jokes are coming from said victim-shamers, or those who seem to
take the topic lightly, or confuse the issue as to what is actually
rape. (If that sounds odd, take note that it took the FBI nearly a
century to officially revise its own definition of rape as something
that most people would recognize as such.)

Sexual violence activists concur that normalizing conversation and
better education about rape prevention would actually increase the
frequency of reporting. But the question is, in the right hands, can
rape jokes actually help with this? Can they provoke and make people
think, in the same way that, say, Richard Pryor’s jokes about race in
America helped further the thinking on it?

The New York Times recently (sort of) asked this question, in a
profile of several female comedians who seem to be pushing the bounds
of good taste, and playing with the line between uncomfortably funny,
and just plain wrong. Primarily focusing on vulgar nerd Sarah
Silverman, the article traces several recent threads that seem to stem
out from the spunky comedian’s willfully declasse style:

http://www.alternet.org/story/153305/when_is_it_ok_to_tell_rape_jokes?page=entire