Recently, I was binge watching one of my favorite shows on Netflix, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Jerry Seinfeld. In every episode, Jerry introduces which car he’ll be driving, usually a vintage Porsche or some other retro sports car and then he’ll introduce his guest. He picks the comedian up, and they go to a diner to have some coffee and chat about comedy. This show is great, and very addicting. Do not watch it if you have a big exam coming up and need to study.

I was watching the episode with Margaret Cho, who is a very funny Asian-American comedienne (Jerry picked her up in a 1967 Mazda Cosmo Sport, in case you were wondering). During the show, Margaret spoke about how she was a survivor of rape and recalled a nasty incident in a comedy club when she did a comedy bit about it. The audience became extremely angry, and at one point people were coming up onstage to scream at her. It was a nightmare.

Later in the show, Margaret said that she wanted to do a make-up show at that venue, and invite all of the original audience members to come back and have a discussion about what happened. Jerry even offered to open for her, which he does. At the end of the episode, we see the make-up show and the discussion with the audience. Margaret was very apologetic about what happened, acting as if she had done something wrong. The audience seemed to agree with this, with one of the women who screamed at her before saying, “everybody has a bad day.”

I’m sorry, but this seems ridiculous to me. In my opinion, Margaret Cho had NOTHING to apologize for. She had an absolutely horrific thing happen to her, and to cope with it, she decided to laugh and joke about it. I don’t think a lot of people could take something so horrible and make it funny, but Margaret Cho found a way. Good for her.

Now, if that kind of edgy humor is not your thing, that is completely fine. If you were in a comedy club and the performer was making jokes that just didn’t sit right with you, that is a-okay. You have every right to leave and never see that comedian again. You have the right to disagree with what they say and share your opinion. What is not okay is trying to shut down any speech that you disagree with.

I don’t care what joke Margaret Cho made, it did not give the right to any of those audience members to try to shut her down. And it certainly did not warrant an apology from Margaret. She did nothing wrong when she made a joke about her own rape because she has a constitutional right to free speech and to make bits about whatever she finds funny. Those audience members should have apologized to her for overreacting like children and harassing a comedian on stage instead of doing the mature thing and simply leaving the club.

It seems like we live in a world where disliking what someone says means the right to silence them. If someone tells a joke or has an opinion that you do not like, you can absolutely walk away, not shut them down. The great thing about comedy is that anything is on the table, that anything can be made funny. Let’s let comedians do their thing, and hopefully if we find one we like, we can forget about all of the problems in the world and just laugh.