Essay 1308

From The New York Post…

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NO LAUGHING MATTER
GAL-BASHING COMICS AT WOMEN’S BENEFIT

By Andrea Peyser

The comedy show was supposed to raise money for homeless women.

This is not funny.

But one comedian starring in the event Wednesday night thought it would be a riot to joke about maiming, killing and urinating on his “bitch.”

Another thought it was a blast to kid about smashing the skull of his toddler daughter.

The raunchfest - called Comedy Cares for the Homeless - took off at Town Hall in Midtown, headlined by funnywomen Paula Poundstone and Caroline Rhea.

But after suffering through the show, one major donor immediately yanked her support from Care for the Homeless, which is now building a Bronx shelter for women - many of them victims of domestic violence.

“It’s open season on women,” said an angry Merle Hoffman, president of Choices women’s clinic, who removed her support. “That’s what really infuriates me - misogyny is the last permissible thing.”

Also in the audience were an unamused Sonia Ossorio, president of the city’s National Organization for Women, and Liz Abzug.

Now, I like to think I have a seriously twisted sense of humor. But I was among those who felt ill when I heard comic Patrice O’Neal (he’s a guy) instruct men on how to turn a lover into a pirate - ejaculating into a woman’s eye, then kicking a leg until she says “arrrghhhh.”

He also drew laughs - and gasps - by teaching men to improve orgasm by paralyzing partners during the act.

Then Louis C.K., whose HBO series, “Lucky Louie,” was mercifully canceled, one-upped his twisted colleague - joking about “decimating” his “stupid” 4-year-old daughter by bashing her in the head.

Bobby Watts, executive director of Care for the Homeless, told me he’d had “some complaints” about the show. Though in a frantic e-mail to Hoffman, Watts insisted that one of the show’s producers, Caroline Thompson, was “outraged” by the material and “let [the comics] have it” backstage. Thompson did not return a call.

“I want to state that I do not condone the offensive, woman-hating nature of the routines,” Watts wrote to Hoffman.

But another producer, Mark Krantz, disputed that anyone was upset - and he said organizers knew very well what the comics might say.

“We’re sorry if it offended, but the performers knew why they were there, and they were there for free,” said Krantz. He said the event’s organizers “walked into this with their eyes open.”

I’m sure on some planet these comics are funny.

But for a women’s homeless shelter? That’s a bad joke.