The host of Comedy Central's "Tosh.0" has taken to his Twitter account to issue a mea culpa for his ill-conceived wisecrack at Hollywood's Laugh Factory.
Tosh's apology comes after an account of the set, purportedly written by the friend of an audience member, began making its rounds on the blogosphere.
According to the account, Tosh made "some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc."
The blog post claims that the offended attendee yelled out, "Actually, rape jokes are never funny!"
After which Tosh asked the crowd, "Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her? … ”
The audience member claims to have been "completely stunned" by Tosh's words and "high-tailed it out of there."
Tosh seemed to validate the story on his Twitter account Tuesday, linking to one of the published reports and writing, "all the out of context misquotes aside, i'd like to sincerely apologize."
The comedian, whose series is punctuated by borderline-inappropriate humor, further attempted to justify his comments by noting, "the point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them."
Tosh then deflected to the conversation to his own series, noting, "on a lighter note tonight's new episode of tosh.0 will be featuring clowns."
Clowns with better senses of humor than he has, hopefully.
