I hate it when people start a piece of writing with “According to Webster’s Dictionary” or similar cringes before the audience. But whenever I think of Daniel Tosh (which is seldom) I can’t help but think of the (British English) definition of “tosh”, which is “nonsense, trash, bullshit”. I checked out the etymology today at the Oxford English Dictionary and didn’t find one. (Aside to the OED: Be ashamed.) But one of the early appearances of the word was in cricket slang, where it referred to “bowling of contemptible easiness” (a “meatball” in terms of American baseball slang). So maybe it’s a variant of “toss”–a throw that’s contemptibly easy to hit.
The takeway, I think, is “contemptible easiness”. Is there a better way to sum up Tosh’s schtick than that?
Normally the guy doesn’t appear on my radar, because I have more reliable sources of funny stuff on the internet (starting with the internet).
But I’ve been hearing and reading stuff about him lately because of this business, where he apparently was trying out a riff on rape jokes, a member of the audience objected, and he speculated about how funny it would be if the audience member were gang-raped, then and there.
As fate and my innamorata would have it, I watched (within the space of a few days) two movies based on old Ira Levin novels: 