Comedy Central’s Downton Abbey spoof Another Period is a mix of witty and crude humor — with some incredibly funny gags falling into both categories. Each, week we’ll be pinpointing those best moments with help from Tumblr’s best GIF mavens.
Last night’s episode, “Divorce,” introduced the titular term (which does not, alas, refer to a dessert), amid a lot of traumatic sex — both Lillian and Beatrice’s excruciatingly obligatory procreative encounters with their husbands and Garfield’s less-than-consensual ordeal with a guest named Pussy. The latter inspires an ongoing discussion of “ravishing,” that classy 19th-century euphemism for rape, with Victor and Albert debating the merits of “ravish jokes” (“Some people feel that ravishing is not a topic to be made light of”) before deciding, “There is no line.”
Meanwhile, when word of the ravishing travels to Peepers, he gathers the staff for some good old-fashioned victim-blaming — prompting Garfield to protest, “I wear my valet’s uniform for me.”
But at least Garfield earns the sympathy of Chair, who gives him some vocabulary to understand what he’s been through: “We live in a ravish culture,” she says. And then he tries to hit on her.
As both a mirror of the ongoing controversy surrounding rape jokes and a parody of Downton‘s own catastrophically mishandled rape storyline, the running ravish gag was easily the highlight of “Divorce.”