It’s always so funny when a man “jokes” about hitting a woman with a hammer. It’s even funnier when both parties are members of Congress.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joked about casual violence against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a glitzy fundraising dinner in Tennessee on Saturday night, according to several reporters who were at the event.

During a speech to around 1,400 GOP donors, McCarthy reportedly spoke optimistically about the Republicans’ chances for retaking the majority in the House following the 2022 midterm elections.

McCarthy went on to say that, should the GOP manage to flip the House in 2022 and if he were to become the speaker, he would find it difficult to resist hitting Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel, The Washington Post’s Michael Scherer said on Twitter.

“It will be hard not to hit her with it but I will bang it down,” McCarthy joked, according to Scherer.

They don’t want us to forget that he was “joking,” do they.

But of course it isn’t a joke. It especially isn’t a joke when it’s a man talking about hitting a woman. It especially isn’t a joke when the man’s political party tried to overthrow the government a few months ago. It especially isn’t a joke when several colleagues of the man appear to have helped the attempted overthrow of the government, and when all but two of his colleagues are resisting all attempts to do anything about the attempted overthrow.

None of it is a joke.