Current Events > Should humorists feel pressure due to evolving standards of taste?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I feel like with comedy it's ultimately about whether the audience laughs. If you're an entertainer and you're not giving your audience a show they find entertaining it doesn't matter if it's material that killed in 1989 or whenever. You're failing as an entertainer right now.

If you say something that nobody finds funny, you're simply not a funny person.

Kinda. It's really an issue by issue thing.

What people don't get is that "offensive humor" is a redundancy. Humor is defense mechanism for the things which offend our sensibilities.

UnsteadyOwl posted...

I feel like with comedy it's ultimately about whether the audience laughs. If you're an entertainer and you're not giving your audience a show they find entertaining it doesn't matter if it's material that killed in 1989 or whenever. You're failing as an entertainer right now.

This is interesting, because a lot of the controversies surrounding comedians in recent years are usually from people who weren't at the show

Dave Chappelle, regardless of whether his jokes are appropriate or not, usually has his audience in stitches

I went with the middle option, though I personally agree more with the first option. Some humor is always in bad taste, even if one has the right audience for it.

While other types of entertainment can get away with losing audience to alienating elements or features that don't agree with everyone (action films' choice of type of action), those elements usually are just tiresome or tedious, and can allow the piece to be utterly ignorable with no consequence to the work beyond how much money it makes. Humor that becomes offensive will actually get people to try and keep it away from others to the point it becomes stigmatized.

None of the above-- today's 'standards' are all about whiners who get offended by every little thing & don't even care about comedy in the first place. They should all shut the fuck up and get off Twitter.

It really depends, like Mel Brooks' entire work has intentionally offensive material in it, but it's still undeniably hilarious

Dave Chappelle is in the wrong. But it's not because people are "too sensitive." There is a difference between making jokes about groups of people and spreading hate speech under the guise of humor. For example, caricature humor you'd see from Tyler Perry or The Boondocks is generally acceptable, but lynching jokes are not. Trans humor is the same way. Always Sunny had some great episodes fueled by trans humor, there are plenty of young comedians that joke about their friends fulfilling trans or nonbinary stereotypes. But the tone and attitude of Chappelle's trans jokes are much more in line with the jokes white supremacists make about black people.

He is not fighting against some unreasonable taboo or standing up for free speech. His trans jokes are not made in good fun. He's deliberately pushing harmful rhetoric because his personal stance is ignorant and in line with those beliefs. And he is staining his legacy by digging his heels on this. Hopefully he'll learn and become better.