“Conformity to proper social norms” and “humor” are contradictions in terms. From Joe Bob Briggs at takimag.com:
RALEIGH, N.C.—The stand-up comedy stage is the last place where you can speak without a filter.
Or at least I always thought so.
People are bringing tape recorders into workout clubs to make sure comics don’t “cross over the line.” That would be the Speech Code Line, the one that dwells within the active imaginations of humorless graduates of Sensitivity Training Class. We used to have a motto: “The job of the comedian is to define where the line is, and then deliberately cross it.” Good luck with that today. Someone in the audience might just be a Kamikaze Safe Space Warrior, a person being repeatedly triggered on purpose in an act of self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Yeah, I know—in one sense it’s nothing new. I’ve heard all the stories about Lenny Bruce, how the cops nailed him in a Greenwich Village club for saying the word “cocksucker” and then the authorities hounded him all the way to jail, an experience that pretty much broke his spirit.
And yeah, I know how George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” routine got trundled up to the Supreme Court by humorless moral scolds.
And yeah, I know how Gilbert Gottfried lost his job as the Aflac duck because he made Japanese tsunami jokes. (That’s the best you could do on offensive Gilbert material? The man anchored the Friars Club roasts for years. If the greatest comedians from both coasts had a life-or-death dirty-joke contest, Gilbert would be the sole survivor—he can tell jokes that make Andrew Dice Clay puke.)
