Should comedians have boundaries?

[DarthMetalliCube]

the-pi-guy said:

DarthMetalliCube said:

But here's the thing - if an idea is awful or holds no water, it will NEVER gain enough popularity to gain much traction or shape society in the first place. Or if the rare time it does, it will not last long and the pendulum will swing back to sanity and truth, overwhelming it. The truth always wins out in the end.

If this is the case - if they ARE in fact so false and unpopular, why worry about them, or the effect they'll have? At the end of the day isn't this just another form of "Democracy"?

That's because there are people who fight for the right things.

Slavery lasted hundreds of years, before enough fighting happened that ended it.

These things don't just magically go away. Awful ideas get put down by people who fight them.

Who said anything about these ideas being unpopular? A lot of terrible ideas are incredibly popular or becoming more popular. 

Jumpin said:

You can’t say you weren’t talking about comedy in a previous post and then come back and say that you are.

I don’t buy your arguments at all, South Park spent over 25 years joking about all those subjects.

Comedy and hate speech are not the same thing.

Hitler stood up and spoke before a crowd. Hitler was a clown. But that is not stand-up comedy. I think you should learn the difference between the two.

Sure, some of these jokes made by South Park may encourage some credulous twat to be more antisemitic, but that’s a small minority at best, and not the fault or general result of comedy… it’s because of inbreeding.

My last comment was that you misunderstood what I was talking about. 
I didn't say I wasn't talking about comedy. 

Hate speech can overlap with comedy. 

If a comedian were putting Hitler's talking points into their bits, do you think that would be fine? Do you think that is impossible for some reason? 

>I don’t think any comedian should be limited on any subject.

You can make jokes about the holocaust, you can make jokes about 9/11, you can make jokes about trans people and black people. 

The issue isn't the subject. Who are you making fun of when you make the joke. Plenty of comedians and plenty of comedy movie/tv series still make outrageous things just the way you like, and it works because the real joke is frequently that the person is an idiot. 

You're conflating art and entertainment with real life. At the end of the day, this is still nothing more than the modern version of a moral panic (which almost always turn out to be false and misguided hysteria, whether the satanic panic of the 80s, PMRC of the 90s, the Jack Thompson video game violence scare of the 2000s, or the current hyper sensitivity against comedy). It makes the argument that art/entertainment = dangerous in some real life, tangible form. I strongly disagree with that, and I always will.