Let me explain my position better, because misunderstandings are a bitch and a half.
Comedians should have boundaries. There, I said it. For example, pointing in a comedy venue at an audience member and shouting: “haha, you are ugly, your kid probably died of a horrible disease and the colour of your hair means that you should be murdered because of your political beliefs.”
That is clearly over the line. And any sensible person knows that. Comedians should have boundaries. And those should be: comedy. Everything that is not comedy, should be off limits. The rub is: comedy is subjective and we cannot expect every comedian to be a sensible person.
Also, we cannot expect every comedians transgressions be the result of a lack of sensibleness. Perhaps they are very sensible and just not very funny. Or they are not very intelligent. Or they are encultured differently and perform in front of the wrong crowd.
And that is the next thing: comedy depends on the recipient as much as it does on the sender. Something I find extremely offensive is definitely super funny to somebody else.
So, genuine question, what good is it to say that comedy should have boundaries, if those necessarily are different with every single person? If the position is that comedy should never offend anybody without power, nothing could ever be said, because the values, positions, personalities within that overwhelming majority of people on earth (people without power) are so vastly different.
I would even argue that comedy is fuelled by transgression. You have to test out how far the crowd accepts you going and then go a tad further.
Another point I want to make is this: we seem to have at least two different discussions here, a theoretical one and a practical one. What I wrote in my second paragraph is theoretical. In theory comedians should have boundaries, because I genuinely don’t want any asshat to say such hurtful nonsense to a guest of a comedy venue.
In practice the call for boundaries in comedy is absolutely meaningless, because there is nobody enforcing any boundaries, other than the audience itself, that can walk away or switch the channel. It is meaningless virtue signalling à la: nobody should suffer hurtful words from people trying to be funny.
Or the call for boundaries to comedy is not meaningless, because it is actually the call for somebody to enforce those boundaries. And the only way (I know) to do that, is to enshrine those boundaries into law. And I think we can actually all agree that this is an absolute can of worms.
Another major disagreement in this thread seems to revolve around our different perceptions of where the danger comes from. Some people on here, who are way more culturally aware and historically educated than me and have vastly better critical thinking abilities, think the danger comes from offensive jokes. This of course is evidenced by all the nazi and communist jokesters fuelling the hatred of millions, who in turn murdered millions of people. That was the reason, right? It started with jokes.
Others might say that censorship is even more dangerous than jokes (even if those jokes are in bad taste or uttered with malice) and that it is always the tyrant king who kills the jester and the authoritarian who wants to control information and criticism. I even heard of people like that burning books. Imagine that.
One last point to ponder for the critically thinking crowd in here: evil jokes outside of the Overton window have an effect. And when we don’t cut them off, they will metastasise into something uglier. If we accept this, perhaps the slippery slope argument can also be applied to censorship and the ever-increasing calls for it. Be careful what you wish for, lest somebody actually dangerous finds you usefull.
