system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
cmv: The notion that modern comedy has been ruined by political correctness is ridiculous

It has become somewhat of an axiom, a truism even, in the minds of many individuals, that comedy (whether in the form of stand-up, movies, parodies etc) today is much less funnier that it was decades ago, and that the reason for this is that comedians cannot joke about touchy, edgy topics anymore without being "cancelled" (fired, their reputation destroyed, you name it) by the media and by certain loud-mouthed individuals (generally scoffingly referred to as SJWs who can't take a joke anymore). This change is considered very negative by these people, and it is blamed on the PC (political correctness) culture that they claim appeared recently (this decade), and which they believe gives certain groups immunity from being made fun of. Instead, they claim, comedy is now used as a near-political tool to attack them.

Of course, almost all of these people share similar views with regards to the effect PC has had on female empowerment in movies, transgender issues etc, but, while these topics are slightly related to what I am talking about, this post is NOT about any of them. It is only about comedy.

In my view, which I would like to have challenged, these criticisms of modern comedy are, en masse, built out of personal biases that prevent these people from understanding the basic nature of comedy. Thus, these individuals fail to understand the simplest notions about comedy and comedians, thus indicating to me that what they mean by "comedy" has almost no relation to the real-life meaning of the word.

Let me begin explaining. I'll try to make every point as complete as possible. This post could be much, much, shorter, but I want to make clear how I got from the beginning to the end in a logical, complete manner, so that I don't get replies which question the basic definition of comedy, for example.

Just like with any word, there are multiple widely-recognised definitions of "comedy", but all of them have small differences between them. Thus, it is reasonable to look at the Wikipedia definition of the word, since Wikipedia behaves, by its nature, as an aggregator: "In a modern sense, comedy (from the Greek: kōmōidía) is a genre of fiction that refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter."

Now that we've established a working definition of the word, let's analyze what it actually means. The work is "generally intended [...] to induce laughter". This tells us two things, which are also quite obvious from a common-sense perspective: one, the main goal of comedy is to induce laughter from the audience; and two, comedy is not SOLELY about getting cheap laughs, just like how not every piece of art is just cheap entertainment: there might be, and there always has been (see later), another side to humour (generally social critique).

Let's take these two points separately. 

1) So, comedy is intended to make the audience laugh, what's so special about that? Well, it tells us that the ones who judge whether the comedy is well-made and funny are not the comedians themselves, the ones who write the skits or one-liners or whatever, but rather the audience itself, the "consumers", so to say. In general, there is a reasonable discussion to be had about whether art "belongs" to the artist or to the observer (figuratively speaking, this is not an IP argument). I have no interest of entering in this discussion. Suffice it to say that in the specific case of comedy, there's no discussion to be had: clearly, the audience determines what the quality of a specific example of comedy is.

But what does the "quality" of comedy even mean? Clearly, every person has a different sense of humour. Certain people love slapstick, while others can't stand anything but deadpan. With such a degree of subjectivity, can one really distinguish between good comedy and bad comedy, and, if not, what is even the point of this post beyond slapping some meaningless cool-sounding words together? Well, clearly, just like how we can say The Empire Strikes Back is a good movie, while The Room is not, we can claim that certain examples of comedy are good, while others are bad. Yeah, maybe most, if not all, types of comedy are acceptable, but not all applications of these types are good. Just like how not every sculpture or painting is good, even if painting is clearly a celebrated art.

So, we've concluded the audience does assign a mostly objective labelling of a specific example of comedy. What else is important about this labelling? Well, clearly, social attitudes change over time. This undisputable fact is shown everywhere; it was only 100 years ago that the concept of women's suffrage was opposed and laughed at by a big portion of the population. And it shows up clearly in discussions about comedy: what was cool 50 years ago might not be cool today, what was funny 50 years ago might not be funny today. And nownonly to social attitudes change over time, but they also differ from culture to culture. And I don't mean just nationalities, but also inside a specific countries. White culture is very different from black culture in the US, for example, as shown by the differing responses to calls made to restructure police departments.

2) So, comedy can be about more than just humour. As implied in the definition, the roots of comedy are in Ancient Greece. Thus, even though it has been in existence for thousands of years, it has maintained its secondary role throughout, that of social critique. Through comedy, just like through any form of art, the creators communicate a message. In the case of comedy, in most cases the message is: "we make fun of this behaviour in order to teach you not to partake in it". Sure, throughout time there has been a clear division of comedy into "punching up" (making fun of those who attained a higher social status) and "punching down" (making fun of those with a lower social status), but in both cases comedians criticized people and behaviours of people that were specific to the targeted class.

How does this relate to politics? Clearly, the critics of modern comedy must be onto something when they claim so much more of comedy is only about politics now? Well, it's true that politics used to be almost taboo in the past, something professional comedians took care not to spend too much time dissecting, while today Late Night Shows, SNL and the like spend a lot more time on it. But the conclusion these critics get from it is nonsensical. It's not a conspiracy by a group of SJWs witn political intentions, it's just the natural continuation of the social critique.  As I mentioned at point number 1), social attitudes and beliefs change over time. Today, people have begun to realize that an undesirable, corrupt, unfair etc political system might be at the heart of the social problems that we face. As an example, instead of mocking the middle-class mom for not being home with her daughter, people mock the government and the ruling class for not offering paid maternity leave so that she can stay home and not worry about paying the bills.



So, getting back to the main point. The critics of modern comedy show no understanding of the 2 main ideas behind comedy: the fact that the audience determines what's good, and comedy's important role in society. Thus, being angry about the fact that somewhat sexist, racist etc comedy that was appreciated decades ago is not appreciated today is ridiculous. 

On one hand, it's like telling the rest of audience: "This is funny! Laugh, damn you!", which is almost insulting, since the audience knows better than you what they consider funny. In their craze to blame a conspiracy for the change in comedy, critics became blind to the fact that THE AUDIENCE ITSELF doesn't find things funny anymore. The average person, not the conspiracy orchestrator. 

On the other hand, those who complain about the over-politicization of comedy fail to grasp that this is nothing more than the natural evolution of the social critique aspect of comedy, once regular people understood who is really to blame for their struggles.

So how can so many people be so dead wrong? Well, judging by the way in which they present their arguments (conspiracy theories, victimhood mentality etc), it's most likely due to personal biases (perhaps even slight homophobia and racism) arising from a subconscious desire to return society to the time when joking about the "blacks, gays and women" was socially acceptable. Thus, they are incapable of understanding how society got away from these potentially toxic behaviours on its own, with no need for a conspiracy by individuals pushing their own political agenda.
gpt
To the contrary, the *audience* almost invariably finds what the comedian is saying to be funny, even if the jokes are about very politically incorrect topics, because the audience generally understands they're at a comedy show and not a TED talk. 

What these comedians are referring to are primarily twitter mobs and select journalists who try to stir up moral outrage over jokes the next day when its revealed one of these comedians had the audacity to have some group the mob likes as the butt of one of their jokes.