Comedy - is everything fair game?

[GonetoGround14]

I listen to a mainstream French public radio channel - France Inter. There's a lot of humour, which is nice. They laugh at everything. This really struck me for the first time today. They had some humorous person on, and in quick succession there was a joke about the kindergarten shooting in Thailand and a series of jokes about Biden's warning of nuclear Armageddon.
My personal reaction was that joking about the kindergarten was much less acceptable than the jokes about Armageddon. I assume that's because nuclear war affects those telling the jokes as well as everyone else. I might have been happier with no jokes at all though.
So when is it okay to joke and when isn't it?

I largely agree with you - I don't think the joke r.e kindergarten was/is acceptable but for me it's very important who is telling the joke. For example there's a comedian I occasionally come across on twitter who makes jokes about various things related to growing up in an African household and the relatability makes it funny, I can't imagine finding it as funny as I do if e.g. Michael Macintyre was making the same joke. All that aside I do think there are certain things which are completely off the table and I don't think that makes me po-faced.

Listen to Jimmy Carr comedy routines. He quite often goes near the mark (or too far).

Well I’d say a massacre at a nursery school really isn’t funny. The topic isn’t funny so a joke about it is just unlikely to be funny. As a pp said, who it is matters. A comedian like Trevor Noah joking about apartheid rings differently. Joking about your own tragedy is different to laughing at somebody else’s.

The older I get the less I appreciate ‘dark humour.’ I’ve often thought it’s much harder to make a joke that is light and doesn’t mock or belittle or rely on ‘shock laughter’ but makes somebody laugh because it’s witty and clever.

…most “free speech” types will tell you that it is, but I don’t agree. Gervais & Carr are just Bernard Manning with better teeth. Punch-down “humour” is horrible, it’s an excuse for bullying people who have intellectual disabilities, are abuse victims, or are black.

Ricky Gervais talk about this and makes the point that we laugh along until it's something that cuts us personally to the bone. I think we have to accept that the freedom to offend is fundamental....but it's a tough one.

i personally think dark humor helps us process tragedy. Satire, even done by others directed at my own groups, is funny if done well. It provides a form of social commentary and discourse that can’t easily take place in other mediums.

that said, I don’t make jokes with anyone outside of an extremely small circle of people I know very well because I don’t want to risk saying something wrong. There is nothing to gain and the risk of not being aware of some nuance is far too high.

With offensive jokes youve got to figure out if theyre laughing AT people who find offensive things acceptable or if they are laughing at the thing itself. If they're an intelligent comic, then it'll be the former and taking offence is missing the point.

If they're an intelligent comic, then it'll be the former and taking offence is missing the point.

This doesn't work. It's really just a means to air certain views under the guise of 'high brow' comedy. At least the racists, ableists and so forth own it.

Nursery massacre - I don’t think it could ever be acceptable to joke about that. Pretty sick

It’s a weird situation in the UK.

On the one hand, there’re popular comedians who make provocative jokes in the context of light entertainment.

On the other, you can been jailed for telling bad taste jokes (the April Jones/Matthew Woods case).

Joking about children being murdered is NEVER acceptable in my view, and I suspect most other people's views

I have a relative who publishes (just on Facebook) a lot of arguably witty little poems / limericks about our politicians and their incompetence. That's not for me, either. I somehow feel that it's too serious for funny poems.

It wasn't a joke about children being murdered. The (very weak) joke was to ask whether someone (I hadn't heard of them, but I assume some French politician or similar) had been at the kindergarten at the time. So implying that the person was a small child rather than a serious adult.

Dark humour is a coping strategy. Life is bleak. Offending others has consequences.