The final taboo of comedy?

[Flying Dagger]

also if you want to be truly disturbed by jokes (or want to know where to avoid if you don't,)
try sikipedia.

 

[Bobtheinsane]

On Stewart Lee and the Comedian piss-take:

It's not that it's a taboo. It's that he's not funny and hence it looks more like jealous ire than an attempt at comedy. It's a shame, because Stewart Lee was good when he was younger, just now he's a whiney old cynic.

 

[Ignignoct]

Now, we've mostly all heard dead baby jokes, jokes about disabled people, blacks, gays, terrorists, death, 9/11, Josef Fritzel, the holocaust, etc.

Even on stage, there's people like Louis CK pushing the boundaries by making jokes about hating his own kids, and there's Ricky Gervais making ironic jokes about the starving in Africa etc.

I was thinking is there anything comics won't talk about.

The I was watching the new Stewart Lee Show on BBC, and he took that final step, he's actively making fun of other stand up comedians, and at least to me, somehow getting away with it.
I realise he's not to everyone's taste, but it's interesting to me that it felt like 'whoa, you can't say that', whereas if he'd taken any of the topic from my first paragraph I'd hardly have blinked.

So, I wonder, is ridiculing your peers the final taboo of comedy?

Or do you think it's something else?

Final taboo?

White people making racist jokes. Publicly, anyway.

 

[TwistedEllipses]

I don't know what comedians you've been watching, but Brit comedians do it all the time. The main targets are the lower end comedians such as Patrick Kielty or Ricky Gervais. The current butt of jokes is the sketch show 'Horne and Cordon'. Comedians also seem to have around 50% of their jokes about themselves, normally about being rubbish and not having proper jobs!

 

[internutt]

Comedy has no limits.

There's a joke about everything and everyone.

The important part of Comedy is that at the end of the joke people laugh.

 

[Ignignoct]

Anyone hear Katt Williams VS Steve Harvey?... New Years just a few months ago.

It was brutal.

Katt Williams destroyed.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

All I know of Katt Williams is the bits on GTA IV, and I wasn't impressed I have to say, can we get some black comedians that don't base their whole act about being black? The whole gangsta/crack/hos/pimping/rims/bling thing gets old. Add gay comedians and women who base their whole act about being gay or a woman, too.

Why can't we have more acts like Paul Sinha, an overweight gay asian ex doctor, and he doesn't linger on being fat, gay, asian or a doctor. Sure he does jokes about himself, but it's not the entirety of his act, and I don't mind black, gay , women based material too, but damn, lets have some variety.

I'm not saying he's the greatest comedian ever, but at least he doesn't base his whole act around his race or sexuality.

I'll give Stephen K Amos some credit, he plays with the whole assumed image of black comics and sure he does some material about afros etc, its a part of his act, not all of it.