One of my favorite comedian-persons, Ricky Gervais, tweeted the following not long ago…
Please stop saying "You can't joke about anything anymore". You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system.
I think I agree with that the way he meant it but with one little codicil. There's an increasing tendency, I think, to believe that if you tell a joke about some sensitive subject and folks don't laugh, it's their fault for being too friggin' sensitive. Well, maybe it's that but maybe the joke just wasn't funny. That's also a possibility. I mean, not every joke about dead babies or people with unfortunate physical conditions is hilarious.
There was a period in my life, long ago and far away, when I spent a fair amount of time at the Comedy Store and other venues where new comedians were showcasing and painstakingly trying to be seen. A lot of the guys I was around went on to decent success — and a surprising amount of them, I now think, attained the level of success they deserved. That is to say B+ comics had B+ careers, C- comedians had C- careers and so on. Often when that didn't happen, there was a clear and visible reason why not…like the comedian being too heavy into drinks 'n' drugs or the comedian being difficult to work with. It wasn't because of how good they were on stage.
One of the recurring problems, it seemed to me, was to take this attitude: I am always funny. If the audience doesn't laugh, they're a bunch of idiots or they're a bunch of squares or they're a bunch of losers…something like that. There was one up-and-coming/going nowhere comic who consistently evoked only mild laughter on stage and it was always the crowd's fault for not being smarter and hipper and more appreciative of true comic genius. Don't try to figure out who it was. I don't remember his name and you probably never knew it.
There is such a thing as a bad audience but as I once heard Jay Leno tell a roomful of comics who envied where he then was in his career, "If you get them [bad audiences] all the time, maybe the problem isn't with them." There's also such a thing as a wrong audience — or the wrong material for the room. I suspect if Ricky Gervais somehow got booked to play a retirement community where the average age was Deceased, he'd tell fewer dick jokes.
I love most of what some call "shock" or "edgy" comedians. My current favorite is probably Jim Jefferies who does it with more thought and genuine insight than anyone else I've seen lately. Gervais is good too. I don't think either of them if they bombed would blame it on the audience being too uptight or "politically correct" or anything like that. They know that to be outrageous and to "push the envelope" (as they say) to the point of offending some is not the point of comedy. It can be a nice bonus but it's not an excuse for not being funny.