Better answers?

I’ve been struck recently when watching interviews on various subjects that I would have given different answers or at least made additional points to the ones the interviewee gave.

For example, the idea that certain forms of comedy should be banned because they are offensive.

One interviewee was a comedian, I forget his name (no-one famous), but he had been banned from certain venues because of his supposedly offensive material. The other interviewee was talking about hate speech and punching down and victimisation of powerless groups etc.

The comedian responding started talking about free speech and the wrongness of censorship by a small number of zealots basically threatening trouble for the venue if it didn’t prevent the comedian from performing there. He said that this sort of authoritarian mob intimidation is how the NAZIs started off in the 1920s and that the number in the audience should decide whether his comedy is too offensive to listen to or not.

And look, there is validity to what he said but I would have started from the basic principle of how humour works in the brain, which is step 1, not at step 2 which is where the critic started and to which the comedian felt compelled to respond.

Step 1 is that the trigger inside your brain that decides if something is funny or not is an instant reaction.
It’s not a careful post-hoc analysis of the precise words used plus subject matter and then whether on balance, you think it is in some way helpful or harmful in a socio-political sense, and then based on that you laugh or sit stony-faced. If you do this, whatever it is, it’s no longer comedy, even if in the end you decide it was funny.
Neither are you correctly dealing with humour if you pre-determine that you will or won’t find comedic material funny based on the socio-political standing or reputation of the comedian. 
Such agenda-driven analysis, whether before or after the event, is politics; nothing to do with humour, with comedy as such.

Some people are like Jack Point in W S Gilbert’s The Yeomen of the Guard, ‘For, look you, there is humour in all things, and the truest philosophy is that which teaches us to find it and to make the most of it.’
Others are like Margo Leadbetter in the 1970s sitcom, The Good Life, where in one episode she says that she can tell when she’s supposed to laugh but doesn’t know why it’s funny.

Both these extremes, the laugh at everything and the utterly humourless, are a bore and most of us are somewhere happily in the middle.
But it’s not wrong to find something funny if the joke has been well-crafted, even if it the subject matter is close to the bone and may offend someone.
Firstly, the taking of offence is a choice;
Secondly, someone will be offended by just about anything said, joke or otherwise, if it suits them to be; and
Thirdly, why is any individual’s or group’s taking of offence justification for depriving others of the opportunity to decide for themselves if the comedian is funny or not?
Everyone is entitled to their opinion and to voice it, but no-one should feel entitled to use mob intimidation tactics, which threatening boycotts or disruption of venues certainly is, to coerce the actions of others.
This is the attitude of authoritarians and dictators through the ages.

Then you can say that in the end, the number paying to be in the audience would decide whether the comedy is too offensive to listen to or not and if you don’t like a particular brand of humour, you are entitled simply not to go.

I’ve posted before about the mistake of starting discussions/arguments at Step 2 and taking Step 1 for granted. In this case, that there is comedy that is, without question, pre-determinedly offensive and thus worthy of censorship, so that the discussion is merely about what comedy is on the ‘right’ side of the dictator's arbitrary line.
It’s an old trick but we shouldn’t fall for it.

Bring any discussion back to Step 1 and often the criticism becomes more clearly and blatantly weak or biased or absurd.