Waah! I'm Offended!

These days almost every comedy routine you do will offend somebody or other.

Oh, this is not something I just thought of. This is a quote from 1957 by no less a comedic authority than Steve Allen.

Yes, the thin-skinned have always been with us, screwing up their faces in reddened outrage. Maybe the type of situation that bothers them has changed, or the morality behind their indignation, but they’ve always been there to try to quash thoughts and words. And I doubt that will ever change.

Here’s Allen’s editorial from August 16, 1957. He was filling in for Herald Tribune News Service columnist John Crosby that day.

Everybody’s An Expert
The letter was typed on official-looking stationery, the usual column of names that nobody ever reads, running down the left side of the sheet. “You must realize,” the writer lectured, “that not all motorcyclists are delinquents.”
I realized it.
What had occasioned the protest was a comedy sketch in which I had worn leather jacket and motor cycle boots as a member of a new vocal quartet, “The Four Punks.” I knew the letter was coming before the skit was ever aired, because these days almost every comedy routine you do will offend somebody or other.
Perhaps a few words about the philosophy of humor might be in order, therefore, if only to lighten the burden currently placed on the secretaries of television comedians. You see, friends out there in televisionland, comedy is about tragedy. By that I mean that most of the things we laugh at are disasters of one degree or another, either actual or make-believe. What are jokes about? They're about fat people, skinny people, dumbbells, small hotel rooms, drunks, sexual problems, high prices, war, marital tensions, laziness and well, as Christian tradition lists them: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth.
PERFECTION UNFUNNY
In other words, there's nothing amusing about perfection. Things are funny in some sort of loose relation to how far they fall short of perfection. There may not be laughter in hell, but there couldn’t possibly be any in heaven.
Almost every comedy sketch, therefore, either makes father look like a goof, portrays a fighter as punchy, makes an old-maid seem man-crazy, a motorcycle cop gruff and rude, a drunk an object of laughter or some other character selected from real life appear ridiculous. You are perfectly at liberty to protest about all this and to say there's nothing amusing about any of it, but it should be explained that the only way you could be completely satisfied is for the networks to fire all the comedians, which, now that I think of it, isn't exactly in the realm of science-fiction.
It will be more productive, of course, to live with the reality of the problem, to appreciate that humor is a gift of the gods that enables us to multiply magically our sometimes meager fund of material joy.
So, bus drivers, don’t waste time writing to Jackie Gleason. School teachers, don’t bother to complain about Our Miss Brooks. Firemen, don't—especially this late in the century—start complaining about Smith and Dale's fire house sketch. Presley fans, Bob Hope doesn’t see your angry post-cards; Liberace-lovers, George Gobel has a staff of secretaries who handle your protests and who know that Liberace himself loves to hear co medians do jokes about him.
MAJORITY AMUSED

Me, I’m fascinated by people and I like to hear them ticking, so I’ve given the matter a bit of study.
I've learned that when a TV comic jokes about cowboys, Indians, undertakers, hillbillies, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Lawrence Welk or what-have-you, he's usually amusing 20 or 30 million people, but making a handful of other people quite angry. And do you know what these angry folks always do when they write to Jack Benny or Red Skelton? They always start off by telling him that the offending joke or sketch wasn't funny. The guy's writers get maybe fifteen hundred dollars a week and they've been studying humor for perhaps 20 years, but there's some druggist out in Keokuk who can confidently assure them that a particular routine wasn't funny.
There's a profound lesson to be learned here, I think. You and I can smugly assume that we're superior to our theoretical pharmacist, but the point is, we are the druggist in Keokuk. We all think we're experts on humor. We don't claim to know a thing about architecture or deep-sea diving or playing the zither, but we all pose as authorities when it comes to the artistry of Sid Caesar.
This is not to say, of course, that all TV and radio sketches are hilariously funny. Once in a while a routine doesn’t succeed, but the first people to know it are the performers and the writers, just as the people who understand when a new air plane is a failure are the pilot and the draftsmen.
We all must learn, I think, never to say "Wally Cox isn't funny." Those few of us who are not amused by Wally must say "He is not funny to me." And once we’ve learned about the subjectivity and objectivity of comedy we just might be able to apply our lesson to the fields of politics, morals, religion, philosophy and the dear, delicate business of living with each other.