Comedians

http://www.thestar.com/article/583744

Comedians are constantly having to provide new material for their jokes and every comedian will offend someone at some stage, some more than others. But it is impossible to avoid hurting the feelings of absolutely everybody in a profession where the job is to poke fun at topics and others so that people will laugh.

There is an incident mentioned in this article, relating to comedian Darren Frost who told a joke about someone being beheaded which caused offence. This is obviously a very difficult subject as the last thing we want to do is restrict the material a comedian uses, as this will obviously limit the quality of a comedians performance. If we ban jokes about death for example, then people will want jokes on religion banned, possibly leading to jokes on racism being banned, which could lead on to jokes on sexism being banned. Before long, comedians will have nothing to talk about and we will have lost the art of comedy in the world, an art which provides so much laughter and happiness.

On the other hand, we have to have huge sympathy for the family and friends of the victim involved in the incident. It must be a very difficult time for them coming to terms with the unfortunate death of a loved one, so to then have someone make jokes about it and put it on the internet for the world to see, must really hurt. No-one deserves that. You could say that while we can excuse laughing at some of the taboo subjects in our world, picking on an individual and nasty incident, particularly so soon after it had happened, was not really a wise move.

I feel comedians do a lot for our world in fact, as pointed out by the Relief Theory. They provide us with laughter which is obviously good for us, but as Sigmund Freud pointed out they also pick out some of the taboo subjects in the world and help us to find humour on a difficult subject, therefore making us feel better on a subject which we may usually be fearful of approaching.

Jokes about some of the stupidity of human nature and about taboo subjects, I often find very amusing as I feel there are so many behaviours in our nature which are actually quite comical and quality comedians allow us to see the humour in these. It is important to bear in mind on the other hand, that we must be sensitive to some subjects where humour is not going to be valued, the death of someones loved one being a perfect example.