Honestly I think Amy Schumer is a breath of fresh air. She's a raunchy, self-deprecating individual who happens to be female, which means the very people who will go to their graves insisting on Chapelle's right to offend people will also die on the hill that Amy Schumer must STFU for the betterment of society.

I don't follow standup much; I read Tiffany Haddish's The Last Black Unicorn and found her positively charming. I think there's a real difference between what you can do with humor and what you should do with humor. Tiffany Haddish manages to relate a story about dating a mentally retarded man that paints him in nothing but a glowing, approving light while also deprecating herself for not being willing to make it work while the comedians I listed above will slag on the mentally disabled as a go-to bit.

I really think it's far simpler than anybody wants to pretend. We all laugh at a comedian who laughs at themselves. Some of us laugh at a comedian who makes fun of the same things we hate. If you watch Eddie Murphy Raw, most of the jokes are at his own expense. Not all, but most. ALL of his negative press comes from laughing at others. George Carlin? His targets were always the powerful.

If anything I think the real shift towards un-funny comedians is the cyclical attempt by The Right to win even a single skirmish in the culture wars. They never do, they never will, but every now and then they try. Ben Shapiro? Failed comic. Kellyanne Conway? Failed comic. The Right hasn't always challenged everyone else's right to existence but it sure is their thing these days. That makes them the butt of every joke, as it should. To no one's surprise, The Right is also full of people with no sense of humor or humility, and they don't like being the butt of every joke. So they champion people who say mean things that can be interpreted as funny if you take pleasure from punching down.

When I grew up there was one form of deprecatory humor that was safe, no matter what: Polack jokes. Not "Polish Jokes" because then you don't get the dig in from the very title. Note that it was only safe because there wasn't anyone Polish around - and frankly, what with the way the Iron Curtain was shaping up we had no reason to believe we'd ever meet anyone Polish. My own mother, fully half Jew, loved to tell jokes created largely to advance the German annihilation of ethnic minorities. This has always been the way of lazy humor - find an easy target that can't fight back and dehumanize it. Unfortunately for the lazy, the more global our society becomes the fewer defenseless targets you will find. This is undoubtedly why I didn't learn what a "beaner" was until I moved out of state - where I grew up, the Chicanos had a culture an easy 200 years older than the Gringos and while they were a long way from dominant, they were a long way from accepting white people's bullshit. Making fun of black people? Very off the table. Making fun of Native Americans? Yeah no, we studied the hell out of their culture. Persecuted Eastern European minorities? Might as well pick on the Martians.

There's a big, primitive swath of humanity that defines itself by what it is not. If you read Graeber, he'll argue that most societies define themselves in opposition of the cultures around them rather than in terms of their internal commonalities. The less tribal we become the more inclusive, but the less tribal we become the less room there is for Dave Chappelle's humor.