I find it fascinating that @sama is discussing a phenomenon that stand up comedy goes through every decade.
I'll explain.http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove
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Comedians have a bunch of outlets but one of the major ones is Universities. It's decent money and for comics that aren't at stadium level it's better money than the clubs play. But Universities are also where young people are setting new cultural norms.
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So comics are confronted every year with diminishing responses for the same material about the same subjects. They experience in almost real time the window of acceptable speech move in different directions.
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You can find interviews with almost every comic over 40 complaining about how things are getting too liberal, too politically correct. Their issue is not that their jokes aren't hitting but that what comedy can be is getting smaller and smaller.
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And inevitably this generation of comics is slowly replaced by the next generation. You can see this play out through the entire history of comedy. In all that time, has the space for comedy gotten smaller?
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How many generations of standups have existed though?
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