Heres how comedy and laughter works: you establish an expectation with a person then you immediately present them with something contrary to that. Peoples beains struggle to quickly reconcile unmet expectation and what ends up happening is your brain kind of short circuits. For example, if I walked up to you, looking sketchy and said "wanna see my pipe?" And then looked both ways before pulling out a 4" section of PVC pipe with a T joint on one end, youd probably laugh. I set the expectation of illicit contraband and saod pipe and set you up with the expectation of a weed pipe or a crack pipe, but then presented you with unexpected sprinkler parts.

This is literally all of comedy and this is why comedy isnt considered art. Its a psychological evolutionary response or something and the practice is just stimulating the response. Its not a wokeness anti wokeness culture war thing, its literally just a set up and betrayal of expectations. Peoples expectations are extremely related to the context they live in. In the 50s, women were straight up not allowed to wear pants and clothes general were so restrictive, so like the whole bigs bunny in drag seducing elmer fudd thing was genuinely like difficukt for audiences to sort of reconcile. You can say the same about every other era of comedy. Rodney dangerfield "i hate my wife" comedy for boomers, seinfeld observational comedy for gen x, dane cook/ aziz ansari style silly man yells loudly about doing silly things style conedy for millenials.

The problem with comedy now is really the death of the monoculture. Comedy is a very hard thing to do when your audience is completely balkanized into different online algorithm bubbles of media. Again, youre trying to establish and subvert expectations from people with increasingly disparate world views and kind of experiences of reality. Its not a matter of sensitivity and people taking offense to the wrong thing, its just a matter of everyone having different mental circumstances. On some level, some people are going to take offense, but the thing is the offense takers are kind of an attention lightning rod for all the other people who werent offended but also didnt laugh at the joke because they didnt find it funny. Its not surprising that the new home of comedy is podcasts where like mibded audiences congregate. Theres right and left wing comedy, theres different strands of apolitical comedy. The sort of absurd comedy styles of time and eric are like a revolution in comedy, similar situation with bo burnham, these guys arent political, they are so absurd and abstract they run the gambit between so absurd you cant reconcile it so you laugh and so absurd you cant reconcile it so you find it alienating and upsetting.

Sammy really had a bead on the zeitgeist in the 80s that made him funny, but thats just sort of what comedy is. Like its kind of amazing weird al is still a thing, frankly he seems pretty amazed by it too. Thats just kind of how it goes tho.