There's a lot of bullshit flying around by people twisting themselves in knots trying to say Tony Hinchliffe’s jokes at Trump's Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden were just harmless jokes by a comedian; I'd suggest that if you watch what he says while removing the fact that he's a comedian trying to make jokes and is just another "serious" political speaker making the same comments, ask yourself if the audience’s reaction of uproarious approval would have been the same and I'd say the answer is obviously "yes".
The audience matters; Dave Chappelle walked away from $50M because of it. I'm more likely to tell a racist-flavored joke around my liberal friends because I know they understand it's a joke; if I'm in my hometown the same jokes do not get made since I know they’d fall upon ears very differently.
This isn’t an example of a "joke" but it's what I think of during moments like this: in the Fall of 1995 I was visiting my hometown of Tappahannock VA for the first time since moving to Oxford Mississippi, and a friend's mother asked me what the black people were like there. I told her they moved about quietly and with their heads down as if knowing their place, and before I could continue, fully expecting her to have the same reaction as I'd had of sadness about such a thing, she simply said "oh, that's good" and skipped right back into whatever conversation she'd was having with someone else. I'm not calling her out to shit on her, she's a woman who's lived in the same small Southern town she was born in during the early 40s and is about as blandly benign about such a thing as she is anything else, but the moment itself has stuck with me for all these years later as a reminder of how much the audience always matters.
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