This is a good piece in GQ. It's written about comedy and the real lives of the comedians we love.
It's pretty brutal, ripping the greatest comedians of all time (including Pryor, Allen, Kinison, Murphy, Louis CK and more), but it also makes you question yourself. This is a subject that I've been thinking about for a long time. I can no longer laugh at the bits I used to laugh at (and some I wrote myself).
Watch the devil versus angel scene in "Animal House" again. It will make you cringe.
I know that times change, but every generation since the 60s has had a teen movie about guys trying to get laid. This has become a rite of passage. But it almost certainly isn't going to happen anymore. And that's probably a good thing.
I remember going to a Don Rickles concert in the early 1990s. He was doing racial bits that would have made people howl in the 1960s, but by the 1990s they were no longer acceptable. The crowd was mostly uncomfortable.
Not trying to be a snowflake here. I used to only have one rule of comedy. Funny is funny, and it doesn't matter what it's about. You know what? Sometimes it does matter.
