Off-color humor

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The term off-color humor (also known as dirty jokes or blue humor) is an Americanism used to describe various jokes, prose, poems, black comedy and skits that deal with topics that are considered to be in poor taste or overly vulgar by the prevailing morals in a culture. Most commonly labelled as "off-color" are acts concerned with sex, a particular ethnic group, or gender. Other off-color topics include: violence, particularly domestic abuse; excessive swearing; national superiority or inferiority, dead baby jokes, pedophilic content, and any other topics generally considered impolite or indecent. Generally, the point of off-color humour is to induce laughter by evoking a feeling of shock and surprise in the comedian's audience. In this way, "blue" humor is related to other forms of postmodern humor, such as the anti-joke.

Off-colour humor has been used in Ancient Greek comedy, primarily by its most famous contributor and representative, Aristophanes. His work parodied some of the great tragedians of his time, especially Euripedes, using sexual and excremental jokes which received great popularity among his contemporaries but would be considered embarrassing in the Christian milieu.

Dirty jokes were once considered subversive and underground, and rarely heard in public. Comedian Lenny Bruce was once tried, convicted, and actually jailed for obscenity after a stand up performance that included off-color humor in New York City in 1964. Comedian and actor Redd Foxx was well-known in nightclubs in the 1960s and '70s for his raunchy stand-up act, but toned it down for Sanford and Son and The Redd Foxx Comedy Hour, stating in the first monologue of the latter show that the only similarity between the show and his nightclub act was that "I'm smoking" [1]. American society has become increasingly tolerant of off-color humor since that time. Due in part to the mainstream success of comedians such as Dolemite, Andrew Dice Clay's "The Dice Man", and Richard Pryor in the 1970s and 1980s, such forms of humour came to be distributed widely, and grew socially acceptable.

In the 1990s and modern era, such comedians as George Carlin (and, in a more moderate form, Dave Chappelle) use "dirty" or otherwise shocking content to draw attention to their criticism of social issues - especially censorship and the socioeconomic divide. The Aristocrats is perhaps the most famous dirty joke in the US; certainly, it is one of the best-known and most oft-repeated among comedians themselves.