There is so much to be angry about, including the fact that people keep getting angry. Were you appalled by Louis C.K.’s pedophilia jokes in his “S.N.L.” monologue? Offended by Lena Dunham’s sketch in The New Yorker in which she compared her Jewish boyfriend to a dog? Furious at the tweets from Trevor Noah, the South African comedian who is Jon Stewart’s designated “Daily Show” heir, that poked meanspirited fun at Israel, Jews and “fat girls”? If so, you were in good — or at least noisy — company. If not, you were probably a hypocrite for complaining about something else. The art of outrage requires the constant turning of tables and forcing of analogies, the endless iteration of the words “But what about ...”

It’s no good longing for a simpler age, though it is possible to imagine that once upon a time things were clearer. Through the middle decades of the 20th century, people went to hear jokes in places that were segregated by race, taste and gender. The guys at a stag smoker could guffaw at dirty jokes about women without the awkwardness of having real women present. Racist humor could flow freely at country clubs where the only black faces belonged to waiters and caddies. With a few exceptions, African-American humorists plied their trade on the chiltlin circuit, and Jews mostly stuck to the borscht belt. Television enforced these divisions and also upheld puritanical standards of decency. But as it tried to expand and homogenize a broad, fractured audience, the medium also helped to loosen old, restrictive customs. The wider American public was introduced to Flip Wilson and George Carlin, Joan Rivers and Richard Pryor. On TV, those comedians could be simultaneously countercultural and mainstream. And if they sometimes pushed against the walls of the box, getting into trouble for being too risqué or too political, their new fans knew that outside that box — in concert or on a record, for a clued-in crowd or a basement full of your friends — they could push even further.

Image Amy Schumer at the Beacon Theater. Credit... Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images for Comedy Central

What they were pushing against seemed self-evident, if also sometimes allegorical: the Man, the establishment, the agents of official centralized power. Lenny Bruce became a free-speech martyr because he faced arrest and banning when he performed bits that would barely merit a parental advisory on basic cable these days.