Comedians exist to make people laugh, often by pushing boundaries and saying things that the rest of us don’t dare say. Comedians, like Shakespeare’s fools, speak a truth – even if it’s an ugly one, and even if it’s not their truth. Some jokes are real knee-slappers, some make us chuckle, some fall completely flat and others make us think. Anyone serious about being funny will at least attempt to go there, with the collective understanding that it’s not serious and that we’re all here to have a good time. No harm done.

On Monday Comedy Central unveiled the man set to replace Jon Stewart on their flagship comedy news program The Daily Show: 31 year-old South African comedian Trevor Noah, a relative unknown.

Noah was an interesting, unexpected pick with whom most people were unfamiliar ... but not for long. Only 24 hours after Noah’s appointment, the internet finished digging through his Tweets and they presented to the world some as evidence of Noah’s racism, antisemitism and sexism. Off with his thumbs! seemed to be the message.

As a white, (or after this New York winter, probably closer to grey), Jewish woman I am supposed to be offended at the tweets that have been dug up, butI’m not. Why? Because he’s not being serious.

I might not find them funny but that doesn’t mean they’re sexist, racist or antisemitic. What’s really offensive to me in this situation is the lack of actual humor the country is displaying. If the reaction to a handful of Noah’s tweets that didn’t pass the Hallmark card test wasn’t so predictable and petty, that I would be able to laugh at. The Noah “backlash” is part of a new cyber-sport in which someone’s entire history and character boils down to 140 characters and their two thumbs.

But let’s do something that has never been done before in comedy: math. Noah sent 8,822 tweets since he joined twitter in 2009. I borrowed a calculator from a nerdy friend and found out that this means that, over the last five years, he has tweeted at least 4 times a day. He certainly is putting in the work – and, since Trevor Noah is a comedian, the work is writing jokes.

Comedians know that not every joke is going to land, that’s the game of comedy. This is especially true on Twitter, when all you have is 140 characters, readers get little in terms of context and you are probably taking a dump somewhere in a public bathroom while you tweet. When Noah started tweeting in 2009, no one knew that, in 2015, the national sport would be to comb through thousands of a person’s tweets to try to prove that they are an evil human being, or that this would become the new precedent to ending racism and sexism in our lifetime.

The answer to ending racism and sexism surely can’t be censoring comedy that deals with them. If the same people that criticize comedians for jokes they don’t find funny with such intensity went after the people who are serious about their racism and sexism, the world could possibly be a better place. But why focus on that when tearing someone apart who cares what you think about them is so much fun?Racists rarely care that the “PC police” think they are racist.

This “public shaming” game is an uninventive, short sighted and boring pastime – and it’s reached such a fever pitch that, even on the rare occasion that it’s necessary, it’s hardly effective after a couple days worth of news stories. The Trevor Noah backlash will blow over and someone else will be next in the new public stocks. I hope that Noah continues to tweet as free as any comedian should, ignores the drama and continues to write jokes. If you don’t like it, then just don’t follow.