The trailer for the comedian Bill Burr’s new special on Netflix, “I’m Sorry You Feel That Way,” begins with a disclaimer: “If you have strong religious beliefs, politically correct opinions, or are easily offended by crude language and sexual innuendo CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED.” The potential viewers being warned away are those who might take exception to Burr calling Jesus Christ “some bearded baby” or referring to adoption as a form of human recycling. About midway through the eighty-minute set, Burr tells a story about how his father didn’t want his kids getting hugged because he was afraid they’d become gay. He says that his dad might have been on to something, before pausing to admonish the audience: “Let me finish before you start blogging, O.K.?” The subject here, as with a lot of Burr’s comedy, is the nature of offense—the people likely to take it, and why he thinks that they shouldn’t bother.

Despite the disclaimer about political correctness, this special is Burr’s most progressive—the least likely to offend the kinds of people who have been accused of policing comedy in recent years for any sign of transgression. He makes fun of gun owners and talks about the hypocrisy of religion. He doesn’t, as he has in the past, make white-people-are-like-this, black-people-are-like-that jokes. He doesn’t say “fag” anymore (it was always as a joke on homophobic, insecure straight men, but it still sounded like a slur). And he has backed away from the full-blown misogyny that marred his previous special, “You People Are All the Same,” in 2012. (“This time, I made a note that I wasn’t going to trash women, because I thought I overdid it on my last one,” he recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “I looked back and watched it and thought, Jesus! Does this guy need a hug or what?”)

Still, Burr has decidedly not become a feminist. Much of his humor involves him impersonating women while saying vain, childish, and stupid things—he pitches his voice high and screws up his face. In 2008, he described women as “psycho robots that don’t run out of batteries.” This time, it’s “You just want to keep them calm. Just keep them calm, like a rescue dog, right?” Watching the special, I laughed at these jokes, at the same time knowing that it would be perfectly reasonable for someone to find them mean-spirited and retrograde. They are both of these things, and saying so means that I am the kind of hypocrite who laughs and then, later, attempts to explain away or renounce that laughter. This might make me a bad comedy fan, or at least a bad Bill Burr fan—the kind of anxious, worried, score-keeping blogger whom he so often ridicules.

On a recent episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Web series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” Burr complained about the sensitivity of modern comedy audiences. “There’s this new level of, like, selfishness when you go to a comedy club—where they’ll watch you for forty minutes and take everything as a joke, and then all of a sudden you’ll hit a topic that’s sensitive to them, and then all of a sudden you’re making statements,” he said. Seinfeld asked Burr if he thought that the culture was becoming more “respectful,” and if that meant people couldn’t be funny anymore. Burr responded, “If I’m saying something and I’m joking, then I’m joking. This is the deal, those people who get offended like that, if they want to see standup comedy, they should hire a comic for a private show and go, ‘These are the topics you can talk about and these are the topics you don’t.’ So you come into the hostile environment of a comedy club, and we get to say whatever we want.”

Burr is making an argument that downplays the cultural power of the comedian—I’m just telling jokes here—while defending the comedian’s absolute and essential requirement of free speech to pursue his art. It is similar to a statement that Louis C.K. made in an interview with Slate, in 2011, after Tracy Morgan was accused of homophobia (during a performance in Nashville, Morgan said that he would kill his son if he came out as gay.) “It’s a dumb thing to take at face value,” Louis said of the angry online response to Morgan’s bit. “You’d have to be a moron. And if you do, you are not allowed to laugh at any more jokes. You are not allowed to laugh at any jokes that have any violence or negative feelings attached to them, ironically or otherwise.” The hostility between comedians and audiences has long been central to comedy, but the nature of that relationship is changing now that technology has knocked down the walls of the comedy club.

Even though comedians are public performers, they can be an anti-social bunch, and these days a certain set of very famous older male comics sound as if they mostly want to be left alone. In a recent interview, Chris Rock said that American culture had reëmbraced the political correctness of the nineties, and that the infiltration of cell phones and social media into the comedy club has spoiled that space for performers. Something said in front of a small crowd a few drinks deep in the middle of the night can easily be shared with a sober mass of people sitting upright in their chairs browsing the Internet the next day. Every performance has become a de-facto national set, even the ones in which a comedian is riffing or failing through new material. “There are a few guys good enough to write a perfect act and get onstage, but everybody else workshops it and workshops it, and it can get real messy,” Rock said. “It can get downright offensive. . . . But if you think you don’t have room to make mistakes, it’s going to lead to safer, gooier standup. You can’t think the thoughts you want to think if you think you’re being watched.”

Standup has always been about thinking while being watched, and it can be a bit grating to hear celebrity comics like Rock, Louis, and Burr gripe about feeling powerless in a fight against an army of hecklers on the Web. (For every critical voice, there are hundreds of fans hanging onto their every word, and who have no problem laughing at a little casual racism or misogyny.) It isn’t that these comedians are Luddites (Burr, for example, hosts his own

(http://www.billburr.com/podcast) and has talked about the various ways in which the Web has been good for his career). Rather, they are responding to the ways that technological innovation has changed the very definition, and composition, of an audience. Other things are changing as well. These complaints about the Web’s restrictive atmosphere are being made by well-established straight men in a field that has, until recently, mostly been the province of straight men. Contemporary audiences are more attuned to social power dynamics in comedy: the high-profile controversies involving comedians in recent years have all started with a straight man making a joke about a less-empowered segment of the population: Tracy Morgan talking about gays, in Nashville, in 2011; Daniel Tosh joking about rape at a club Los Angeles, in 2012; Bill Maher drawing connections between Islam and violence during a segment on his HBO show earlier this fall.