My take on the matter:
But motivation isn’t really the main thing, because it is invisible. We can’t know if a bunch of hateful sounding jokes are coming from a place of hate or not. All we can use is the context. We may infer motivation, but we can’t actually know it.
The idea that humor can’t worry about people’s feelings is a bad one, because it allows any hateful asshole to use humor as a defense. What is different is just that humor pushes boundaries, and thus has a different line to walk than everyday speech.
Ethnic humor spreads ethnic stereotypes. If it’s not in a context of “how stupid these people are to believe these harmful stereotypes,” then you are just spreading the stereotypes. When people laugh at a joke, that bypasses their defenses and the idea gets lodged into their brains.
Even if Cleese intends no offense, spreading stereotypes through humor can cause social harm. If you have jokes about Black people being lazy, and people laugh at them, they first have to accept that black people really are lazy for it to work. The exception is if they recognize that the “blacks are lazy” joke is what some stupid person thinks, and are laughing at the stupid person. But, otherwise, the humor is just spreading the hateful stereotype.
It’s why I would not want to be a comedian. The tightrope they have to walk to push boundaries while also making sure not to spread bad messages is a difficult one.
The one thing I hate is when they try to tell people they are wrong to be offended. No, they didn’t like your jokes, and see an issue with the underlying message. You don’t get to tell them they are wrong. Like when Seinfeld said college students were wrong for not finding his humor funny due to the messaging. Fuck him for thinking he’s entitled to have people laugh at his material, blaming them instead of realizing his humor just didn’t work for them.
That’s my take on this. That’s not to say that ethnic humor has no place, but there is a responsibility of all people to not make the world a worse place, which includes not spreading hateful messages. You want to use that type of humor, do so with a knowing wink to the audience that “only an idiot would actually believe this shit.”