What Sacha Baron Cohen does is really nothing like stand-up. He’s basically a situational performance artist whose artwork is the whole scene that develops, not just his own character or the things that character says.
Colbert is a little closer, but I’d say that his satire is so broad that it’s not really expressing a right-wing viewpoint. Even with no prior knowledge, I’d think one would have to be pretty dim to take Colbert seriously for longer than a brief segment of his show.
Daniel Tosh is a different matter. He may think he’s not “really” racist. He certainly has some fans on this board and elsewhere who would argue that he’s not (and by extension, that they’re not). You say he “probably” isn’t a racist shitstain; is that not just what we’d like to believe? Has he ever actually said anything in any non-performing context that makes this clear? Colbert’s joke is that he is (roughly) pretending to be serious. We’re supposed to think that Tosh’s metajoke is that he’s not serious about his overt jokes–the ones that he and his audiences are, in fact, laughing at?
As I said in one of the Tosh threads last year,
Sarah Silverman I am less familiar with, but taking your word that she shows similarities to Tosh, I’ll say the same for her–barring evidence, of course.
I haven’t watched SNL regularly for a long, long time, so I haven’t seen too much of their current stuff. It wouldn’t be whether the writers and actors think he’s accurate, but whether the depiction is representative of a bias against gay men. Not all stereotypes are hateful, of course. I certainly don’t think that members of minority groups are incapable of producing material which supports discriminatory attitudes against their own groups. With a quick glance at a random vid, Stefon seems to me like he was conceived without real malice, but is still rather dehumanizing, and not funny. I don’t think the attitude towards gay men exemplified there is even distantly comparable to Morgan’s, though.
Again, not a stand-up comedian. Sometimes an actor, sometimes a performance artist–indisputably realms of fiction.
I may be wrong, but my impression of Dangerfield’s “wife” jokes wasn’t that they were to be understood as references to his actual wife; did he name her?
I found a reference (the People piece that followed Edgar’s suicide) that claimed, “Joan was always careful that she, not he, was the butt of her jokes.”
In any case, I’m asking for evidence that the tone of such a routine is at odds with the comedian’s genuine beliefs. If there is no evidence, further assumptions about what the real feelings “must” have been are not illuminating.
Unless somebody can provide one clear cite to the contrary, I’m going to stick with tim314 here.