Within hours of Comedy Central announcing that South African comedian Trevor Noah would take over from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Twitter had ferreted his old tweets to disclose his apparent sexism/anti-Semitism.

One of his Tweets reads:

And another:

While Noah was only raising laughs, comedy operates within broader sociocultural norms and what we find funny tells us a lot about our biases. Several “fat” women, as well as others, found the body shaming of the first tweet tasteless. As for the second tweet, its play of “Jewish” against “German” was shot down sans mercy.

The line separating humour from crassness is a thin one, and is subjective at the best of times. As Sean Penn opened the envelope for Best Film at this year’s Academy Awards, he joked: “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?” The film that won the Oscar, Birdman, was directed by the Mexican-born Alejandro Iñárritu. Incredibly, some commentators chided Penn for ridiculing the struggle of illegal immigrants. But Penn was not ridiculing anything. If anything, his statement seemed to suggest that America’s tough immigration policies keep out genuine talent.

(Such is the culture of political correctness around speeches these days that when Iñárritu came on stage to accept the award and said, “Fear is the condom of life,” I half-expected someone from a sexual health NGO to pounce on him for trivialising safe sex practices.)

Is there a line, then, that separates humour from humiliation? I was uncomfortable, say, with some of the things that were said at the AIB Roast. A lot of people hated the Roast for the foul language and the vicious remarks. Which was fine as far as I was concerned, given that the Roast is meant to provoke. But provocation itself has several hues. I found the gay jokes at the Roast premature, as in premature for an Indian setting. (I have written about it here).

I was reminded of the AIB Roast in the backdrop of the Justin Bieber Roast that happened this past Sunday. Again, not to take anything away from the element of fun and surprise, but I could not help noticing how penitent Bieber looked through it all. Bieber has in recent times repeatedly apologised for some of his more flamboyant behaviour in the past, and it seemed he was looking upon the Roast as another opportunity to show that he had finally turned the corner.

Which is not what a Roast is about, Justin! A Roast, as Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor showed us, is an avenue for letting your tongue forget its inhibitions. The way Bieber sat baby-faced through the two hours of untrammeled pulverisation was painful. The humour was tabloid-y and off-putting. One repeated theme was Bieber’s relationship with his ex Selena Gomez. Jeff Ross (who?) said things such as “Selena wanted to be here but she is dating men now” and “Is it true you dumped her because she grew a mustache before you?”

A gay person might take umbrage at the glib association between Bieber’s (once) effeminacy and his sexuality. An intersex person might find the joke about the mustache in bad taste. Should comedians care? They should, I think. Not just because everything ends up being discussed on social media today so there is a real chance they would, in turn, be roasted for anything that was out of line. More, they should be careful that their humour does not tip into cliché. This is 2015, and surely, comics can come up with stuff that isn’t hurtful to those who have traditionally been the butt of jokes.

Is comedy as we know it dead then? Well, if humour is about making fun of deaf people or homosexuals or stutterers, maybe it had better be dead. But humour can equally be about speaking truth to power. Trevor Noah, in fact, has made a name for himself in South Africa as well as via gigs in other countries by speaking openly of racism (he is biracial). Some of his most hard-hitting jokes come from there. Discrimination of any sort is fertile ground for humour, as is an attempt to show the megalomaniac their place. The Hitler meme from 2004’s Downfall has been used to poke fun at everything from certified misogynists to Adarsh Liberals. It works because it so brilliantly punctures the image of Hitler as a man in ultimate control. Look at the number of spoofs targeting IS, for instance.

Sean Penn retaliated thus to the criticism around his statement at the Oscars: “I’m always surprised by flagrant stupidity. I keep having more hope…In fact, I have a big fuck-you for anybody who is so stupid as not to have gotten the irony when you’ve got a country that is so xenophobic. If they had their way, you wouldn’t have great filmmakers like Alejandro working in this country. Thank god we do.”

Perhaps his is the kind of comedy – which raises both laughs and issues – that we need to plump for.