How Seriously Should We Take "Offense"?

In light of the entire Down With Molestia debate, I’ve been rolling around a question in my head for some while with no clear answer: how seriously should we take offense? Derpibooru well established that, overall, while we agreed that real life rape is a horrible thing, you can’t change someone’s sense of humor, therefore people will find rape jokes funny. Since they’re found funny in the privacy of one’s own home in the case of Molestia, there’s not much any protest can do about it. However, if one was to make a joke about, say, 9/11, you’d be called an insensitive asshole, bashed on all sides. Why? 9/11 was long ago, and more people have been raped in this world than killed in the attack. So how do you make the distinction?
 
What about racial jokes? Can people who belong to whatever race the butt of the joke is focused on make that joke, as opposed to anyone else? I have a friend who’s Hispanic and is always cracking jokes about his heritage, and people find him funny enough, but if a white person makes the same jokes as him, he’s gonna have his ass handed to him. Again, how do you make the distinction?
 
Obviously, you can roll your eyes and say “lol idgaf what u think of me!!”. but you probably wouldn’t be cracking jokes about insensitive topics with teachers, professionals, bosses, and others. So what’s sacred, and what isn’t? Why do people make distinctions?
 
I’m not trying to stir up shit, I’m honestly just confused.

Nothing is or will be sacred in my house.
 
My GF cracks holocaust jokes all the time, and I usually reply with racist, misogynist, mental disability and a long list of other “offensive” jokes.
 
I honestly can’t think of something that would “offend” me, not even extremist gay haters/mainstream feminazis.
 
It feels good to have finally kicked out all of my teenage white knightism out of me, I just wish the rest of the world would lighten up a bit.

@Blackie
 
But what if, hypothetically, a bombing takes place in California tomorrow, and thousands of people loose their lives? If you make a joke about it the day of, hell, the day after, you’ve going to be mauled. So is there such a thing as a cooling period?

@And Brother I Hurt People
 
You just have to know which people will be offended and those who won’t give a fuck and will be making image macros the hour after.
 
If talking with a stranger, just keep basic sensibility standards ’till you get to know him better.

Comedy is ultimately about pain and tragedy. The only thing that separates an anvil on the head, from a bomb on a home is the level of tolerance the recipients of the joke has.

People who are constantly shocked by shock comedy create only more shock jokes and shock comedians.

@And Brother I Hurt People  
I dont take ‘offense’ but I will fight if I think I’m right and they’re wrong. Time and place obviously.
 
But if Chris Rock says some misleading garbage about welfare, I’ll still point out why he is wrong even if I find it funny.

I used to be easily offended by a few things, then I found this quote;  
 
Just know when to tell offensive jokes and when not to really, and when someone gets offended by something for stupid reasons and has a big old bitch about it I just ignore it, they’ll shut up eventually.

@HeroInferno  
My thoughts exactly, also My mom taught me to laugh at my problems well more I learned to laugh at my problems from her and that’s what I’m gonna do! if I got hit by a car years later I would say “Well them’s the breaks” or something goofy like that.
 
Also I find it hard to take something that clearly says “Mature warning” And “Do not take seriously” Seriously, it’s not that hard just listen to the warnings, if you see a gate that says “warning landmines do not pass gate” Your not gonna pass the gate are you!?

They do say that making someone laugh is harder than making them cry.
 
While I may not personally enjoy rape jokes I do stand by their validity as humor in the case of people having the right to say what they need, as people would have the right to laugh at them, and I will have the right to personally scorn someone for making rape jokes, or bad ones (PDP). But if we’re to consider that making a person cry is easier than to laugh, there is an execution.
 
It’s a long, pretentious debate with a lot of view-points. But at the same time I find it rather amusing. Bob Mankoff, comic editor for the New Yorker points out that humor exists on the boundary of what we consider to be safe and normal, and the realm of the dangerous and exciting. Like riding a roller-coaster. I think Plato said that humor/comedy exists to challenge established norms and pre-conceived notions as a sort of internal/external observation that points out the absurdity of things.
 
So therefore, offensive humor exists to explore the dangerous and to seriously challenge our pre-concieved notions of a thing. And if we’re going to be legit about it: exists to make us wonder about a topic and to continually reconsider it.
 
 
But, I feel I have maybe committed a great hypocrisy/irony in explaining shit when I said it was a long pretentious thing, and then I went and did the long thing. So have a picture of a cat doing a funny thing.
 

@HeroInferno
 
Continuing on from that:  
 
Even when joking about “Offensive” things with my friends, we’ve usually had a discussion about said offensive thing afterwords.
 
For example: After making a sexist “sandwich” joke with a female friend, we then discussed how neither of us could take actual sexist viewpoints seriously, and wondered about the people whom could.