'The Thin Black Line': Black comedy and its descent from subversive comic provocation to mainstream inglorious offence

This thesis examines whether black comedy still lampoons influential institutions and probes social mores with sharp satire and strong language or simply aims to offend for its own sake. It questions whether the freedom of speech that comedians in the 1960s advocated to defend their social and political subversion is now assumed, as a right, by comedians for the less edifying practice of humiliating people and targeting the vulnerable.