Few images in American culture have been as sacred as that of Jacqueline Kennedy, in a blood-stained pink Chanel suit, standing next to Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office. Puncturing that reverence would have been unthinkable— until Lenny Bruce, just a few months later, performed a bit called “Hauling ass to save her ass”. In it, he characterizes Jackie’s reaction to the assassination not as some heroic self-sacrificial attempt to save her husband but as an act of self-preservation; stripping Jackie of her sainthood and restoring her humanity.

This impulse to parody the hallowed is a long-standing tradition in American comedy. From South Park to Louis CK, we are a culture notorious for laughing at the untouchable. Today, as Mrs. Kennedy and even 9/11 fade from holiness, the culture has a new set of sacred symbols— anything related to racial or sexual identity; or, on the right, the Sun King himself, President Trump.

Bruce effectively ended government prosecution of people for ‘word crimes’ and by the end of the 60s, the American legal system had determined that it was not up to the New York Police Department or anyone else to determine what was too offensive. Yes, it was absurd to arrest people for saying “fuck” onstage, but what filled the vacuum once those restrictions were lifted? What happens to a society where vulgarity is everywhere and nothing is sacred?

Taboos are the adaptations of a species whose survival depends on signals of allegiance to the group They mark the boundary between loyalty and betrayal, purity and filth, danger and safety. They are the shared myths that hold a culture together. Gentlemen remove their hats in the presence of women, Muslims don’t draw Mohammed and Americans stand during the national anthem. To violate these customs is not just to break a rule, it is to reveal yourself as dangerous.

This is often a good thing. After all, do we really want a society where nothing is inviolable? Do we want profanity in our churches, pornography in our schools or racial slurs in our courtrooms? When filth is everywhere it makes it harder to see what is true, good or beautiful; corroding sincerity until everything starts to sound like a bit.

But when everything is sacred, nothing is. The divine becomes cheap, manners get mistaken for morals and disagreement is seen as harm as conformity begins to feel like a moral duty rather than a lack of courage. The rules can also seem silly or absurd— ‘don’t wear white after Labor Day’ and, in anthropology departments, ‘black bodies’ is enlightened but ‘black people’ gets you fired. Not every cultural prescription is noble and sometimes a “sacred boundary” is just a way for the powerful to control others. We’ve had taboos against women speaking in public, gay people holding hands, and about talking honestly about race, sex or religion. Some of those lines held communities together and some just punished those who stepped over them.

No people have ever been as skeptical of the boundary between what is allowed and forbidden as Americans. Here the poor no longer tipped their hats to the wealthy and titles of nobility were banned. From the very beginning, the ugly American rankled the Old World. Our humor was seen as disgusting and lowbrow, divorced from the polite understanding that jokes ought to leave the social order intact. This democratic sense of humor reinforced equality in everyday life, mocking rich people like poor people and making fun of smart people in the same ways as dumb people because in the United States, no man stayed king.

Today, comedy clubs are the gladiator pits in which free societies work this out. They are the free for all spaces for testing which taboos are useful, and which we should discard. On the left there are so many rules about who can say what about whom that you have to consult a moral spreadsheet before you can give your opinion. On the right there are none— it’s get what you can and the hell with everyone else. The Ministry of Problematic Sensibilities vs Trump 2028.

Nothing so illustrates the precarious line between what’s brave and what’s merely crude as the final years of Lenny Bruce. As his legal troubles mounted, his comedy turned angry. The laughter died and his audience went with it. So we’re left with the hard questions: Are some jokes just gratuitously shocking, with no deeper purpose? Are there forms of obscenity that simply degrade without enlightening? There’s danger on both sides: MAGA trolls who think it’s funny to own the libs by drawing swastikas vs leftist prigs who moralize everything and call everyone who disagrees a bigot.

Humor lets us shuttle between the sacred and the profane without tearing the fabric. It lets us test limits and play around with controversial ideas. Take away the arena where human behavior can be mocked or exposed, and you don’t make it disappear; you just push it underground. We need places where we can take our ideas less seriously before we start taking them too seriously.

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