By Kevin ReichThe Daily Northwestern

Jokes should be funny. I’m a fan of the dirty. I love the insensitive. And if done right, nothing need be sacred. The value of the comedian is to find humor where there is none. In embracing the untouchable, we have found some hilariously offensive comedy.

There is, however, one stipulation: Make it smart. Last Friday, Mee-ow, a student comedy group at Northwestern, crossed the line into a precarious zone of iniquity. In an otherwise unrelated sketch at a comedy tour with MADtv stars, a student offered the audience the group’s final inane punch line, “You faggot!”

Sarah Silverman, here next week, might use the word “faggot” to satirize gays and gay-bashing. That’s funny! “Faggot!” as an individual expletive is not so funny.

But the Mee-ow audience laughed. Probably in a nervous, Ha! I’m supposed to laugh (but I’m more scared) kind of way.

NU is supposedly progressive. We have one of the leading gender studies departments and a number of gay professors. In the film department, we can read about how Gore Vidal might have intentionally made Ben Hur a little gay. In the English department, I think my professor told me every novelist from the 20th century was gay.

The comedian’s choice word, however, was a rude awakening to the thinking of a seeming majority.