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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8740406" data-attributes="member: 18">This is kind of a half-truth, because it's technically true, but obscures two important points.Firstly, it's a matter of "broadly" rather than "absolutely". Yes, a lot of things that used to be broadly considered "good fodder" for comedy aren't any more. That doesn't mean no-one uses them or that they can't be used, just that they're not considered good subjects by most comedians in most circumstances.This is important because that's always been an issue with comedy. Things have always been unpopular or ill-advised, or actively off-limits. Every society that even allows comedy, this is the case. There's never been an exception. Not at any point in human history. Realistically, you can get away with more in mainstream comedy now than in, say, 1990. Edgy comedy of certain kinds is also more likely to be called out now than in 1990, but that is simply the combination of social media, clickbait mainstream media, and the 24-hour news cycle's voraciousness, none of which was really "a thing" in 1990.Secondly, a bunch of stuff that didn't used to be "broadly" considered "good fodder" is now considered that, including religion, sex, drugs and politics, which were considered pretty much taboo until the 1960s and only gradually went from edgy material to mainstream material. People often have very selective memories here, thinking Lenny Bruce, for example, was like the "norm", when he was actually far out on the edge. Different material is generally popular with audiences now than in say, 2000. But the exact same was true between 2000 and 1980, and 1980 and 1960, and so on. Most older comics fall out of favour with younger audiences - it was ever thus.Only truly exceptional comics retain success over multiple eras, and a comedian who might have been incredibly popular 20 or 40 years ago is not necessarily one of those exceptional comics. I could give a lot of examples, though perhaps that would be distracting (if nostalgic). Not everyone can be George Carlin.Dementia and being stupid to the level of appearing seriously mentally disabled (rather than merely a twit) are two things no longer popular in comedy. The former hasn't been "broadly considered good fodder" since the 2000s, but it is still used either by people who just think it's really funny, or in the right circumstances, and with care. The latter has been decreasing in popularity since literally the 1940s! Doing impressions of mentally disabled people was looking pretty bad by the 1980s, and by the 1990s, it put you into the realms of fairly extreme edgy comedians.More to the point, Dragonlance was never particularly strong at humour. A lot of the stuff that was clearly intended to be funny fell completely flat with nothing to do with subjects no longer working. Tinker Gnomes for example. That just was fundamentally not particularly funny. Gully Dwarves similarly, except they incorporated some nasty themes to just add to the basically unfunny and kind of eye-roll-inducing concept.And it's notable that actually-funny fantasy comedy from the same era, like I dunno, the entire Discworld series hasn't really suffered from this. The only places where his stuff is less funny is where the times of fantasy it was parodying have largely vanished (and he moved away from much parody fairly early on) and a couple of ill-advised "foreigners are funny" efforts.</blockquote>

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