Netflix recently released a stand-up special in which comedian Michelle Buteau claims to be making “herstory” as the first female comedian to hold a show at Radio City Music Hall. Given her obviously attention-seeking and leftist pandering criticism of Dave Chappelle’s transgender jokes in his award-winning Netflix show The Closer, perhaps she should have offered her historical moment onstage to a transgender-identifying male. After all, female athletes are forced to do it all the time.

And honestly, anyone would probably have been better because the comedy aspect of her show could not have been much worse. The Left has tried to censor comedians for many years. Buteau’s show is one more example of the platforming a bot to deliver a patronizing speech rather than material approaching anything comedic. Seriously, what’s less funny than a lecture from Mom? Buteau said she wants to “make millions and millions of dollars for making people feel safe, seen, secure, heard, and entertained.”

I doubt many people in that audience were entertained because comedy isn’t meant to make people feel safe, seen, heard, and secure. It’s meant to make people laugh and think. But the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement appears to be doing to comedy what it has been doing to education, the government, and private companies for a long time: lowering standards and expectations across the board.

The Left’s emphasis on “feeling safe” is also ironic given how little it seems to value actual safety. That was especially clear as progressives were cheerleaders over the last four years for illegal immigrants crossing our southern border, including many who continue to commit crimes and wreak havoc in communities across the country. Leftists’ only problem is the semantics of what we call people who have entered our country illegally, but not the part where they are murdering, raping, and setting people on fire.

Leftists further applaud bathroom policies based on gender rather than sex to the detriment of the safety of women, and even girls in schools. Just consider Loudoun County’s high school rapist Hunter Heckel, now an adult, who sexually assaulted two girls in his high school bathrooms. The district’s bathroom policies paved the way for sexual assault, and then the district’s administrators tried to prevent the public from learning about it.

Also among the victims of so-called transgender-inclusive policies was Payton McNabb, who suffered a skull fracture and partial paralysis from a volleyball spiked at her head by a transgender-identifying male opponent during a high school game. Heckel’s victims and Mcnabb were actually in grave physical danger because of the Left’s policies. They were not just vulnerable, in theory, to having their feelings hurt.

Comedy is full of raunchy and offensive topics that make people uncomfortable. What is comical to one person can be offensive to another. Isn’t it wonderful that we have this special little handheld device called a remote control that enables us to change the channel?

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld was right when he said “the extreme left” and “PC crap” killed comedy, just before the overlords perhaps threatened him or reprogrammed his mind so he had to rescind the comment. Hollywood elites and unfunny leftists continue to try to censor comedy and control which social groups are fodder for jokes. Under this repression, it’s interesting to watch how different comedians rise to the occasion. Ricky Gervais, whom I find hilarious and whose comedy quite often makes me uncomfortable, makes it clear that nothing is off the table in stand-up.

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In 2016, while he was promoting Special Correspondents, Gervais said, “You’ve got to be allowed to say things that everyone might find offensive.” He continued, “I think offense is the collateral damage of freedom of speech. But just because you are offended doesn’t mean you’re right.”

We owe a sincere debt of gratitude to comedians such as Gervais, Chappelle, and many others who refuse to conform to the Left’s tyranny and continue saying sometimes unpopular things to make us think and laugh. They are beautifully symptomatic of a free society.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Federalist and the Washington Examiner; a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia; an author; and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.