It’s not so much about what is in the chasm, but what lies at the edges. Dave Chappelle has a strong incentive to keep his jokes edgy but somewhat acceptable within the society he makes a living in. The anonymous edgelord posting neo-Nazi Pepes on 4chan has no such constraint.
It’s very easy - and indeed I’ve seen it with my own eyes when I was younger - for communities that accept jokes about minorities or LGBT people to very quickly devolve into open fantasizing about actual physical harm of such people. Back in the early 2000’s gaming forums were rife with that kind of supercharged self-radicalization.
Having grown up in South America, I take the ‘jokesters’ wearing t-shirts with slogans such as ‘Pinochet did nothing wrong’ and ‘make leftists afraid of helicopters again’ extremely seriously. Several of my parents’ acquaintances were ‘disappeared’ by the last dictatorship. My dad - a student at the time who wasn’t involved in any kind of political activism - shaved his beard because he was afraid he’d be mistaken for a ‘commie’ and jailed or worse. All you need is a small percentage of idiots actually believing the ‘joke’ for real life consequences to follow.
It’s very easy - and indeed I’ve seen it with my own eyes when I was younger - for communities that accept jokes about minorities or LGBT people to very quickly devolve into open fantasizing about actual physical harm of such people. Back in the early 2000’s gaming forums were rife with that kind of supercharged self-radicalization.
Having grown up in South America, I take the ‘jokesters’ wearing t-shirts with slogans such as ‘Pinochet did nothing wrong’ and ‘make leftists afraid of helicopters again’ extremely seriously. Several of my parents’ acquaintances were ‘disappeared’ by the last dictatorship. My dad - a student at the time who wasn’t involved in any kind of political activism - shaved his beard because he was afraid he’d be mistaken for a ‘commie’ and jailed or worse. All you need is a small percentage of idiots actually believing the ‘joke’ for real life consequences to follow.