Cancer comedy skits: when do they go too far?

The links below to comedy skits about cancer (all on Youtube, and all relatively short) are examples of this particular genre, that is, playing cancer for laughs.

Do they go too far? Well, I guess they do if one is offended by them. But it can also be argued that joking about something like cancer is a way of seeking relief from it, even mastering it in a way, of gaining a kind of power over it.

See what you think:

"How long have I got?"
/www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTUvRW7gtGU

Tig Notaro jokes about her breast cancer:
/www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW3i9cU96OU

Amy Schumer, the Cancer Excuse:
/www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoRMHA4SVME

"While we're in there":
/www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqKb579Ww_8

Okay, maybe those aren't all that bad (or are they?), but what about something like this?

/www.youtube.com/watch?v=woqBVGpjjpc

Going too far? Well, as someone in that video remarked, "Whatever floats your boat?"

Joking about children with cancer would likely draw universal condemnation and rightly so, but beyond something like that, where is the line?

There's no ready answer here, as one man's humor is another man's insult. So draw your own conclusions.

So what do you think? When do cancer jokes really go too far?

I like the one on you tube extranormal I had a robot take out my prostate

In my warped mind, this thread is connected to the thread about warrior language. Finding the bizarre humor about it is what we have to do, IMO.

I've often said that the most bizarre part about going through RALP is the visual:

The doctor is sitting at a console surrounded by video screens and wearing a 3d vision eyepiece. He has two joysticks in his hands. The scrub nurse is sitting on a stool surrounded by trays of tools. Her job, is to remove one tool from the robot arm and replace it with a different one as needed. In all of this, you are strapped to a table tilted at a 45 degree angle, with your head down near the floor. I imagine (but do not know) that the background music is Jimi Hendrix or Deep Purple or maybe Bon Jovi 'livin on a prayer'.

Comedy is the smooth, comfortable nacre that we use to coat the jagged bits of our lives, like oysters forming pearls. In an environment of shared pain it comforts us to know we are not alone and comedy makes it possible to say words that would otherwise be too abrasive to speak, and too uncomfortable to hear.

I tend to agree that jokes about cancer should mostly be limited to those with first hand experience of it. This is not because such jokes are wrong or insensitive but because without that seed of shared pain the jokes often seem fraudulent and unfunny.

It is also worth mentioning that the modern idea of comedy as a thing in itself is not that old. If you go back to the 1400s when the word entered the English language, comedy referred to a literary work where the characters in it triumphed in the end. "Comedy" was simply the antipode for "tragedy." It identified a work with a happy ending. The notion that comedy is funny came later. That explains why Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" is such a laugh riot.

As for stories with happy endings, we need all we can get here.