Too Soon?

Not soon enough but to be fair I really really hadn't been paying attention to this particular tabloid story.

I think 2 minutes and 11 seconds after any crime or tragedy is fine for joke creation purposes.

i first started thinking about this after the fox twitter hack about the president being shot (i thought it was funny, i must admit) and the coming 10th anniversary of 9/11

are there things or events that are untouchable?

I remember watching the doc on Joan Rivers, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. She had one particular heckler who got irrationally out of whack when Rivers made a few disabled jokes.

Here is the transcript of Joan Rivers being interviewed by 60 minutes. The inner quote is the transcript from the documentary of the footage of the incident:

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8106489

I tend not to apply concepts like "morals" and "values" to public personalities. I have zero expectations for them with respect to responsibility. Though I do not include politicians in this group (I know you have a very different take on them, dj).

And I just can't sympathize with those outraged by comedians, of all people. I take issue only with bad comedy. And there are so many shitty comedians out there. The worst of them often rely on "shock" tactics, which depend entirely on that base of puritans prevalent particularly in the US. There's nothing daring and certainly not implicitly funny about that.

If the joke is funny, no subject is off limits. But if the comedian leans too hard on the fact that his subject is controversial, rather than saying something original about it (I guess I would have to hear Rich tell the joke, sorry--though I worship other comedians on that show, like Louis CK and Patrice O' Neal) I get super annoyed. But that's the extent of my emotional response.

I would say that a joke about something tragic or taboo needs to be extremely funny. If it is not extremely funny, comedians should expect that people will get offended and turn against them.