Just a Joke

He'd posted this joke on Facebook, and no I'm not going to tell it here 'cause (a) it weren't funny and (b) it was based on a series of sexist and ethnic slurs. Enough to say it was a regression to the old vaudeville gags based on insults and slapstick (which, as we all know, is really a comic form of physical abuse.)
Since I have this unfortunate difficulty tolerating that kind of thing, I pointed this out, in a low-key, polite kinda way of course. Next time I'll stick to something less hazardous, like wrestling alligators and poking bees' nests. Lighten up, I was chastised, stop being so "politically correct." It's only a joke.
Let us not be distracted by an old right-wing shibboleth, "political correctness." Let me, rather, introduce you to a little thing called "verbal abuse." When you use slurs, or stereotypes, even in a joke, you are putting someone down. You are belittling them, as in "putting them below yourself." Consider: would you say the same thing other than in the pretext of a joke?
Freud had a theory that most humor is akin to anger and hurt and humiliation. He might have had a point; consider the archetypal example of comedy: slipping on a banana peel. Why do we laugh at that? Is it because we feel superior to the poor person lying there on the ground?
Granted, there are variations on humor that depend on clever wordplay or identification with what is being talked about (Bill Cosby springs to mind.) But think of the most popular comedies out now: they are filled with people being hurt, humiliated, made to seem foolish. They are aimed at that particular stage in our lives when we can think of little funnier than putting down our peers. (In boys, as I remember, it happens around adolescence.)
And regardless of age, it is a common defense when confronted. I was just kidding. Only a joke, man.  But that elides the difference.
Yes, I have a sense of humor. Like to think that I am even witty. But when someone moves into that kind of humor that depends on putting someone down, where the laughter is a cover for tears, that ain't funny anymore.