Louis C. K. What Makes Language Offensive?

The term “that’s offensive” is often used whenever a piece of language is being consumed. The language may be in any form whether it’s a tweet, text, or essay they can all be deemed to be offensive. However what language is offensive and what language is not being never defined. Regardless, the entire world lives in agreement and thus there appears to be no need to ask the fundamental question: What makes language offensive?

The questions itself is about language: the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way. Something so inherent to all of us yet so foreign.

Recently Louis C. K.’s monologue on “Saturday Night Live” shocked the media. It was reported on

He pointed out that at the time no one was offended by racist language and that to this day he is still “mildly racist”. Then we began to dwell on the topic of child molesters. He said “Child molesters are very tenacious people” pointing out the unequivocal consequence of being a child molester. He then made the claim that child molestation “must be amazing” if the molesters are willing to take the risk. His exact words were “Which from you can only really surmise that it must be really good! From their point of view, it must be amazing for them to risk so

Clearly, Louis C. K’s joke was intended to get us to think about societies attitude and treatment of pedophilia. Perhaps insinuating that we revile this demographic to blindly. That we take solace in our normalcy when the complexity of sexuality means that the urge to pedophilia is something that is not chosen. He never forgives or validates the act, it is taken for granted that pedophilia deserves the harshest retribution. The intent of the joke was a subtle indictment of our smug righteousness and our fear of the lawlessness of sexuality in society. So the intent of the joke was perfectly moral even