Because I can’t really soft-pedal this part: If you tell a joke to the effect of “I raped her and it is hilarious,” you’re wrong. If you tell a joke that goes “all Latina women are crazy” or “all black men are criminals,” you are wrong. If your joke is “here is how all gay men speak and behave, which is weird” or if it is “transgender women are men,” you are just not correct, buddy. You don’t know what you don’t know.
I don't think I've yet seen a comedian who tells jokes to these effects; in most cases where a comedian uses stereotypes or rape it's in an attemp at self-depreciation, making themselves look like a piece of shit and the butt-end of a joke. The audience then laughs at the absurdity of the statements involved, not that they inherently think those stereotypes are true or that rape is funny.
But even if all you do is make them laugh, even if all you do is entertain them, there is that one, lingering problem. There is the power of art to inspire.
Anyone can be inspired by anything, though. An intrinsic part of being human is finding inspiration wherever you go.
We don’t create the Christopher Archers of this world. We don’t control them, either. And there is no way we can go back in time to save that girl, or even the cat. But we don’t have to entertain them.
If those are the jokes that make mentally stable people laugh, those are probably the intended targets of those jokes. I don't see any comedian conciously choosing to target the kind of mentally unstable person who could potentially take their words to heart without understanding the context that makes it funny.
Also; just about every time there's a story out about a murderer, people keep flailing their arms around trying to find some piece of the story that justifies their world view. The people who go on to commit murders are people, they indulge in art and literature and what-have-you like everyone else.
There was a case a few years back when some school shooter was found to have been a fan of Call of Duty. That part of the story was repeated in various outlets and discussed in various forums as if it were important to the story itself, as if their indulgence in FPS games was some sort of causal factor in their actions. The discussion focussed so much on what may have inspired the murderer and the style of the killings rather than what biological, psychological or sociological conditions actually caused them to do what they did.
They’re asking you to think about what else might be in there — what we know, from history, is too often found in there. To know that some people are flammable, and to be careful where the spark lands.
I'm going to make a counter-suggestion and say focus on trying to find out what makes people flammable and helping those people. This posts seems to very much sidestep the idea that the people who go on to be murderers or school shooters often have a bunch of underlying psychological/medical issues that aren't being treated.
It's laying the blame at the hand of the creator who wants to engage stable and healthy individuals, rather than at a system that has failed to help unstable and vulnerable individuals.