Clarence Page/Chicago Tribune

This has been a summer of discontent in stand-up comedy circles, despite the abundance of laughable material that President Donald Trump’s White House continues to provide.
You could hear that discontent in June in Jon Stewart’s onstage interview at San Francisco’s annual Clusterfest. After amusing the crowd with talk of the “yearning in America” for someone to topple the current administration, the former “Daily Show” host turned serious about the need to organize, campaign and vote.

If anyone’s going to topple the current administration, he said, “it’s not going to be a comedian.”
Maybe not, although quite a number of us citizens used to say the same about the chances of a reality TV show star being elected America’s president.

“We mistake cultural power for power,” Stewart said, acknowledging the limits of his own fame and influence. “And I, being a part of that machine and mechanism, do feel oddly culpable.”
With that pause to seriously assess his role as a comedian in these polarized and turbulent times, Stewart was engaging in serious self-reflection that seems to be all the rage among political comedians.

Dave Chappelle sounded a similarly reflective note after his jokes about the #MeToo movement brought charges of insufficient sensitivity to victims of sexual assault and harassment. In an interview on “PBS NewsHour,” he said he finds some of the criticism actually “helpful.”
“I get educated by it,” he said. “I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but I learn about a lot of things just from my critics.”

He might learn a lot, then, from such new-wave comics as Cameron Esposito and Tig Notaro, who have mined brilliant and surprisingly successful comedy riffs out of their personal tragedies. Esposito’s own story of surviving her sexual assault culminates her hourlong June comedy special, now self-released through her website (www.cameronesposito.com, where it streams for free).

Notaro came to fame for mining her bilateral breast-cancer diagnosis for humor — and then baring her chest, post-double mastectomy, onstage. Her latest special, “Happy to Be Here,” started streaming on Netflix in May.

Both women helped prepare the way for Hannah Gadsby, who zoomed almost instantly into international fame by announcing in her act that she is quitting comedy.

Fed up with the strictures of a genre created mostly by male comics, she tells stories about her life that involved sexual violence and homophobia, mostly during her years growing up as a lesbian in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997.

Not knowing what to expect, my wife and I found ourselves riveted by her Netflix special. She sets us up nicely in its first half with well-delivered jokes and insightful anecdotes (“I don’t even think lesbian is the right identify for me,” she quips. “I identify as tired.”) before shifting smoothly into a thought-provoking explanation of why she’s quitting comedy.

“I don’t feel very comfortable in it anymore,” she said. “I built a career out of self-deprecating humor. That’s what I built a career on. And I don’t want to do that anymore.

“Because do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.”

It’s humiliating, she said, to “put myself down in order to speak — in order to seek permission to speak.”

Self-deprecation, which almost always is viewed as essential for comedians and other speakers who want to connect with their audiences, takes on a sinister edge for her, she said. She’s not alone.
I was reminded of how black stand-up comics were almost nonexistent in mainstream nightclubs until Dick Gregory broke through in the early 1960s. Even so, there always has been a harsh reaction to black comics and other comedians of color whose material leans too stereotypically into the direction of Stepin Fetchit or Moms Mabley, whose brilliance was shrouded from many Americans by their stereotypical clowning in order to be accepted across the color line in those days.

Today we see a new generation of comics who seek not only to shock and amuse us, but also reveal some of the world outside of our comfort zones. They can’t tell us what to think. But, along with the laughs, they offer us some valuable stories to think about.