Why does fury over Maher’s use of N-word feel muted?

Maher, of course, is just the latest high-profile comedic fail. Kathy Griffin is still smarting from the beating she took for a jarringly offensive picture of her holding up a prop meant to look like the bloody, severed head of Donald Trump. But ugly as that “joke” was, it is of a different kind than Maher’s transgression.

What he did is more of a piece with Stephen Colbert’s homophobic quip about Trump’s mouth and Vladimir Putin’s man parts. It calls to mind Seth McFarlane’s sexist “We Saw Your Boobs” song at the 2013 Oscars, which appalled many women. And Daniel Tosh’s 2012 “joke” about an audience member being raped.

We are not here to argue whether those men are or are not racist, sexist or homophobic. That’s immaterial. No, we are here to deconstruct the sense of privileged, white, male, liberal entitlement that allows them to feel they can say and do such things in the first place.

Yes, humor is rude, comedy is shock and funny is whatever works on a given night. Yes, satire is the art of undermining an asinine belief or behavior by magnifying or pretending to agree with it. Yes, the business of laughter is the business of crossing that completely subjective, always moving line of decorum and propriety.

And yes, occasional failure is inevitable. Ask Kathy Griffin.

But with all that duly conceded, imagine for a moment it was Rush Limbaugh who made Bill Maher’s joke or Sean Hannity who sang Seth MacFarlane’s song. The right wing is known for its hostility toward African-Americans and women, so the outrage would have been visceral, immediate and loud. Many of us would have rightly decried “jokes” that bully and demean marginalized peoples.

Yet that fury feels muted or altogether absent when such jokes are told by the left-leaning likes of MacFarlane and Maher.

But why? Because they’re on “our” side? Because they’re just joking?

Those of us who are marginalized and those who simply care may want to rethink that blank check forbearance. If your ancestry traces to slavery, you might well ask: is this guy laughing with us — or at us? And that’s the problem.

These days, it’s hard to tell.

Last week, Washington hoped that infrastructure, which is a product of civil engineering, would be much discussed. But if you find yourself in Oregon, keep your opinions to yourself, lest you get fined $500 for practicing engineering without a license. This happened to Mats Jarlstrom as a result of events that would be comic if they were not symptoms of something sinister.

Jarlstrom’s troubles began when his wife got a $150 red-light camera ticket. He became interested in the timing of traffic lights and decided there was something wrong with the formula used in Oregon and elsewhere to time how long