Is comedy history?

Another Gilbert pic, this one from Fun, 17 December 1864.

This is going to be quite a brief one today, I think. All I have is a question, but an important one from my point of view I think. What do people want from entertainment? This seems to have changed radically over the years. For instance, in the first half of the 20th century a very "soft" and unpolitical kind of comedy was generally preferred in the UK--cultured and without bite, Pierrot revues and so on. After the war, in the 1950s and 1960s, something more caustic came in, the Goons and Beyond the Fringe. Still very articulate and even whimsical, but directly relating to and criticising social and political realities. In the 1980s, with "alternative" comedy, it became almost a truism that comedy is radical and offensive. It was taken as given that the point of comedy is to question and to shock for political ends.

Today, in 2011, it seems to me that the political undertow has disappeared and it is accepted that comedy shocks, and that's all it does, as an end in itself. In fact it seems sometimes that a serious or political meaning is seen as a disadvantage in comedy. Certainly the verbal and articulate aspect of comedy has been downgraded so that it is enough to state obvious and stale ideas again and again in unending repetition. The one thing that is absent is the shock of a new idea.

Is, therefore, Gilbert's comedy, which is verbal and intellectual, suitable for today? Is it even recognised as comedy, containing as it does no gross or disgusting elements, relying instead on social and intellectual games? I ask because I don't know the answer.