First of all, it’s got to be funny

THERE’S an episode of “Seinfeld” in which Jerry believes his dentist has converted to Judaism for the jokes. Concerned, Jerry tells the dentist’s priest.

“And this offends you as a Jewish person?” the priest asks.

“No,” Jerry says, “it offends me as a comedian.”

The lesser offense of Don Imus’ put-down of the Rutgers women’s basketball team is nevertheless worth reviewing as a textbook violation of comedic rules -- rules that good comics can hear like dogs sensing a whistle beyond the frequency of human ears.

“He broke two rules of comedy,” Bill Maher said of Imus on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” Friday night. “It wasn’t true, and he picked on not the powerful but the weak.”

That about summed it up, though even Maher (“I appreciate you taking the time to join us,” he said to satellite guest and Imus confessor Rev. Al Sharpton. “I know this is your busy season”) couldn’t resist digging at what he saw as hypocrisy all around.

To that end, much was being made in the gab-o-sphere last week of the double standard that had Imus publicly flayed for using the same rough street talk that permeates contemporary black entertainment culture, most notably the language of hip-hop.

But the rules of engagement when it comes to ethnic humor have always been fairly clear: If you’re black, upon you is bestowed more authority to tell a joke about other blacks. Ditto if you’re Jewish, Latino, Asian.

Is it really so hard to adhere to or remember this? I happen to think the double standard works and, beyond this, has a shared, cathartic value (and as a Jew, I take advantage, enjoying Jewish jokes with Jewish relatives and friends while remaining comparatively mum around outsiders).

Like Jerry with his dentist, outsiders who tell Jewish jokes in my presence run the risk of offending my comedic sensibilities as much as my Jewish identity. But Jackie Mason can make me smile. That the culture has become inured to what is or isn’t racially insensitive isn’t so much hip-hop’s fault, then, as it is a side effect of the pop form’s success, with whites flouting the rules in order to get in on a multibillion-dollar party arguably started by Richard Pryor, who passed the baton to Eddie Murphy, who in his 1987 concert movie, “Raw,” tells of the phone call he got from Bill Cosby, chastising the young comic for being too dirty in his act.

Angered, Murphy calls his idol Pryor.

“Do the people laugh when you say what you say?” Pryor asks.

“Yes,” Murphy says.

“Do you get paid?” Pryor asks.

“Yes,” Murphy says.

“Well,” Pryor says, “tell Bill I said, ‘Have a Coke and a smile’ and shut the ... up.”

Passing the baton again

THERE’S another apparent baton-passing with “Martin Lawrence Presents: 1st Amendment Standup,” a new series premiering Wednesday on the pay cable network Starz.

Lawrence doesn’t perform -- he’s more the godfather/executive producer of the show.

Here, in the week after Imus, is an instructive lesson in who gets to use “ho” with impunity and who doesn’t. For nearly every comic on “Martin Lawrence Presents” is black, including Sheryl Underwood, who proudly says of Monica Lewinsky: She “was an amateur ho. They should have let me [perform oral sex on the president]. I’m a professional ho. Card-carrying, union-dues-paying, world-class-federation ho.”

She’s standing onstage with a smile and a purse -- in character and killing. “Martin Lawrence Presents,” it must be said, isn’t cutting edge; it’s actually more like “American Idol” -- half an hour of mostly unsurprising comics imitating, to the best of their ability, the raucous, angry, ethnic-on-ethnic (and straight-on-gay) humor that makes “Raw” a kind of Tony Bennett master class.

Comic Ian Edwards stands out (“I’m from New York, where you know who you know. Once you graduate from high school, that’s it, you are not accepting any more friends applications”), but the trouble with “Martin Lawrence Presents” isn’t that it perpetuates the use of “ho” and the N-word -- or that “bitch” is interchangeable with “woman” -- as that it tends to franchise familiar ethnic jokes like so many Starbucks, a devolution that’s been happening pretty much since the stand-up boom of the 1980s diluted the stage.

Lost in the controversy over Michael Richards’ bizarre N-word tirade at a heckler at the Laugh Factory was the fact that the Laugh Factory, far from being the mecca of comedy, is just as often populated by a call-and-response of ethnic humor whose lack of originality, to an outsider’s ears, can feel at odds with the laughter.

Along with the good ones, I’ve seen enough bad comics in the Laugh Factory (white, black, Latino and otherwise) to know that the stage Richards took that night had been fairly well degraded, so that his violation was to be especially tin-eared with an audience member and also white.

Richards, in that grainy YouTube video of his “act,” appears to be appropriating dangerous words without any sense of how to own them for comedy.

The audience that night was right; he was “deaf jam” instead of “Def Jam.” In “Martin Lawrence Presents,” Underwood gets laughs telling a joke about how New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin should have hired Mexicans to do the post-Hurricane Katrina cleanup, because they’re such industrious workers. I’ve heard a version of that same joke from a number of comedians since Hurricane Katrina, and with each repetition it’s just struck me as progressively lazier. But neither have I thought it rules-breaking offensive. Because every comic who told it was either black or Latino. Assuming, of course, Imus didn’t try it on for size.

His firing just further shows that if there’s a double standard when it comes to ethnic humor, there’s an art form in there too. It’s the difference between being offensive and leaving me offended, as a comedy fan.

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