“Tom Ballard looks like an enormous baby: we should use him to ween paedophiles off children.”

When Jimmy Carr delivered that line at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal in July 2015, the drunken crowd erupted in gasping laughter. Jimmy and I were facing off in the Roast Battle, a one-on-one competition in which two comics go head-to-head, inflicting brutal jibes upon one another for entertainment. The line made me double over. It’s horrific, yes – but it’s also a bit true. I do look like a giant baby. That’s why it was funny.

I tried to give as good as I got: “Jimmy Carr’s mother died in 2001. She died of pancreatic cancer and yet Jimmy’s still not considered ‘side-splitting’.”

The crowd groaned and looked at me like I was a reprehensible human being. But they also laughed. Hard.

In 2017, the tension between comedy and the regularly-decried-but-rarely-explicated phenomenon known as “political correctness” is the focus of endless controversies, heated Twitter exchanges and think pieces (like this! Hello!).

Dave Chappelle has returned to standup after more than a decade’s absence and has faced criticism for his routines referencing rape and transgender people. Ricky Gervais has been admonished for his material on Caitlyn Jenner and dead babies. The Australian defended Bill Leak’s controversial cartoons by describing them as “grim humour”.

After years of this tension swirling around in the culture wars, the broader questions seem to be more or less settled.

Can comedy cover dark topics? Yes. See Mel Brooks, Chris Morris, Hannah Gadsby, et al.

Is anything off limits? No, as long as it’s executed well enough. See Patrice O’Neal, Bill Burr, Amy Schumer, Tim Minchin, et al.

Can comedy survive in a PC world? Well – yes. Clearly.

If the freedom fighters are to be believed, politically correct groupthink has become so powerful that it has now fully enslaved the west, shot free speech in the face until it’s dead and implanted microchips in the brains of all white babies to ensure their first words come with a trigger warning.

And yet somehow the likes of Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Lisa Lampanelli and even Kevin Bloody Wilson bravely struggle on, selling out large venues in liberal democracies across the world. Plus it’s perfectly possible to write comedy that’s both pro-PC and hilarious: Stewart Lee, Sarah Silverman and Aamer Rahman manage it on a regular basis.

The central headache seems to be the defining of terms. What is offensive? What is funny? Indeed, what even is political correctness? If you’ll accept the top Google definition, it’s “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalise or insult groups of people who are social disadvantaged or discriminated against”.

If you prefer UrbanDictionary.com, PC is “a way we speak in America so we don’t offend whining pussies”. You say potato, I say snowflake.

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I believe political correctness is a negotiation. There are no holy commandments of PC that have been carved on to gluten-free stone tablets by Lena Dunham – these are ideas that are held, shared, debated and enacted by living, thinking human beings. We choose which rules of social interaction we adhere to all the time. I put my elbows on the table when I’m eating and if that offends someone, well, I don’t really care. I’m prepared to stand by that decision and face the consequences.

However, when it comes to comedy like, say, blackface, I try to abstain. Even if I knew someone who thought that blackface was funny or even if the dress-up party’s theme was ghetto, I’m sorry, those factors are immediately dwarfed by the real and unnecessary hurt that the action could cause people of colour.

(Though that’s not to say that blackface can never be acceptable. A friend of mine who has passionately criticised public displays of blackface told me recently that he considers Robert Downey Jr’s cosmetically blackened character in Tropic Thunder to be a perfectly acceptable and hilarious comment on the practice of blackface.)

Caveats such as these do not “expose” PC ideas as inconsistent or hypocritical. They reflect how complex and messy the world is and it’s not necessarily a bad thing when your audience asks you to wrestle with those complexities.

I’m not here mounting a defence of every piece of feedback that’s ever been sent to or yelled at a comedian. I’ve received my fair share of communication from people who are clearly very keen to hang on to their offence at any cost. But I’ve also received heartfelt messages from some fans telling me why my use of a certain word onstage brought up some real darkness for them, or what crappy message they thought a particular routine was sending out there.

I’m not being censored or weakened by listening to such feedback; on the contrary, I think it makes me a better comic and a better person. Not every joke that’s spat out of my dumb head is going to be perfect genius. Silly, humourless whinging from Twitter eggs is tedious, but so is Bill Maher berating his own crowd for being so politically correct when one of his punchlines falls flat.

I acknowledge this negotiation is messy. I don’t believe that being a PC comedian means one has to let go of irony or black humour. Context still matters. I care about the ideals of political correctness, but I also loved partaking in the undeniably un-PC Roast Battle with every fibre of my being. I made horrific jokes about other people’s race, ability, gender and sexuality and they responded in kind and it was fine because we, the comics and the audience, had an understanding. Every comic on that stage had given each other permission to make such jokes. Everyone was on an equal footing. I got to make that joke about Jimmy’s mother and he got to say:“I used to think that Isis throwing gays off rooftops was terrible until I met Tom Ballard – now I see their point.” One could almost say that the Roast Battle is something of a “safe space” for dark humour. Funny, that.

In a different context, this would be a disaster. If I was talking to someone in my audience and I made a callous joke about their dead mother, for example, I would, quite rightly, be considered a terrible person. The power balance would be all out of whack and I could hardly claim that I wasn’t “punching down”. An audience’s silence here wouldn’t be “PC gone mad” – it would be recognition of the fact that human beings with hearts and minds feel emotions. As Brian Logan wrote in response to Chappelle and Gervais’ recent work, a “rich, powerful straight male with a huge audience mocking the beleaguered isn’t a good look”.

Every day we learn more about the experiences of the marginalised, from cultural appropriation to intersectionality to “minority stress”. Learning things about the world has this annoying habit of forcing us to consider changing our opinions and behaviour. Comics aren’t immune from that, nor should they be. The obligation to be a decent person doesn’t switch off when you walk on stage. You can cover your ears and chant “La-la-la! Toughen up! Stop being offended! It’s not real!” if you like, or you can be honest and acknowledge that just like everyone else, comedians’ freedom of speech comes with responsibility and consequences. Sometimes it’s not just the hecklers who could afford to shut up and listen for a bit.

• Tom Ballard is performing Problematic at the Melbourne International Comedy festival until 23 April and in Sydney from 4–7 May. He will be giving the MICF comedy lecture, Boundless Plains to Share, on 22 April