@andy58-in-nh
I guess someone didn't send the memo to Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Will Rogers, Allen's Alley, Mort Sahl, or P.J. O'Rourke. 
Sahl was an intriguing case---when he zapped the Eisenhower administration in the late 1950s he was a comic darling; when he zapped Camelot, the New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson and company with equal aplomb, he became poison. (Even though he'd warned people about the 1960 election: "Whoever the President is, I will attack him." Guess they were thrown when Sahl turned out to be a man of his word!)
Though if you were to ask me who my favourite comedians of Sahl's day were (and still are), I'd have to give equal time to Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart . . . (And Berman got a nasty bum rap himself: when he flipped after an actual telephone rang during a 1963 performance---Berman was famous for routines involving one-sided telephone conversations, as Newhart was; it's even money who thought of it first---it wrecked his standup career . . . because NBC was following him around for a documentary but the documentary producers made it look like Berman was always that temperamental.)
@EasyAce Well, there are and have been
humorists, whose ruminations often include political fodder and who are still genuinely funny people. I would certainly include those such as H.L. Mencken, Mort Sahl, P.J. O'Rourke, etc. The reason is that their common practice is
humor, as opposed to mere stand-up comedy.
Humor involves a far wider scope of human experience, which in turn requires a broader, more universal perspective. But even stand-up comedians can offer nuggets of wisdom along with their wisecracks, as long as they reflect on the human condition as opposed to simply making fun of people they have reason to believe their audience (also) hates.
Gratuitous nastiness (Samantha Bee) ain't funny. But someone like George Carlin, who frequently included political commentary in his act, was just as frequently hysterically funny because his observations touched on things that his listeners easily recognized as being essential truths about others, as well as about themselves.
