Judging by the story of the National Enquirer spiking a scoop nine years ago about Bill Cosby’s activities, and the Newsnight edition about Jimmy Savile that wasn’t aired, we might have waited a long time for journalism to reveal what those two veteran entertainers were (allegedly, in Cosby’s case) getting up to.

In both instances, comedy got there first — most strikingly in the case of Cosby. Everyone is talking about those Cosby rape allegations — but only because of what US stand-up comic Hannibal Buress said on stage in Philadelphia last month.

“He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the 80s! I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches,” Buress said.

Here were allegations that had been discussed before, but had never stuck until a stand-up chose to let rip.

Scroll back to 1987 and there was Jimmy Savile — loved and respected entertainer, high status to the point of immunity, rumoured to be dodgy but no one said it publicly. Except for Jerry Sadowitz. “He’s a child-bender!,” ran Sadowitz’s routine. “That’s why he does all the f****** charity work: it’s to gain public sympathy for when his f****** case comes up.”

No one listened to Jerry, of course. Perhaps there was a boy-who-cried-wolf effect at work; Sadowitz is bilious and offensive about everyone, an outrider and easy to dismiss. Buress — an ex-writer of 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live, an acclaimed Edinburgh fringe act three years ago, and recently dubbed “the funniest man alive” in a magazine profile in his native Chicago — is a more measured and authoritative figure. The more significant difference, though, is that Buress’s routine was filmed on a smartphone and posted on YouTube. It couldn’t disappear. No one could pretend it hadn’t been said. It was on record.

In both scandals comedians were the first to stick their heads above the parapet. It’s easy — especially these days — to dismiss comedy as a light-hearted branch of the entertainment industry. But it has a more profound role than that. Its practitioners have a licence to say what others can’t. Shakespeare’s fools were doing it, and comics today are doing it now — exploiting the licence that comes with humour, the “only joking” excuse, to expose realities that can’t be exposed elsewhere (because they’re libellous, commercially problematic, taboo, whatever.)

Of course, art does that more widely. Behzti, Jerry Springer the Opera, the current Allen Jones exhibition, The Death of Klinghoffer — the list of art projects as lightning rods for hitherto inchoate attitudes is endless. But only comedy can be so direct.

I wish it happened more. We hear plenty about comedians “taboo-busting”, but often the taboos — infringements of “political correctness”, for the most part — aren’t taboos at all. But I also wonder whether the advent of smartphones and social media may prove a threat as well as an opportunity. Might not comedians’ readiness to say the unsayable depend on the traditional privacy of the comedy club? Buress didn’t know he was being recorded; Sadowitz certainly wasn’t aware. Now that any given joke in any obscure gig can be broadcast to millions, might comedy become as careful, as wary of litigation, commercial penalties as every other branch of the media?

Maybe so; it’s something to ward against. But in the meantime, let’s celebrate Buress, and comedians’ compulsion to say what caution stops the rest of us from saying. Long may their lips remain unsealed.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, November 28th, 2014