What's happened is that in general, the public has been deceived (most likely by the right) into thinking that "offensive" means a different word than it actually is. "Offensive" comedy, following the original definition of the word, is actually extremely good, because it goes on the offense and challenges upheld societal norms. People look at Carlin's Seven Words and judge the material as "offensive," but they completely misunderstand the definition of the word - Carlin's bit is actually offensive because it's tearing down the idea that comedians shouldn't be allowed to be crass, but people think it's "offensive" just because he's saying gross stuff and naughty words.
The other problem with Seven Words is that it is now completely obsolete. There used to be no way to ever get your artwork distributed on a large scale if it didn't play to puritan senses of morality, so important discussions about icky subjects just got brushed aside because nobody was able to talk about them. Now we have the internet. Now we have thousands of people successfully making a living off of writing, filming, or streaming homemade porn. Now if you make a movie with more nudity and/or gore than the MPAA would like to see, there's still a pretty damn good chance you can just get Netflix to throw money at you for it.
The general public doesn't seem to understand this, because people who actually are total shitheads (including some comedians, like Joan Rivers and Jeff Dunham) twisted the definition of "being offensive" into "being gross or impolite," and now it's gotten so bad that "being offensive" now means "representing conservative values" when that used to be exactly the opposite. As an example, staff of Chicago-based game company Cards Against Humanity have stated in the past that they avoid using the term "offensive" to describe their own game because what the game really is is just kinda gross. (The game, admittedly, has had some problems with genuinely hurtful cards in the past, but they've been diligent about removing content like that, and their social work speaks for itself.)
So now that the right has twisted the idea of being "offensive" into something that completely serves them instead of the attacks on the status quo it used to be, we have completely bizarre occurances where somebody with a South Park picture can come into a thread about The Simpsons being hurtful to Indian people and claim that the reason the show sucks now is because they're afraid of hurting somebody. These ridiculous leaps in logic are outright celebrated nowadays, alongside a show that once argued that it's okay to call gay people "faggot" because the show runners, two straight men, have changed the dictionary definition of it, all by themselves, you're welcome gay people.
