Edit: to explain my position a bit, what I observe with people that are easily offended is that they can't seem to separate what the character is saying from what the overall piece is saying.
Just for example, think of The Office. Michael Scott says a lot of horribly sexist and homophobic stuff right? And we as the audience frequently laugh at it. But I don't think anyone in their right mind would say that The Office is sexist or that the audience that watches it is. Because we understand that the humor is that Michael Scott is saying something really inappropriate but he's also clueless and naive.
In this piece, the salesman character makes a dark joke. That is part of the character of the salesman, along with other aspects that are revealed. If you personally don't find it funny -- maybe you just don't like dark humor -- hey, I won't tell you you're wrong, humor is always subjective, but I don't see anything offensive about this. It's not advocating for violence it's simply adding a weird dark personality quirk to an already very weird character.
What I find with the easily offended crowd is all they look for is "bad thing involving a protected group in here? OFFENSIVE!" and completely ignore the actual context of everything else. It'd be like if you took a "that's what she said!" joke from The Office and completely ignored the context of Michael Scott's character.
You don’t have to be a bad person to have a dark sense of humor and you don’t have hate women to find the joke in the hammer factory story funny.
But I recently saw "Dont Fck With Cats" on Netflix and if had been a joke about animals I'd also been jared (because in my mind it would no longer be absurd).
So I guess it depends on what media makes us fearful off right now.
An AbstractEmotionSensorSensorFactory would be required to unwrap that.
Moreover dark humor has its place. Indeed 2 of the biggest comedies of the last 20 years used exactly this kind of humor (Seinfeld and The Office). Even to this day some of the most acclaimed comedies have humor in this vein (Veep and Curb Your Enthusiasm for eg).
It's that kind of joke that at best will make you look like a moron and ruin the mood... It's especially sad since the post is otherwise interesting.
You’ve got it backwards. No “psycho” would consider it funny; they would just consider murder something normal one could conceivably do with a hammer. There is nothing funny about it, to them; it’s just normal.
The murder joke was only funny to those people who consider murder something utterly unthinkable. It is its very outlandishness which creates the humor.
If it is no longer considered funny today, it can mean a few things: Either more people now believe that there are more “psychos” than they thought previously, or an extraordinary number of people have turned into “psychos”. Or possibly both.
This is why I think that masking outrageous things as humor is a losing strategy. Either it is funny, in which case the thing being masked with humor is so outrageous as to be completely niche, making the secret signal irrelevant, since so few people recieve it. Or, the thing is such a relatively common stance to make it no longer absolutely unthinkable, which makes it no longer funny, which removes the mask.
(Also, how do “white supremacists” fit into this? The original joke was about murdering an ex-girlfriend. This might possibly be generalized into misogyny, but I fail to see the connection to white supremacy. Please don’t fall into thinking that all people who hold opinions which you don’t like also hold all other opinions which you don’t like.)