In the current print issue of NR is a fascinating article (behind paywall, sorry) by prominent comedy writer Rob Long explaining why he thinks Charlie Hebdo isn’t that funny:

It’s been more than two weeks since the deadly attack at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, which is enough time to allow me to say this: Charlie Hebdo isn’t funny.
Not really, anyway. Charlie Hebdo is French, and the French — who can be subtle and nuanced about things like cheese and marital fidelity — are remarkably ham-fisted about humor. For them, a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed engaged in a wet kiss with a rabbi is hilarious, because, well, how can that happen? In real life? On ne fait pas ça!
. . .
Charlie Hebdo is funny in context, if you imagine someone really uptight — a cleric, say, or some humorless religious zealot — reading it. In fact, the cartoons are funny — and even then it’s a stretch for me — only with the image in mind of the target, face red with rage, offense very much taken, holding the magazine with specks of foam around the mouth and spittle flying.

I can corroborate this with a small incident from my youth. I grew up in Francophone Quebec in the 1970s, and I once saw a French-language sketch-comedy show in which a segment began with an actor playing Jesus coming out faux-nailed to a large foam-rubber cross. The studio audience (or the laugh track, I don’t remember) hooted with uproarious laughter as the announcer declared that the crucified Jesus would now jump off a chair into a glass of water (more uproarious laughter). Then the segment abruptly ended, and the show moved on to another sketch.

At the time, I was a little Catholic boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, of rather tender sensibilities. I was shocked by the sketch — certainly, for the most part, because of the idea that the Crucifixion of Christ is no laughing matter, but also, even at that tender age, because there seemed to be no actual point to the joke. There is something innate in my comic sense that makes me expect the continual pattern of setup/punchline. But here there was no punchline; the crucified Christ in an absurd situation was the joke, point final.

Quebec at that time was reaching the tail end of its rejection of Catholicism, part of a historical phenomenon known broadly as the “Quiet Revolution.” Perhaps at that time there were still some older folks around who were as shocked by this sketch as a shy and sensitive youth of some eight years of age was. Nowadays, I’m sure, there are a lot fewer of them. At some point the strategy of épater le bourgeois runs out of bourgeois to épate.