Okay, so I read your question yesterday, and I've been thinking about it a lot since then. I came up with a lot of stuff, which I'll try to explain here, but I apologize if it ends up being really long and confusing.
Okay, first of all, I'm of the mind that nothing is off limits in comedy... if done well. I also strongly believe that no matter what you say or do, there's a very good chance you're going to offend somebody, so to worry about that is pretty much an exercise in futility.
So, back to making sure it's done well. I've recently been watching the first two seasons of a show called It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. If you haven't seen it, it's basically like Seinfeld times twenty in terms of how self absorbed these people are. Especially in the first season, it seems that the writers of the show strategically went down a list of "all the things you're not supposed to joke about" (cancer, abortion, racism, etc.) and made a whole episode about it. Now again, obviously there are going to be people offended at this show. That's fine. I think though, that the reason it didn't offend me is that the show wasn't making fun of the things it was talking about; rather, it was making fun of these buffoons who think that making fun of these things is okay. Like, when Charlie pretends he has cancer so that the girl of his dreams will take pity on him and sleep with him, the show isn't making fun of people with cancer, it's making fun of Charlie for not understanding why it isn't okay to pretend to have cancer. In my opinion, this is one way to do it well.
Another way to do it well is to have the guy be totally oblivious, but to have other people be in on the joke, and basically call him out as an idiot. What this doesn is gives a voice to the audience. If they're just watching a guy make fun of a thing that he "shouldn't" make fun of, then that sets a tone that almost implies that the movie is okaying making fun of that thing. But if you give a voice to the audience, and have another character call him out, then it's almost giving the audience permission to laugh. It's like letting them in on the joke and saying that the movie isn't, in fact, okaying it. There was this script that I was doing a second draft of this one time, and there was an exchange involving two bonehead, pothead slacker dudes named Kenny and Kyle. They're best friends, and they refer to each other as "Killer Kenny" and "Killer Kyle". In the scene, their superior, Paul, comes up to them, and says, "Hey guys, I've been meaning to talk to you about your Killer Kenny and Kyle shirts." "What's wrong with them?," Kyle asks. "Well, it's just that I think some people might be offended by them, is all." "Like who?," Kenny asks as he and Kyle stand up to reveal that they're shirts read in big, bold letters "TEAM KKK". After a beat, Paul replies, "Black people." He walks away, and the two boys look at each other, down at their shirts, and shrug, totally oblivious. Again, it gives permission to the audience to laugh, because the joke isn't about the offensive thing, it's about how dumb Kyle and Kenny are.
Another thing I was thinking is that you could be a little more subtle about it. Like, the guy's name could be Oz Switch or something, and we never hear his whole name put together until the reveal of the company name. Then you could have a slow build leading up to a final reveal that actually feels appropriate since the groundwork had been laid. Like in that episode of Arrested Development, when Tobias decided to blend his Analyst skills with his Therapist skills to become an "analrapist"(uh-nal-ruh-pist). We hear him talking about it, and it seems like a simple light joke being used throughout the episode, and it's only when Buster reads the business card, and says, "I'm not concerned with how it's pronounced, just with how it's spelled," and we see the card for the first time, and it looks like "Anal Rapist". I love Arrested Development.
The last thing I was thinking was that you could just go for it so hard and blunt, and make that the joke. Like, the movie The Producers (the new one moreso than the original, probably) had so many different things that you just "shouldn't" make fun of, but it went so far with it that that became the joke. Like, the extra long lisp-y introduction of the gay guy, or Will Ferrell's totally committed Nazi sympathizer character. So, along those lines, I was thinking something like this, "You're calling your business Oz Switch Extermination?" "Yeah, we get rid of everything. Just wipe every pest imaginable off the face of the planet, that's the goal." "You don't say." "Oh, yeah. You name it, we get rid of it. Ants, Roaches, Jews." "Woah, woah. Did you just say Jews?" "What? Yeah... oh, no. No, Jews is short for Junebugs. Insect people would get that." "I'm pretty sure they wouldn't."
Just my thoughts. Let me know if any of this was helpful.
-- lifedoesntimitate
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