Jim Norton makes no apologies for his comedy

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The goalposts may be moving for comedians, but Jim Norton is on offense.

The stand-up calls his latest special "Please Be Offended," because he’s had it with fellow comedians having to apologize to audience members or special interest groups.

"I have such a hatred for what’s been going on, people being fake outraged with comedians," he says. "I think the only way to deal with that is to be belligerent about it. You should not be apologetic, unless you’re genuinely sorry."

So he did a stage rant about the woman who engaged Daniel Tosh in a comedy club exchange about a rape joke last summer, resulting in a Tosh apology.

"She had the right to get up and quietly leave. How she felt about it should be irrelevant to the rest of the audience," Norton says. "We’ve lost that ability to silently object and leave."

It’s worse, he says, when organized advocacy groups force a comedian to apologize, such as GLAAD organizing a news conference so Tracy Morgan could apologize for homophobic comments last year.

"These special interest groups, you just have to slap them in the face back. They really are atrocious. They contribute virtually nothing," Norton argues. "They’re leeches. They leech onto a comedian to get you to parrot their message."

Norton says GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and other groups have "done a lot of very important things. … They fight a lot of oppression and they fight these things they’ve been denied.

"But what happens is they overextend. They go from being this honorable, important organization to being thought and language police and being nitpicky."

This is all familiar terrain for the 44-year-old Norton, who owes most of his fame to satellite radio’s "The Opie & Anthony Show."

Norton’s standing advice to the would-be offended is to tune out or ignore him, and that extends to the Twitterverse. He says he doesn’t pick fights with celebrities directly by "@ messaging" them by name.

"I purposely don’t when I mock them, (because) it would be like, ‘Hey, notice me!’ That (Tweet is) something I’m saying for people who follow me. If they follow me, they’ll see it."

Norton’s own comedic self-loathing is worse than anything an enemy could come up with. His sex addiction and adventures with prostitutes are mined for stand-up material, not TMZ fodder.

So is Las Vegas a very good or very bad town for him?

"I love Vegas, I love doing gigs there because the crowds are always great," he says, but quickly adds, "I get in and out of town quickly.

"I’m such a pervert, I know I couldn’t spend a whole lot of time there. So I get out kind of quickly if I can," he says. "I try to avoid the dirtier side of Vegas. I’ll get an escort, but I’ll have her come to the room.

"Most of my perversion is here in New York," he adds of his home turf. "Most of the dirt I do is here. I’m relatively calm in Vegas compared to the way I am at home. … I’m a dirty guy."

But even dirty guys have to draw the line somewhere. Norton is maybe the only person you’d have to ask about a scene he did on Louis C.K.’s FX comedy "Louie," in which Norton confesses at a poker game that he grew up drawing his own stick-figure pornography and masturbating to it because the real thing wasn’t available.

So, uh, was that true?

Not this time. "Anthony from ‘Opie & Anthony’ actually told that story about someone he knows, and Louie just wrote a really funny story around it."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.