> You don't need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.

I am not a native english speaker, I don't know anything about humourous form of language in that tongue.

Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one. "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.

Your story is interesting, and I don't understand how you could be surprised : people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...

Do you think Baudelaire cared about engagement ? You talked like there were no way taste could dramatically change to the point "ugly" is becoming "good" or vice-versa. Some of the writers and artists I like the most braved the taste™ of the different hegemonic culture of their time, and just trusted their own intuition of what they did want to express, say, create.

Marcel Duchamp is a great example of how a mid level joke can change the art world suddenly (and people's taste with it).