Joan Rivers is never one to censor her words, however, some believe that her recent joke went just a little too far across the line.

When the 80-year-old visited The Today Show last week to speak about her new reality show, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?, she compared living with her daughter, Melissa, to the three women kidnapped for several years by Ariel Castro in Cleveland.

"Those women in the basement in Cleveland had more space," Rivers joked.

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Despite the controversy she received for the joke, Rivers refused to apologize for her words telling local Cleveland paper The Plain Dealer, "There is nothing to apologize for. I made a joke. That's what I do."

Yet, Rivers isn't the first comedian to make a joke and receive backlash for it.

Dane Cook was heavily criticized when he spoke about the shooting at the Aurora, Colo., movie theater during The Dark Knight Rises premiere in 2012, which left 12 people dead and 58 injured.

Days later, an audience member took video of Cook's standup show at The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, where he mocked the movie and the situation.

"So I heard that the guy came into the theater about 25 minutes into the movie," the comedian said about the shooter, James Holmes. "And, I know that if none of that would have happened, pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realizing it was a piece of crap, probably was like ‘ugh (expletive) shoot me.”

Cook wrote an apology after the video went viral tweeting, "I made a bad judgment call with my material last night & regret making a joke at such a sensitive time. My heart goes out to all of the families & friends of the victims."

That summer and at the same venue, Daniel Tosh caught heat for a joke involving rape. A female audience member recounted her experience at the show via a blog post and said that Tosh told the crowd, "Rape is hilarious." After she called him out at the show, Tosh reportedly responded, "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her..."

Tosh quickly explained himself on Twitter: "The point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them." He added, "all the out of context misquotes aside, i'd like to sincerely apologize," with a link to the blog post.

Seinfeld star Michael Richards also went off on a racist rant at the same Los Angeles comedy club in 2006 after an African-American audience member interrupted his act. Richards spoke about the famous incident during his 2012 appearance on former co-star Jerry Seinfeld's web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

"It was a selfish response. I took it too personally," he said. "I should have been working selflessly."

These are clear examples of comedians who have either made insensitive jokes or taken their act too far. Do you think comedians should ever censor their jokes?

Follow me on Twitter: @AnnaHalkidis

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