There are a lot of sound ideas coming out of this thread.
Geoff - You are spot on with the historical analysis and although many of us dancers like to believe that before people started to do it because "they knew allowed them to rattle a collecting box at the doors of the rich people" there was a time when it had a sacred purpose (and that is a debate for another thread I think) this is more of a wish for some and a sense of understanding what it is you do at so many other levels for those who it inspires in that way. The bottom line is that it has been danced to entertain and to collect money for hundreds of years.
However, this entertaining and collecting does seem to have been done with some sense of dignity and I think, pride in ones athletic abilities etc. This is where I feel most dancers would prefer to draw the line. No to being laughed at, but yes to the audience laughing with you if you are trying to do something comic within the performance.

I do not agree that we can differentiate what is a "traditional dance" from any other. How many of the collected dances can be truly verified as traditional? How much of the information collected by Sharp and others can be relied upon when the informants were often paid in beer for each dance they described?
I accept that many of us have now taken that step further into the unknown and written dances quite deliberately; not just in our heads for a pint of beer, but in the dance notes of our own morris teams in an attempt to expand our repetoire with something unique to that team rather than just dance the same dances as others do in what amounts to a re-creation of the snapshot of time in which they were collected. Similar arguements exist in morris to those between the "old traddies" of song and those who welcome new songs into the tradition. At present it would seem that those who accept that morris must move with the times are winning and morris is moving forward into the 21st century. The Morris Ring issues press releases about morris dying out with twenty years but this is not the view of the other two organisations. The Morris Ring teams struggle for members in a way which is not felt by the others. Morris is no longer seen as a historical record to be demonstrated in a prescribed way, but as a living tradition in which many people can feel they can contribute physically and creatively.
The one issue which does worry many of us is whether in handing over the tradition to a younger generation we are also able to hand on the values of ensuring that the public is entertained and that they maintain a dignity in their performance through aspiring to a good standard etc. Here, perhaps is the problem. Like parents trying to hand on their moral values to their children, we struggle to hand on our performance values to the new generation of dancers. Some will uphold them, some will exceed them, but unfortunately in the eyes of many of us, some will "just do it for fun" - meaning their own fun and not the audiences. This is where we sruggle with morris in the 21st century, but then, do we not also struggle with a number of similar issues in the broader society? I know I do. Morris has always moved with the society in which it exists. That is the only way it can survive, so matbe we need to be a little more forthright in combating the worst element of change within the broader society than to demand that morris alone stays the same?