I disagree that humour needs to be offensive in order to make us laugh. Offensiveness is a normal feature of human life, but few laugh at it I would say. They normally find it repressive and boring. I think Chesterton was closer when he basically split humour in two: wit and comedy. So wit is ‘intellectual’. Its aim is to give pleasure in the arttistic and virtuosic wielding of language – and it is usually aimed at equals in intellectual understanding. To use it deliberately against the less intelligent is snobbish. Then’s there’s comedy which he equated to the basic idea that we find the loss of human dignity funny because we have that dignity by virtue of our status in the cosmos (he implicitly makes dignity a matter of religious evaluation). So a man treads on a banana skin, man slips, man lands on bottom. All laugh instinctively at this (especially children). However if a penguin were to slip on a banana skin we do not necessarily find this funny (nor do penguins). If a tree falls over (another example of his) we don’t find that funny at all. In fact we have to anthropomorphise animals or plants (e.g. genital-shaped vegetables) in order to find them amusing (e.g. the penguin’s walk, which appears to lots of people as funny because a penguin looks like a failed approximation to a human when it walks – it functions as a proxy for our own occasional waddling lack of dignity cf. chimps failing to drink tea at a dinner correctly). Even satire should have at its core some recognition of human dignity, and its point would be to reform, to shame by comparison to some minimal standard of moral human bahviour. What passes for it nowadays is mostly left-wing witless oiffensiveness, and boring self-regard.

As to dignity there is an immediate way to spot a psychopath. He’s the person who, when someone ‘slips on a banana skin’, continues to laugh even when he realises the person is badly injured and can’t get up, when normal people would stop laughing. I’ve actually met one of those. He’s now a lawyer.

The only Jewish jokes I know are about death and the only jokes about death I know are Jewish jokes. I think your wife was just sick of you being holier than thou and decided to undermine you by othering your sense of humour.

Funny yet not funny is the fact that the Dutch have just announced that paintings featuring scenarios in which people are not social distancing will be removed from the Rijksmuseum etc. So no ‘Nightwatch’ and not much of Frans Hals or any of those old paintings of people gathering around Jesus in his crib or on the cross. Quite a few Breitners will have to go. along with various painting by de Hooch and Vermeer. There won’t be much left except for a few van Gogh haystacks and those Mondrians.