Born 100 years ago this weekend, on a kitchen table in a Brooklyn tenement, just in time for the Depression and the golden age of American comedy, Melvin Kaminsky, the son of Polish and Ukrainian Jews, inherited a powerful love for life. He was raised by a single mother who worked a 10-hour shift in New York’s garment district. (His father died when he was two.) Short, scrawny, and with a nose that someone once compared to “a small mudslide”, Brooks told Playboy that he could hang around with older boys because “they were afraid of my tongue. I had it sharpened and I’d stick it in their eye. I read a little more than they did, so I could say, ‘Touch me not, leper!’ ‘Hey! Mel called me a leopard!’ ‘Schmuck! Leper!’ Words were my equalizer.”

That’s true of comedians in general. But it was Jewish ones who perfected the fine art of using wit — which Aristotle defined as “cultivated insolence” — as a weapon of defence. Don Rickles, Joan Rivers (born Molinsky), and Jackie Mason (Yacov Moshe Maza), also children of immigrants and contemporaries of Brooks, made their careers out of humor honed to a razor’s edge over centuries in the Diaspora. (A typical Mason joke: “Are there any Poles in the audience? No? There must be. They just don’t understand the question.”) A few years older than Rickles and Mason, Rodney Dangerfield (Jacob Cohen), “Mr I Can’t Get No Respect”, revealed the socially anxious underbelly of their aggressive routines. But Brooks, who at the age of nine told his uncle that he was headed not for the garment district but for show business, is cut from different cloth.

Brooks can be as outrageous as anyone: The Producers’ vaudeville production “Springtime for Hitler” made the film untouchable by major studios. Yet if his humour is distinctly Jewish — in Blazing Saddles, he appears as an Indian chief who speaks Yiddish — it is also as big-hearted and self-assured as the country that gave him his break. Whether it was a natural inclination to gratitude, or serving his country at the Battle of the Bulge, or rising from poverty to the silver screen by way of the Borscht Belt, Brooks came to love America, and to reflect that love in his art.

Consider Blazing Saddles. Nothing captures the American belief in gritty individualism, justice, and a fair deal for the little guy more than the Western, where the white hats give the black hats what’s coming before they ride off into the sunset. Brooks, whose writing team included the legendary comedian Richard Pryor, turns that idea into a piece of biting social commentary — one that condemns present-day racism while offering a hopeful vision of Americans’ capacity to live up to the nation’s ideals. The story’s protagonist is Bart, a black convict played by Cleavon Little. As the opening credits roll, the title song informs us that Bart “conquered fear and he conquered hate, / He turned dark night into day, / He made his blazing saddle / A torch to light the way.”

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Blazing Saddles doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall, because there is none from the get-go. In one early scene, a boss taunts his chain gang of railway track-layers: “When you was slaves, you sang like birds. Come on! How ’bout a good ole n****r work song?” Backed by a chorus of black convicts, Bart sings a fine a capella version of the 1934 Cole Porter tune “I Get a Kick Out of You”, and then watches with amusement as the befuddled cowboy bosses — “Hold, it, hold it! What the hell is that shit?” — dance like imbeciles while singing “Camptown Races,” a minstrel song that parodies slave music, to show what they had in mind. Taggart, who oversees the whole operation, comes riding up fit to be tied: “What in the Wide Wide World of Sports is goin’ on here? I hired you people to get a little track laid, not to jump around like a bunch a’ Kansas City faggots!” It’s a brilliant (if unintended) reversal that foreshadows the plot as a whole — Taggart is as racist as anyone — in which bigots learn to respect, and even cherish, the objects of their former hatred.

Like Huckleberry Finn, an anti-racist book full of racial slurs, Blazing Saddles doesn’t have a mean bone in its body. In fact, it’s a retelling of Twain’s great American novel of friendship between outcasts, with Gene Wilder’s Jim (a washed-up alcoholic gunslinger) in the role of Huck, and Bart in the role of Jim. These two characters — nothing but a lousy pair of deuces, socially speaking — become fast friends when Bart, who’s been appointed sheriff of Rock Ridge by the state’s attorney general in a scheme to seize their land, is greeted with open hostility by the town’s all-white residents.

But the pair ultimately win over the townspeople, setting up a genuinely democratic drama. They lead a popular coalition of Rock Ridge settlers, and black, Irish, and Chinese track-layers, to outwit a motley band of common criminals, Klansmen, Nazis, Hell’s Angels, and (this being the year after the Yom Kippur War) Arabs on camels, paid for by the wealthy and powerful. In Blazing Saddles, a classic tale — the triumph of the wily underdog against organized injustice — turns out to be equally Jewish and American. In the end, the townspeople beg Bart to stay on as sheriff, but he and Jim head for greener pastures. They get into a chauffeured limousine and drive west, toward the setting sun. It’s a story of civic amity worthy of America’s 250th, a reminder of national aspirations that are sorely in need of renewal.

“I’m a serious human being who is a humorist,” Brooks told Playboy. “The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball… if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively.” Brooks’ signature combination of edgy humor, deep generosity, and a tragicomic sensibility shaped by wide reading — Gogol, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy — was already apparent in his first film, The Producers, released in 1967. The protagonists are Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), a Broadway producer, and Leo Bloom (again Gene Wilder), an accountant, whose name is a nod to the eponymous wandering Jew of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Many people think that it was in very bad taste for Brooks to make a film full of goose-stepping, Sieg-Heiling characters in Nazi uniforms little more than 20 years after the Holocaust. Maybe so: but Brooks subtly indicates that he is by no means insensitive to Jewish suffering. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is targeted by Irish antisemites, while the Polish city of Bialystock was home to 50,000 Jews at the start of the Second World War; 800 were burned alive inside the Great Synagogue when the Germans torched it in 1941, while the rest died on the streets, in the ghetto, or at Treblinka.

These hints had to suffice, and not just because the film is a comedy: American survivors just wanted to forget the past, and began speaking publicly about their experiences in the Holocaust only in the Seventies. But in 1967, Americans were fully prepared to ridicule the Nazis; the popular television series Hogan’s Heroes had been doing just that for two years. Little wonder “Springtime for Hitler” brilliantly mocks the Third Reich by having a spaced-out acid-head perform the role of Hitler (did Brooks know that der Führer was sustained by a steady diet of opiates, cocaine, and amphetamines?) and a black hipster that of “Little Joe” Goebbels.

Brooks’ big heart is there again on full display in The Producers. Bialystock talks Bloom into participating in his con of massively overselling shares in “Springtime for Hitler” — a play so bad that he is convinced it will fail on its first night — to little old ladies he pretends to love. The scheme backfires, and both men are sent to prison. But neither the little old ladies, who attend their trial, nor Bloom, who seems to bear in himself all the anxieties of Jewish trauma have regrets. He explains that “No one ever called me Leo before… even in kindergarten they used to call me Bloom. I never sang a song before, I mean with someone else… This man, this man — this is a wonderful man.”

It’s a plea for kindness and compassion that is all-too-rare in comedy today. That’s because the world in which Brooks came of age no longer exists. His generation was educated in the school of hard knocks: first the Depression, then the war, with its triumphs and horrors. And if the slump taught self-reliance, that existential fight against the Germans and Japanese taught patriotism and civic responsibility. To many veterans, it revealed what really matters in life: family, friendship, community; gratitude and kindness. Brooks’s distinctly American comedy — democratically capacious, high-spirited, goofy, magnanimous, tinged with Jewish pathos — perfectly expressed this sensibility.

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Shortly after the bicentennial, however, Americans began losing faith in their great experiment in ordered liberty. The schools stopped teaching civics; the idea of the melting-pot ceased to form young souls, and national pride declined. No longer united by common ideals and aspirations, our sense of humor has become smaller and more brittle. And with the reassertion of a wary tribalism, Brooks’s marriage of Jewish and American comedy seems but a distant memory. In Blazing Saddles, Sioux warriors attack a wagon train in which Jim (then a boy) and his family are travelling far in the rear, a wry comment on how black Americans were sent to the back of the bus in the Jim Crow south. Brooks, the Yiddish-speaking Indian chief, lets them go, marvelling “They darker than us! Woo!” The scene, which wittily presents Jews as aboriginal Americans while emphasising their solidarity with black Americans during the civil rights movement, wouldn’t work today. Some black Americans view Jews as oppressors, and few Jewish Americans still understand Yiddish. Like other Americans, Jews have increasingly embraced progressivism, which turns people into humorless scolds — especially when jokes contain offensive language. These developments have pushed Brooksian comedy to the brink of extinction.

What remains in a world without humor is absurdity, the incongruity at the heart of any joke. But absurdity in itself, shorn of the meaning our common human endeavors and shared concerns bring to it, isn’t funny. It can’t lift us up, because it isn’t going anywhere. Brooks is always going somewhere; his comedy is beloved because its honesty about who we are, and its hopeful vision of who we might be, satisfies our craving for authentic human meaning.

As for creative freedom, that might be the biggest joke of all. Two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, have had their shows canceled at two venues. One of these, Whistlebinkies, at first claimed that this was due to “safety concerns” — presumably it feared that activists from “the right side of history” might turn up to assault audiences and staff in the name of compassion. Creeger and Simon say they were told of “staff discomfort at hosting Jewish shows”.

Of course, any appeal to “safety” in the context of a comedy show is mere sleight-of-tongue, a specious justification for the curbing of artistic freedom. The Banshee Labyrinth has canceled Simon’s solo show after trawling through his social media posts in search of heretical views. Chillingly, its managers have compiled a “dossier” of tweets in which Simon criticizes the hypocrisy of those who attend and organize “humanitarian” marches for Palestine while turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by Hamas. The venue was particularly outraged that Simon pointed out that Greta Thunberg had not been “kidnapped” by the IDF when she sailed her flotilla to Gaza in her ongoing mission to save the universe and chronicle it all on Instagram.

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One would hope that a comedy venue of all places might appreciate that creatives do not always agree, and that it is not their place to cancel performers who do not pledge fealty to the fashionable omni-cause of the middle-classes. Alas, as ever, conformity is now being demanded from those we should least expect it from. It is particularly dispiriting to see this kind of groupthink take hold at the Fringe. Since its inception in the late Forties, performers have been accustomed to protests and demands for censorship from the Christian Right, but such calls today are coming from within the industry itself.

The ideological capture is evident from critics who laud shows for conveying the “correct message” and comedy commissioners who evidently prefer propaganda to art. Ever since Nica Burns, the director of the Fringe comedy awards, launched the 2018 festival with a paean to “comedy’s future in the woke world” which will “establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”, most performers and industry doyens have been diligently following the decree. Genuinely subversive acts have been edged out to make space for the mediocre and the bland.

This is a trend that is now firmly established. Three years ago, the Pleasance Theatre — one of the Fringe’s main provider of venues — canceled a show by controversial comedian Jerry Sadowitz. According to the director of the Pleasance, Anthony Alderson, this was because “this type of material has no place on the festival”, and “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable”. When a leading comedy promoter openly admits that he doesn’t understand the difference between opinions and jokes, we know the rot is entrenched.

Kate Copstick, one of the few comedy critics who has refused to kowtow to the new orthodoxy, wrote the following after the Sadowitz cancellation: “In all my years of covering the Fringe, there has never been a more joy-stranglingly censorious August. Councillor Moira Knox in her heyday seems like a libertine now, in comparison to today’s recreationally offended. When the blood-chilling phrase “unacceptable and does not align with our values” is bandied about, and by a venue like the Pleasance, then it is time to fear for the freedom of our funny. The point of a Fringe is that it does not align with anything.

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All of which would be depressing enough, but the situation has been exacerbated by the complicity of comedians themselves. Many acts at the Fringe now fall into the category of what the Spanish call “cuerpo oficial de cómicos del Estado” (official body of comedians of the state). These “regime comedians” are aware that success in their careers is dependent on echoing the dogma of our times, one that has been promoted consistently by successive Conservative and Labour governments. These are the fools at court who have forgotten that their job is to criticize the king.

It was not always this way. Back in 2006, when Tony Blair’s government attempted to oppose amendments passed by the House of Lords that limited the scope of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, comedians were outspoken in their dissent. Had the bill passed, any vexatious complaint about a show that mocked religious belief would have resulted in its suspension pending a police investigation. Acts have just over three weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe to recoup some of their losses; they simply can’t afford to waste time being interrogated by the Star Chamber.

But whereas there was near unanimity among comedians in 2006, by the time Markus Meechan (aka “Count Dankula”) was prosecuted for a joke video in 2018, there were few speaking out. Whereas they once understood that “the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended” — the phrase used by Rowan Atkinson during the 2006 campaign — they had now subscribed wholesale to the core woke belief that words and violence are synonymous and that suppression of free speech is essential for the preservation of a cohesive society. Where once comedians fought censorship, now they were defending it.

Up until relatively recently, punters would have been sorely disappointed at a fringe festival that offered a series of interchangeable comics all aiming their barbs at similar targets. When Scott Capurro took his show Islamohomophobia to the Fringe in 2013, and was depicted wearing a transparent burka in the publicity materials, nobody took offense or called for his deplatforming. A little over a decade later, and police are contacting a venue in London because of accusations that Capurro might be “homophobic”. Perhaps the investigating officers should have asked for evidence from his husband.

For the humourless and the doctrinaire, comedy will always be a dangerous phenomenon. Take George Monbiot, who recently produced a piece for the Guardian in which he argued that jokes are the equivalent of gateway drugs to the far-Right. “Dominant powers have for centuries used clowns to express their deepest, most unmentionable urges,” he writes, forgetting that the antics of clowns have always been the most effective tool to undermine authority. Citing jokes by Lewis Schaffer, a comedian whose every utterance is guaranteed to bewilder the congenitally literal-minded, Monbiot concludes that “Humorous suggestions of violence reveal and embolden real desires,” that they “soften us up for violence and misrule” and that “it’s the clowning that kills us”.

In this, Monbiot appears to be channelling the spirit of William Prynne, the puritanical firebrand who, in his Histrio-Mastix (1633), railed against the capacity of stage comedies to “empoison, endanger, and deprave” the audience. The elegance, wit and popular appeal of these shows, Prynne reasoned, had the effect of acclimatising the public to “adulteries, fornications, rapes, love-passions, meretricious, unchaste, and amorous practises, of lascivious wicked men or heathen idol-gods”. The claim that jokes lead to violence is often asserted but never proved. It is eternal cry of the sanctimonious and the philistine.

Monbiot’s logic is identical to that of the officers who last week arrested Jon Farley, a protester at a pro-Palestine rally in Leeds, who had been holding a placard bearing a cartoon from the satirical magazine Private Eye. The cartoon mocked the Government’s proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Fully on board with the notion that comedy and satire are potentially toxic forces and can incite real-world harm, the police swiftly handcuffed Farley and detained him for nearly six hours. This is what happens when freedom of speech is no longer valued by the ruling class, and the ideology promoted by the likes of Monbiot becomes institutionalised.

No doubt this authoritarian attitude will persist at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Innately subversive comedians will continue to self-censor, and those who do risk the ire of the establishment will doubtless pay the price. We can expect increased conformity while activists insist that “nobody is being stifled”. Genuine fans of comedy would be advised to avoid the Fringe, at least until its gatekeepers learn that laughter is more satisfying than nodding along to the approved creed.

Even with my love of melodrama, I cannot sustain such histrionics. While it’s enjoyable to momentarily inhabit the caricature of the Andrew Doyle that exists in the minds of my detractors, the truth is far less exciting. On a recent appearance on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, I let it be known that I am leaving the United Kingdom to work with the actor and comedian Rob Schneider on a new production company called No Apologies Media. Some of my friends have assumed that I am flouncing away out of a desperate conviction that all is lost. The reality is a little more nuanced.

While I do not believe that we live under tyranny, there are serious threats to liberty that ought to be addressed. Many members of the ruling class have scant regard for freedom of speech, as evidenced by the existence of hate speech laws, the recording of “non-crime hate incidents”, draconian jail terms meted out for offensive social media posts and continued calls for online censorship. These are not the hallmarks of an authentically free country, but one in which the authoritarian instinct has not been successfully tamed. As for the artistic industries, they are now similarly beholden to an ideology that demands self-censorship and punishes nonconformity. For creatives, this means finding ways to work within a system that is antagonistic to genuine free expression.

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We often hear practitioners in the arts claiming that “cancel culture is a myth” and that “nobody is being censored”. This is an easy claim to make if your views are naturally in lockstep with the prevailing orthodoxies of the time, but it does suggest a degree of solipsism. The energy it must take to studiously ignore the continual stream of reported cases of artists being cancelled would be sufficient to keep the Large Hadron Collider running indefinitely.

Like many of those with unfashionable views, I have been dragged unexpectedly into the culture war. Whereas I once made my living solely from writing plays, musicals and performing stand-up comedy, in recent years I have found myself drawn to punditry. I have hosted a weekly show called Free Speech Nation on GB News for the last three years, written numerous articles and two books in defence of liberal values, and satirised the worst excesses of culture warriors through my satirical character Titania McGrath.

But while I feel a compulsion to address the ongoing threats to free speech in our culture, and recognise the importance of challenging a journalistic monoculture, I do miss working in the creative field. It is my hope that relocating to Arizona to work with Rob will bring greater opportunities to focus on writing and producing comedy and drama. Rob’s commitment to freedom of speech is absolute and uncompromising. Under the aegis of his new company, I’ve already begun writing a sitcom with Graham Linehan and Martin Gourlay which we hope to be filming early next year. In addition, we have plans for other television projects with a focus on political and social commentary. This culture war isn’t over yet.

It’s quite the team. And it goes without saying that Graham is one of the foremost comedy writers of our times. If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who claims that cancel culture doesn’t exist, it might be worth asking how it is that the creator of hit sitcoms such as Father Ted and The IT Crowd has been unable to work in the UK television industry for six years simply for airing his opinions. You won’t get a coherent answer, but it’ll be entertaining to watch the attempt.

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For myself, I’ve never been cancelled. One could even accuse me of finding a way to capitalise on my heterodox perspectives, given that much of my career has depended upon me expressing my views openly and satirising the intolerance of those who would rather I shut up. Yet isn’t it strange that a commitment to freedom of speech, individual autonomy, and equal rights to all irrespective of immutable characteristics, should be considered “heterodox” at all?

Rather than facing cancellation, I have experienced what Helen Dale has described as the “silo effect”. Although most of my political views would traditionally be described as “Left-wing”, my stance on the culture war has meant that I have been pigeonholed as being on the Right. So while I do not hold allegiance to any ideology, the insistence that I must be classified with one particular “side” means that my employment prospects will always be limited. The digital crèche of social media, with its insistence on political tribalism, binary thinking and purity spirals, has infected the mainstream. For many commentators, it’s now a matter of “you’re either with us or against us”.

The first time I became aware of an opportunity missed due to ideological factors was when a senior member of staff at the Soho Theatre in London told me candidly that I had been taken off the shortlist for a new playwriting scheme because I was white and male. Years later, when I taught stand-up courses at the Soho Theatre for up-and-coming comedians, I was informed that my contract could not be renewed because one of the members of the group felt “unsafe” after reading a joke I had tweeted. This impact for me was negligible — I didn’t rely on the work financially and was only continuing out of a sense of loyalty — but it did concern me that a leading theatre had such a casual disregard for the importance of artistic freedom.

A career in the creative arts should not be contingent on toeing any specific ideological line, but such incidents are now, unfortunately, the norm. The groupthink that currently predominates in theatre, film, television, comedy, publishing and all other branches of the arts has catalysed some promising pushback. The choreographer Rosie Kay and arts producer Denise Fahmy have established “Freedom in the Arts”, a project specifically aimed at tackling these restrictive conditions. One of their mission statements is “to protect freedom of expression and make sure that the arts are the place where difficult ideas can be addressed, explored and discussed”. What should be a prerequisite is now an ideal that we must struggle to reclaim.

In the current climate, artists are expected to be activists, to ensure that their work promotes the approved message. In other words, conformity is being demanded of those whose vocation ought to make them the most freethinking. When art is expected to be didactic and propagandistic, very little of interest will be produced. Rather than tailor their output to the whims of prissy moralists, artists should be aspiring to William Blake’s precept: “Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”.

That is not to say that creatives cannot fall in line with intersectional dogma if they so choose, but we have seen how the arts quickly become enervated when this is the default expectation. Widespread self-censorship is inevitable when commissions are conditional on whether they reinforce voguish political trends. This does not mean that there are not exceptionally talented artists currently producing good work, but it does mean that their output is often sanitised.

Of course, the true artistic geniuses — those who emerge once or twice in a generation — can always find a way to play the game. There’s a very good reason why Shakespeare’s masterful narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are preceded by dull and dispensable panegyrics to his patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Michelangelo’s talents were so unquestionable that he was given licence to create explicitly erotic imagery for his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. When the Papal Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained that his nudes were more fitting for a bathhouse, Michelangelo painted the naked figure of Minos in the underworld with Biagio’s face, and for good measure added donkey’s ears and a snake biting his genitals.

We can’t all be Michelangelo. For us lesser mortals, we have to find a way to muddle along as best we can in an industry that expects us to be sheep to the establishment shepherds. I have no idea what my move to America will bring, but it is my hope to find a creative climate in which all this tribalistic nonsense is considered irrelevant. If nothing else, it’ll be an adventure.

“Why would you say that name!” he screams.

“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.

One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.

I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election.” And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right.”

The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.

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The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.

It is, of course, difficult to have a sense of humour about the topics one takes most seriously, even for those who generally enjoy making hamburgers of other people’s sacred cows. I was recently reminded of the 1999 Onion article titled, “That’s not funny, my brother died that way,” in which an aggrieved writer takes issue with a scene in the Police Academy movie where a motorcyclist gets his head stuck in a horse’s rear end. (“His life-insurance policy didn’t cover equine-anal suffocations. So now you might understand why I don’t think it’s funny to see that sort of thing played for laughs.”) That this essay is, in itself, funny, speaks to the unfortunate truth that also animates the “your body my choice” brand of trolling: the we-are-not-amused disapproval of another person can be pretty funny, especially when that person has been attempting to scold you into compliance with their preferred political agenda for years on end. It is no coincidence that this anti-feminist edgelording comes hard on the heels of a campaign cycle in which one side’s rhetoric was almost pathologically alienating to men: the more shrill the calls for conformity, the more naughty fun there is to be had in refusing to read the room.

This was easy enough for liberals to understand when we were the architects of an intentionally edgy counter-culture, whose pleasures derived in no small part from making self-serious moral authoritarians clutch their pearls and scream. Punk rock and heavy metal, Marilyn Manson and Damien Hirst, Saturday Night Live and South Park: if we loved these things on their own merits, we loved equally as much how they scandalised the prudes. Indeed, the Left’s conception of itself as the scrappy underdog poking fun at The Man was powerful enough that a decisive victory in the culture wars hardly put a dent in it; even after the legalisation of gay marriage, the passage of the Hate Crimes Act, and the annual rainbowification of every American city during Pride Month, there’s just no joy quite as potent as triggering the cons. That memes invariably provoke outraged reactions from people who don’t (or won’t) get the joke is the entire point. What can we say? You’re just so funny when you’re mad.

Alas, we are now discovering the same unfortunate truth as generations of edgelords before us: that you either die a provocateur, or live long enough to see yourself become the Church Lady.

“Posting now creates political reality”, Tolentino writes, by way of insisting on taking dead seriously what the “your body my choice” memesters evidently find hilarious. “There are parents all over social media reporting that their kids are hearing the phrase from boys at school. A therapist at a university in the Midwest told me that a student she works with had gone to a frat party where one man had yelled it, and that the people around him hadn’t called him out.”

Perhaps, needless to say, I remain unconvinced that the inane (and yes, often intentionally offensive) banter of teenage boys represents “political reality”, let alone a material threat — but convincing oneself otherwise is both a hallmark and privilege of middle age, and one you will pry from our cold dead hands. The therapist who openly frets that a frat boy yelled bad words at a party without being called out is clearly resonating at the same emotional pitch as the teacher who, circa 1994, made a panicked call to my parents after I doodled a pentagram in the margin of a biology test. Then, as now, the suggestion that she might be overreacting only exacerbated her outrage. What did they mean, I was probably just joking around? Satanism was no laughing matter!

If there’s one big difference between the moral majoritarians of decades past and the social justice warriors of the digital age, it’s that the former group was unapologetic in their authoritarianism. Today’s progressive scolds don’t like to think of themselves as such; instead, they finger-wag with one hand while still clinging to the mantle of the countercultural cool kid with the other. At one point in the essay, Tolentino describes being unsettled by the appearance of a “VOTE RED… LOL” graffiti in her deep blue Brooklyn neighbourhood; it is, she says, “one more reminder that we are typically closer to people who find us laughable and repulsive than we think”. It’s a new riff on that churlish Pauline Kael quip about the 1972 election — “I don’t know how Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him” — in this case reinforced by years of near-total Left-wing hegemony in America’s culture-making institutions, from media to museums to Hollywood and beyond. Amid a sea of narratives that only ever validate her place among the heroes on the right side of history, of course a Brooklyn-dwelling New Yorker columnist is stunned to realise that some of her neighbours think she’s ridiculous — to the point where she can’t conceive of it without suggesting that their mockery must mean they’ve been literally poisoned. Her Trump-voting neighbours, meanwhile, have surely never not known what she thinks of them.

But for as long as the Left still prefers to think of itself as powerless and persecuted by conservative oppressors, the insouciant trolling of Trumpian youths must be interpreted as something sinister and serious. As the meme goes, are we out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong… or aspiring rapists, as the case may be.

The irony — of the literary rather than poisonous variety — is that “your body my choice”, like any offensive joke, only achieved its current foothold in the discourse through amplification by the people who take it too seriously.

And could this stop? Sure, if somebody just blinks first. But just as with the bickering Max and Valerie, the fact that neither party is making different choices suggests that the current dynamic serves them both. In this case, the peacocking insensitivity of the MAGA bro fuels not just outraged op-eds by feminist media critics, but endless, tearful TikTok videos by the women of Gen Z, which in turn fuels more mockery, and in turn, still more tears. It’s too late, now: “Your body my choice”; has achieved velocity from the viral outrage cycle and into the echelons of the attention economy, where it will live on indefinitely in a toxic, self-sustaining symbiosis with its equally attention-seeking haters… at least until someday, inevitably, it is replaced by something even worse.

It may not be the funniest joke, but that’s because it’s an anecdote from The Lives of the Caesars by the Ancient Roman historian Suetonius. The comedian in this case was a senator called Aelius Lamia whose wife had left him for the Emperor Domitian. For making this casual quip, Domitian had Lamia put to death. Now that’s a bad review.

It might be worth keeping this anecdote in mind when the usual debates flare up about whether comedy “goes too far”. The notion of people being offended by jokes is as old as comedy itself, and often people react angrily if humour isn’t to their taste. The current manifestation of this age-old debate takes the form of a simple dichotomy: “woke comedy” versus “anti-woke comedy”.

Already we are in treacherous waters. It is very unwise to define whole genres by terms that have no settled definitions. The actor Kathy Burke believes that “woke” simply refers to people who are neither racist nor homophobic, which would surely mean that the overwhelming majority of us would happily embrace the term. But for those who have been on the receiving end of the bullying, harassment and intimidation by activists who self-define as “woke”, it is clear this issue is not so straightforward.

Over the past few years, we have seen the emergence of a new comedy movement, one branded by commentators as “anti-woke”, that seeks to push back against the orthodoxies of our time. Its closest historical precedent is the “alternative” comedians of the Eighties, who also took aim at establishment norms and were often similarly blunt in their approach. The key difference today is that there is no broad agreement about where the power in society lies, and so while “anti-woke” comedians see themselves as anti-establishment, their critics insist that the opposite is true.

Consider the example of Ricky Gervais, whose new Netflix stand-up special Armageddon has sparked this most recent round of discussions about the supposed red lines in comedy. Some have accused Gervais of taking a reactionary stance, most notably because of jokes relating to migrants and disabled children. Gervais has been branded an “anti-woke” comedian, but I doubt very much that he would see it in such reductive terms. Anyone familiar with his work will know that he has always lampooned closed systems of thought, and it just so happens that “wokeness” currently represents the dominant incarnation. There was a time when many of Gervais’s critics were perfectly happy to see him take a wrecking ball to the certainties of religious faith. It would appear they take a different view when it’s their own belief system taking a battering.

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A simplistic reading of “woke” versus “anti-woke” comedy is that the former “punches up” while the latter “punches down”, but such rules are incoherent when applied to an inherently anarchic medium. Besides, it simply is not true that there exists a growing number of comedians who are seeking fame and easy laughs by taking aim at the most marginalised in society.

As I have said, it comes down to a question of how one perceives power. Too often the culture war is misconceived as a conflict between Left and Right, with “woke” aligned with the former and “anti-woke” with the latter, but “wokeness” carries with it the kind of clout that transcends the political binary. In their 13 years of government, the Conservatives have presided over the worst excesses of this identity-obsessed ideology and the havoc it has wrought on society. Far from fighting a “war on woke”, they have been actively enabling it.

So where does the real power lie? Is it with governments that can be voted out if the public tires of them? Or is it with activists who now have significant influence in all cultural, educational, political and corporate institutions, and who cannot be dislodged by means of any democratic process? These are the same zealots who have fostered racial division in the name of “anti-racism”, jeopardised the rights of women and gay people through the promotion of gender identity ideology, destabilised the very notion of empirical truth, attempted to rewrite our history and reconstruct our culture, and launched a relentless assault on free speech and the achievements of social liberalism. Just because they describe themselves as being “on the right side of history” doesn’t make it true.

And so, when we read an article in the New Statesman lamenting the “tedious world of anti-woke comedy”, we can be fairly sure that the criticism is political. Does the writer sincerely believe that these performers are simply trying to attack minorities and cause as much offence as possible? This is the least generous of all suppositions, one born out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the art of comedy. It strikes me that many of those who dismiss stand-ups as “anti-woke” are simply berating them for taking an anti-establishment stance and for believing that those in power ought to be ridiculed rather than eulogised. But what is the point of a court jester who acts as a propagandist for the king?

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Another common reaction from critics has been to imply that certain topics ought to be ring-fenced, and that joking about them is tantamount to a form of violence. The charity Scope has lambasted Gervais’s new show for containing “ableist slurs” and claimed that “language like this has very real consequences”. But those of us who have seen Armageddon would have to concede that the most obvious consequence appears to be the laughter of audience members who are clearly enjoying themselves. What Gervais’s critics mean is that jokes are like toxins, and that popular culture — if not carefully regulated — has the power to corrupt the Great Unwashed. Mary Whitehouse made the identical argument many decades ago.

Fortunately, her fears were unfounded. Over half a century of research into “media effects” theory — the hypothesis that the public will modify its behaviour according to the mass media it consumes — has seen it roundly discredited. Jokes do not cause violence, unless you are talking about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, or the Emperor Domitian lopping off the occasional head.

The history of comedy shows us that its practitioners will always cause offence, so why do we continue to squabble over where the red lines ought to be drawn? No matter how many times you shift the boundary, it will still end up being crossed. I am not implying here that there is anything wrong with criticism, however puritanical it might be. Comedians who violate popular sensibilities have always faced pushback and resentment. The problem arises when the offended parties seek to impose their tastes on everyone else. So while I support anyone’s right to criticise Gervais’s show, I am disturbed by those who have called on Netflix to censor the offending material.

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Blasphemy laws have returned to Denmark

By Andrew Doyle

Personally, I have always relished those comedians who have no clear affiliations, who take aim in all directions and unsettle as much as they entertain. But today’s comedy industry is not a hospitable environment for these sorts of freethinkers. For some years now, there has been an undeniable strain of groupthink among those in positions of power: promoters, commissioners, critics and even some performers. Acts who conform have been rewarded, while those who refuse to do so have been shunned. It hasn’t taken much for up-and-coming comics to realise that it is more profitable to be seen to convey the “correct” message rather than to develop their craft in innovative and individual ways. The impulse to serve Mammon rather than the Muses has enervated the comedy scene, and self-censorship is now the norm.

The writer Graham Linehan is living proof of how heretics are treated in the current climate. For blaspheming against the holy creed of gender identity ideology — one embraced wholesale by the gatekeepers of the comedy industry — he has been unable to work for six years. In his new memoir, Tough Crowd, he discusses how his musical adaptation of Father Ted has been scotched, either because the bosses at Hat Trick Productions (which owns the rights) are too cowardly to be seen promoting his work, or because activist elements within the company disapprove of his views.

Only a couple of decades ago, it was virtually unheard of for comedy promoters to take seriously complaints from audience members claiming to be “offended”. Now, it takes little more than a few disgruntled tweets for venues to panic and cancel bookings. But the backlash is palpable. Many of us have grown weary of comedians toeing the establishment line and substituting agitprop for jokes. Some “anti-woke” comedy may lack sophistication and subtlety, but maybe that’s a small price to pay to redress the balance and reenergise the art form. If you want to smash taboos, sometimes you need a sledgehammer.

The reader who looks to fiction for a critique of something or other will find no critique here of anything at all. If there is a glimmer of hope when Mike’s pal Psmith reveals himself a monocle-wearing eccentric and declares himself a socialist, the glimmer will fade once it emerges that his socialism doesn’t extend beyond addressing everyone as “Comrade”, and his eccentricity is not a sign of alienation from the middle-class world he happily inhabits. Psmith and his creator find many things about that world ridiculous — but not contemptible.

The sort of reader I have in mind is most likely Left-wing in their politics, suspicious of anything that mocks a social world not as way of, but as a substitute for, changing it. But the demand for seriousness once came from conservatives worried about the essential frivolity of novels — books that didn’t instruct their readers in manners or morals. It was that view to which Jane Austen was responding in the much-quoted passage of Northanger Abbey where she defends novels as the works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed.”

Few writers have seemed to care so little about importance as Wodehouse. His endless linguistic ingenuity made admirers of Left-wing authors such as George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens — the effortless succession of wild similes, the clever deconstruction of weary clichés. That and the mad but intricate plots. But what seems absurd is the idea that anyone might be drawn to Wodehouse for his themes, or what you might call his “ethic”.

In fact, it isn’t absurd at all; it seems so because we only count “serious” themes as real, and conflate having an ethic with being didactic. Yet why shouldn’t a comic view of the world be less insightful than a tragic or an angry one? “If you take life fairly easily”, Wodehouse once remarked to an interviewer, “then you take a humorous view of things. It’s probably because you were born that way”.

His words here recall the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan: “Nature always does contrive / That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!’ There’s a misplaced debate among Wodehouse’s champions and detractors about exactly where he fits on the political spectrum. Liberal, say readers who see his jokes at the expense of his upper-class characters as satire. Conservative, say readers who notice that he, “in creating such characters as Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hanneyside Coombe-Crombie, 12th Earl of Dreever… is not really attacking the social hierarchy”.

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Those last words are from George Orwell’s essay, “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse”. He was writing just after the war, when the uproar about Wodehouse’s idiotic (but well-intentioned) broadcasts on German radio in 1941 were fresh in public memory: Wodehouse was in need of a robust defence. But Orwell, a political man through and through, could not avoid, even when defending Wodehouse’s lack of political nous, adopting a reductive view of the man’s writing. “Wodehouse’s real sin”, he wrote, “has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are”.

In Orwell’s worldview, whole classes — as distinct from the individuals who comprise them — might have their niceness appraised. Wodehouse, by contrast, sees his characters as individuals — paradoxically so, given how many of them were stereotypes. He once described his approach to his later fiction as “making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether”. But the very earliest boarding school novels, animated though they are by a basically comic spirit, are not yet the farces for which he became famous.

Few other stories published in the same magazines that published Wodehouse’s juvenilia stand up today. The clichés are too numerous, the plots entirely interchangeable. But Wodehouse’s early novels hold up surprisingly well. In an age when public schoolboys seem to divided themselves into sentimental nostalgists on the one hand and angry rebels on the other, Wodehouse distinguished himself by the matter-of-fact tone in which he wrote of boys’ attitudes to their schools:

“The average public schoolboy likes his school… He is sorry to leave and he likes going back at the end of the holidays, but as for any passionate, deep-seated love of the place, he would think it rather bad form than otherwise.”

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One can’t doubt that the experience of boarding — involuntary separation from family, the casual brutality of masters and other schoolboys — must have left many boys with scars they carried into adulthood. There is no shortage of memoirs by men who survived the ordeal. But Wodehouse speaks for what must have been the silent majority: men for whom boarding school had its challenges but was not conspicuously more traumatising than any other place they might have spent their childhood and adolescence.

His protagonist, Mike, is a representative of that untraumatised majority. He is a straightforward teenage boy, interested above all in sport. Transplanted midway through the book from a school with fine cricketing traditions, Wrykyn, he finds himself at Sedleigh, a place with an undistinguished sporting tradition. “Mike’s outlook on life,” Wodehouse tell us, “was that of a cricketer, pure and simple. What had Sedleigh ever done? What were they ever likely to do? Whom did they play? What Old Sedleighan had ever done anything in cricket?”

But at Sedleigh, he finds himself set against another character, Adair, to whom “Sedleigh was almost a religion … a public school among public schools, a lump of radium.” (In this we see the beginnings of the grown-up Wodehouse’s talent for the entirely original analogy.) Adair wants Mike to play for the school side; Mike prefers to play for a village team. Like countless schoolboy antagonists, they fight. A little while later, their reconciliation is dramatised in a simple exchange when someone describes Adair as “not a bad cove”, and Mike replies, simply: “He’s all right.”

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There is no mawkish sentiment, but equally, no affectations of adult toughness. The boys have their feelings, but they are the feelings one can imagine real boys having in that time and place. They sort out their problems between themselves and learn to live with other. Each boy has his place in the little world of the school. The book’s most celebrated odd-couple pairing of Mike and a much more flamboyantly eccentric character than Adair: Psmith. He is, of course, “really” a Smith, but informs the bemused Mike when he first meets him: “If you ever have occasion to write to me, would you mind sticking a P at the beginning of my name? P-s-m-i-t-h. See? There are too many Smiths.”

Part of what’s so funny about Psmith is that the silliness of how he spells his name is only apparent in writing. It was Wodehouse’s first really good joke and foretold the many glorious jokes to come — Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth and his enormous pig. It also encapsulates the wholesomeness that distinguishes him from other comic writers — whose comedy begins in anger and vengefulness. Saki, like Wodehouse, had scary aunts, but took pleasure when they were killed by a vicious ferret. Roald Dahl’s nasty grown-ups are set up for some horrible and ingenious punishment. If political-minded readers are disappointed that Wodehouse doesn’t care more for justice, they might remind themselves that he cared even less for revenge: most of us have a hard time telling the desire for fairness apart from the desire to get even.

We live in a world anxious again to divide people into goodies and baddies, their views into liberal and conservative. Wodehouse was unusual in seeing that it is enough to divide them into “all right” and “bad coves” — in other words, those we like and those we could learn to live with. If that didn’t make him sound like a more solemn figure than in fact he was, you might even call that the deep insight behind his comedy. The message — if that’s not too pompous a thing to ascribe to Wodehouse — is: it takes all sorts to make a world. The right word for the author’s ethic — such as it was — is not “liberalism”, which is the label for a political philosophy; the imputation of any such thing would indeed have made him seriously ill. What he possessed was a rarer, more precious thing: the virtue of liberality.

Wodehouse’s world is one in which the monocled dandy can be friends with the school jock. (A great lover of American English, he would not have protested the Americanism.) And both can live, eventually if not right off the bat, in harmony with the idealist and the prig. Is that an ethical ideal? Not, perhaps, in a sense that Orwell would have recognised. But that only tells us that some people have too narrow a view of the ethical. Whatever those words — ethical, political — mean, they must have something to do with living together with other people. The desire to transform other people so that they live up to our own ideal is at the root of so much political violence. The idea, especially at Christmas, of a writer who doesn’t want to change you — or anyone or anything — is all the more attractive, for just that reason.

But as much as these moments underscore the art form’s past audacity, they also highlight the pallor that has settled over it. Once a platform for such biting wits as Don Rickles and Joan Rivers, the comedy roast has become a sanitised ritual, a showcase of quips that hardly go beyond the skin. Perhaps the last time we heard a roast joke that truly shocked was in 2019, when Blake Griffin took the mic to thank Caitlyn Jenner “on behalf of black men everywhere” for giving her daughters “daddy issues”. Since then, roasts have transitioned into an assembly line of safe, formulaic jokes that don’t even scratch the surface.

Yet looking at the roast’s decline, perhaps it’s understandable that nowhere in the entertainment world is the existential crisis over the rise of AI more palpable than in comedy. After all, there is no field of creative endeavour that’s become more dependent on cliches, groupthink and repetition. But while the malaise is widespread, the roast, in particular, looks set to be an early casualty.

Consider the recent “roast battle” between a human comedian and an AI counterpart. Earlier this year, Matt Maran, a comic from Queens, faced off against a ChatGPT-powered version of Sarah Silverman. Maran faltered early, attempting several jokes that clearly misfired. In contrast, the AI dished out jokes without so much as stopping for a sip of water. Though the AI was unflappably corny — “you’re as edgy as a butterknife,” it told Maran — it won the roast by ceaselessly throwing cliched barbs that were more agile and responsive to Maran’s hit-or-miss material. (Perhaps the AI’s biggest hit: “You’re from Long Island and you lost your virginity to a prostitute… talk about starting from the bottom and staying there.”)

Yet rather than serve as another warning of a Skynet-like robot takeover, this episode was more an indictment of human comedians’ inability to excite. Look past the hype, and ChatGPT stands as a glaring example of AI’s limitations: its output may be rapid and cost-effective, but its algorithms still can’t replicate the spark of human wit or the depth of human emotion. It certainly can’t capture the true essence of laughter: what French philosopher Henri Bergson described as “a slight revolt on the surface of social life”. In his view, comedy is not just about robotically eliciting a laugh; it’s a social endeavour. The emotional connection between the human comedian and his human audience isn’t just beneficial — it’s essential for the success of the joke.

Ironically, then, it’s almost as if AI were precisely calibrated for churning out the type of lame, uninspiring content that now defines roasts as well as late-night comedy — a genre that has long suffered from a lack of originality; jokes about SNL being “Saturday Night Dead” have made the rounds almost since the show premiered in the late Seventies. Given one or two fast-working hack writers to oversee its output, ChatGPT could easily pump out entire seasons of it.

And perhaps it already is. Joe Toplyn, for instance, a former writer for David Letterman, has ventured into this uncharted territory with his bot, Witscript, which takes topical headlines or themes and generates what it believes to be the “best” joke, leveraging algorithms to optimise for elements such as timing and punchline effectiveness. The output is beyond cornball: in response to a user prompting it to make a joke about the Bidens’ aggressive German Shepherd, it wrote: “Sounds like he was more of a BITE-en than a Biden.” Yet for all their banality, Witscript’s jokes are merely a reflection of the modern comedy circuit.

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By contrast, genuinely artistic comedy will always thrive on a certain rebellious spirit — a willingness to stake out and work on that edge. This is the comedy of David Letterman in his early years at NBC, of Bob Odenkirk and David Cross at HBO’s Mr. Show in the Nineties, of contemporary comedians such as Sam Hyde and Nick Rochefort of Million Dollar Extreme. This is the comedy that doesn’t just elicit laughter, but also provokes thought.

Recall that last show’s most unforgettable sketch, in which Rochefort portrays a burnt-out teacher so convincingly that it is almost uncomfortable to watch. His character wrestles with self-loathing and moral apathy, manifesting a bleak internal monologue that touches on career failures, his complex sexuality and an eagerness to escape his dismal reality. This form of humour is deeply unsettling — it ends with his imagined suicide set to rock music — and yet groundbreaking, the likes of which AI can’t come close to replicating. Here, then, is an important clue for saving the traditional comedy roast from automation: re-embracing the raw, unfiltered humour that made roasts a staple of American comedy in the first place.

Yet, if we are to be brutally honest — in the true spirit of the roast — the odds of such a revival seem extraordinarily slim. From economic pressures that favour risk-averse humour to a polarised comedic landscape that leaves little room for edgy jokes, the variables are stacked against a revival. The recent Writers Guild of America strike exemplifies the trend, with the industry’s creatives clamouring for a bigger slice of an increasingly bland pie — temporary protection from the bots — rather than attempting to surpass them by creating great art. As a result, any hope of reigniting the fire in the roast seems less like a potential future and more like the fading light of a bygone era.

James Frey, author of the bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces, had been exposed as a fraud. Oprah Winfrey, formerly his biggest champion, was about to confront him live on national television. And she was pissed.

“I’ve struggled with the idea of it,” Frey said, in response to a question about the famous and then-allegedly fallacious scene in his book in which he receives a root canal without anaesthesia. Oprah snapped. “No,” she said, icily. “Not the idea of it. The lie of it.”

Frey, whose book was published in 2003, was the most notorious literary fabulist of the moment, but hardly the only one. The Noughties were rife with fabricators. There was Margaret Seltzer, who had lied about being a biracial gang member in South Central Los Angeles. There was J.T. Leroy, a trans sex worker, drug addict, and author of semi-autobiographical novels — who turned out to be the imaginary alter-ego of a middle-aged woman named Laura Albert. There was Herman Rosenblat, whose Holocaust memoir Angel at the Fence was cancelled when it turned out that, though his story of surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp was true, the improbable tale of the little girl who saved his life by throwing apples over the camp’s barbed wire fence, and later became his wife, was not.

All very different narratives, and yet, with a common thread — one that at the time spurred a fiery debate about memoir as a genre, and the proliferation therein of what could only be described as trauma porn.

Memoir offers all the enticing horror of sexual abuse, of graphic violence, of watching a man strapped down and brutalised by a dentist — while offering the upright reader plausible deniability. He consumes these books not because he finds such things titillating but because he cares. Audiences want to read about pain and suffering, abuse and exploitation; you were supposed to feel bad for the people who had written these books, while also feeling good about how bad you felt.

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When Oprah angrily told James Frey that he had “betrayed millions of readers”, it was this crucial contract he was accused of violating. Because if these stories weren’t true, then the people who were thrilled by them weren’t empaths, but voyeurs.

Today, the collective horror at Frey’s deception feels like the product of a more innocent time, particularly when compared with the muted response to last week’s unmasking of his contemporary equivalent. Comedian and television personality Hasan Minhaj, an alumnus of The Daily Show, built his career on stories of the persecution he had faced as an Indian, Muslim son of immigrants in a post-9/11 America. But as outlined in a devastating report by New Yorker writer Clare Malone, his most popular material contained key omissions and barefaced lies.

The FBI informant who infiltrated Minhaj’s Muslim community and then reported his mosque to the authorities? Minhaj never met him. The hospitalisation of Minhaj’s daughter after someone mailed him an envelope full of a white mystery powder that could have been anthrax? Never happened. And the high school ex-girlfriend who accepted Minhaj’s invitation to prom, only to jilt him on her doorstep for racist reasons while her new (white) date slipped a corsage on her wrist? She had actually turned down Minhaj several days earlier, and this doorstep moment — upon which Minhaj more or less built his career — was a complete fabrication.

Much like Frey, Minhaj’s popularity centred on his suffering. His work was understood to express the crude, unvarnished and sometimes darkly funny truth of what it is like to be a brown-skinned man in a racist America: white liberal audiences treated him as a sort of mascot for the oppressed, while the culturati lauded him for speaking truth to power. Here, as Slate writer Nitish Pahwa puts it, was “an Indian Muslim, hosting his own show, taking the country to task on his terms, terms that had long been absent from the white man–dominated industries of stand-up comedy and late-night TV”.

But things are a little more complicated when the fabricator is telling tales on the stage rather than the page. It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this — even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves. An essay from 2017 by screenwriter and stand-up David Misch, which tackles this very question, includes a prescient little frisson:

“I agree that the idea of authenticity in a stand-up’s persona is bullshit, but subject matter is a different matter — specifically, when a comedian moves from personal observations to cultural critiques. Wouldn’t we feel betrayed if we found out that the political routines of … Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers (now) didn’t reflect their beliefs? Being Muslim-American is central to Hasan Minaj’s identity as a stand-up — wouldn’t we feel differently about him if it turned out he was Baptist?”

Misch presents this as a rhetorical question, and it is — but only because of the kind of comedian Minhaj is, which is to say, the kind who is not particularly funny. Consider the top YouTube result from his Netflix special, Homecoming King, in which he talks about the harassment his family endured after 9/11. There are ripples of laughter here and there, but it’s only when he stops joking and starts preaching — “I have the audacity of equality!” he says — that the audience explodes like they’re at a tent revival.

Of course, this is as intended. Minhaj isn’t a make-you-laugh-til-your-face-hurts comedian; he’s a Daily Show guy, a pundit with a slightly-better-than-average sense of humour, but one that is smug rather than silly. His audience isn’t there to laugh so much as enjoy the sensation of moral authority with a wink and a titter. And while Minhaj’s material works well enough on television, onstage it translates to something that is less stand-up comedy and more performance memoir.

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Here, Minhaj is following in the footsteps of performers such as Hari Kondabolu, John Oliver, Seth Myers, and, of course, Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix special Nanette was more trauma porn that explicitly scolded its audience for showing up expecting to laugh. Critics at the time suggested that Gadsby had broken some final frontier, effectively severing the connection between comedy and jokes. Maybe laughter had had its moment; maybe what we needed from comedians now was some moral instruction in what isn’t funny. Maybe what we needed was to feel bad — and to feel good about how bad we felt.

Under this new contract, drawn up amid the creeping identitarianism of Trump-era art, it is not hard to see why someone like Minhaj might fall into the trap of not just monetising his trauma, but fabricating it. It is what Jay Caspian Kang called “oppression fantasy”, writing that Minhaj’s fakery represents “another example of how oppression stories — in this case fabricated oppression porn — gets leveraged by upwardly mobile immigrants to mostly advance their careers”.

It is also a familiar dynamic to anyone who remembers the memoir hoaxes of 20 years ago; the type of audience who flocks to see Minhaj today is the same one that made James Frey a bestseller. There is nothing that white educated liberals love more than to slum it in a voyeuristic narrative of someone else’s suffering, all while congratulating themselves on being enlightened enough to appreciate it for the art it is. Inject a bit of racial guilt into the mix, and you’ll dine out for the rest of your life courtesy of the New Yorker tote bag class — at least until one of said magazine’s investigative reporters finds out you’re full of shit.

But today’s trauma merchants are ultimately better off than the hoax memoirists. The days in which audiences responded to lies like this with a sense of outrage and betrayal are over; if anything, the anger today is reserved for the person who interrupts a comfortable narrative with a bunch of pesky facts. Consider what happens, inevitably, whenever some bias-stroking outrage is exposed as a fraud — whether it’s Jussie Smollett, or kids identifying as cats, or a guy allegedly shrieking the N-word at a crowded sporting event. Instead of revising our priors, or even being relieved, we look for ways in which being wrong only goes to show how right we were. So, this story wasn’t true? Ah, well: this country is so racist, or sexist, or full of sexually depraved weirdos who want to secretly turn every kid into a trans-cat, that it could have been true, and that’s just as bad.

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Or, as Hasan Minhaj might put it, it doesn’t matter if the story is fake when it is “emotionally true” — which is to say, when it feels like something that could have happened. Needless to say, some people object to this, not least the woman who politely declined that prom invitation as a teenager: she and her family have been receiving death threats for years thanks to Minhaj’s fabrications, a fact about which the comedian is decidedly cavalier. Maybe this girl didn’t do what he described, he says, and maybe what he described wasn’t done to him — but it had certainly happened sometime, to someone, somewhere: “There are so many other kids who have had a similar sort of doorstep experience.”

No doubt this is true, and not just of kids like Minhaj; when I was 17, a more popular boy took me out on a date, then dropped me back at my house several hours later with the dire warning that I couldn’t tell anyone that we were seeing each other. He simply couldn’t risk the humiliation of his friends knowing he was interested in someone like me. His reasons for this had nothing to do with race and everything to do with high-school social dynamics; if I were telling this story as part of a stand-up routine, perhaps I would have to find a way to make him an antisemite.

But despite the fact that the prom story is emotionally resonant with many a teenage experience, there is still something weird — even, dare I say, appropriative — about claiming to have been a victim of something that didn’t happen, let alone making a living off it. On this front, Minhaj has less in common with the comedian who embellishes a wacky story for laughs, and more in common with the TikToker who scammed her followers out of thousands of dollars to treat a cancer she didn’t have. Minhaj has been dining out for years on that doorstep moment. He published it as an essay in Vanity Fair. He’s spoken about it countless times with reporters, never presenting it as anything but a first-person experience. And while it has become a fixture of his comedy over the years, when Minhaj first debuted this material, it wasn’t actually in a stand-up routine, but at a storytelling competition called The Moth.

It is an interesting institution, The Moth: a sort of open-mic night for anecdotes, a performance memoir showcase. It has just one rule: the story you tell on its stage has to be true.

All have lofty ideas of station and status and all have these ideas disappointed. All are repulsed by a hostile, progressive world. And all are shown in the process to be (to varying degrees) trapped, spiteful, grasping, status-obsessed and self-deluding. It’s a comic instinct that speaks to something masochistic in the British spirit. Some sense that human dignity really is only as thick as a sticking plaster, but that tearing it back to expose our wounds and prejudices is in fact cathartic — cringe-making yet somehow soothing. It is through these embarrassments of men that we strangely choose to represent and interpret our culture.

Much psycho-historical ink has been spilt on the roots of this national quirk. Is it the bad British weather? Perhaps it’s a sublimation of glories lost, of needing to find a personification for superpower contraction. It’s a seductive theory — while other countries (France) tried to physically cling on to empire, we channelled the loss of ours into making people laugh. Whatever the cause, it has generated a streak of vicious, self-lacerating humour, which always works best when targeted at flawed cases of masculine psychology. It’s a tradition that has a culminating triumph in Peep Show, which marks its 20th birthday tomorrow, and despite its age, is increasingly emerging as the defining British sitcom of the early 21st century.

At first glance, Peep Show doesn’t represent any great advance in subject matter. Mark and Jez, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, are two mid-ult everymen fated by their creators to have a difficult time in work, play, and everything in between — middle-class men behaving slightly badly. Instead, its innovation is chiefly formal. Peep Show is filmed entirely from the perspective of its characters — quite literally in the cheap and crude first series, the actors wearing bicycle helmets with camera-antennae. The viewer is trapped deep in the cockpit of the characters’ minds, following them everywhere, from bedroom to bathroom.

This is accompanied by a script of wonderful linguistic aggression — but only around half of which is dialogue. The other half is delivered as voiceover, the thoughts and thoughtcrimes of Mark and Jez fed straight into your ear. At times, it is like a neurotic ghost train: the show has been described as “an intrusive thought in physical form”. Watching it is to experience consciousness with clunky but near-novelistic intensity. For some it’s unwatchable. For the rest of us it’s addictive.

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Peep Show originally ran from 2003 to 2015, inadvertently forming a Balzacian chronicle of that charmless, formless, nameless era of British life after Blair and before Brexit. It is full of the stuff of that age: iPods, chavs and coffee chains; Bez, Bush and oil wars on TV. It runs the full alphabet of chronological references from Ali G to Zoella, capturing all the anesthetising affluence of the Noughties just before the snap of tumult and hyper-politicisation that followed. A low, dishonest time if ever there was one, characterised by little more culturally than a tabloid-carnival of endless frivolity. And all the while, society’s atoms continued to drift ever further apart and a low of hum of bitterness set in.

Mark and Jez are two such atoms who have collided and glued together, though bound not by attraction but necessity, two university friends who have wound up living together in Croydon. Their friendship is formed of mutual love and loathing, each regarding the other as the worst-case scenario, a motivating example of how bad things could get. But they’re both outcasts and they know it. In a line that Robert Webb regards as the show’s thesis statement, Jez imagines a more “normal” existence, thinking he could abandon Mark and “be in the mainstream of the culture instead of lying like a freak in our weird puddle”. Of course, he doesn’t leave, and neither of them get anywhere, trying and failing to scale the ladders of success they’ve misguidedly selected.

For Mark, this looks like a Blairite update of the dad-on-the-Meccano-box family man. He wants a house in Surrey (and ultimately a “cottage in the Ardennes”), children who learn the viola and ancient Greek, a mid-level executive job, a Mensa membership and a Sunday Times subscription. He is too anxious and self-sabotaging to achieve nearly any of these things. And for much of the series, he projects these expectations onto Sophie (Olivia Colman), a colleague he imagines holds the key to this lifestyle, even though, as he admits, they have “very little basic compatibility”.

This creates the show’s greatest and most agonising plotline: Sophie and Mark’s relationship, accidental engagement (a twin product of “embarrassment” and “fear”), and Mark’s attempts to extricate himself (respectably) from the arrangement, up to and including on their wedding day. This leaves him at the altar saying “I do”, even his attempted jilting a failure, with his bride-to-be weeping beside him. He thinks to himself (and to us): “That’s it. I’ve ruined it. I’ve ruined my life. You only get one life, and I’ve ruined mine.” It’s a disastrous tilt at 21st-century bourgeois-dom, later to be further disappointed by menial, manual jobs, further failed (though initially more promising) relationships, and a child born out of wedlock.

Whereas Jez is an altogether more contemporary creature. He’s desperate above all to be celebrity-famous, even, if necessary, just for being famous. Craig Phillips or The Chemical Brothers will do fine (an outtake from the first series even shows Jez’s audition tape for Big Brother). This initially takes the form of trying to make it as a talentless DJ-musician alongside “Super Hans”, his erratic and “crack-addled maniac” bandmate, just one of the pack of eccentrics and one-offs that orbit Jez and Mark’s lives, there to perplex and bedevil them further. When music and the dole give out, he pursues the even more fashionable, undemanding and unpromising career of a “life coach”, delivering catastrophic and unethical advice to his clients, who are marginally more damaged than him.

If Mark is buttoned-up and emotionally barren, a superhuman super-ego of English repression, Jez is his exact double, the “work-shy freeloader” to Mark’s “tight-fisted cockmuncher”. He’s a bohemian with none of the art and all of the mess. At one point, he’s living in a bathtub; at another, he agrees to pimp out his girlfriend to Mark’s boss (after haggling to the exact price of £530). He’s feckless and thoughtless, driven by a pathological adolescence summed-up by his motto of “sucky-fucky” and his “higher law” of “if it feels good, do it”. To which Mark responds, with full David Mitchell panel-show condescension, “Oh, that’s a great law, isn’t it? What’s that, Gaddafi’s law?” At Peep Show’s best, entire episodes can pass like this, the minutiae of life chewed up in perfectly weighted and acted exchanges between its leads. And the quality of the comedy is what sustains such a bleak format, the viewer caught in the bitter-sweet spot of laugh or cry, wince or snort, smile or groan.

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It’s not a classic recipe for a large audience, and while it was on TV, Peep Show only ever enjoyed the dubious honour of “cult” status. Beloved by a few, heralded by critics, and commercially unfortunate. It was threatened with cancellation annually. Remarkable, then, that, in the past half-decade, it has achieved a cultural significance and pop-cultural ubiquity that is rare for any modern sitcom, celebrated at the very top of “best-of” lists. These days there are only two sitcoms one can, in need of auxiliary humour at a forbidding social gathering, quote to some agreeable recognition: The Inbetweeners and Peep Show. The “four naan?” exchange in particular has become so commonplace as to have slipped from reference to irritating catchphrase.

And that’s because the mood of Peep Show has moved from cult to collective. Its cackling cynicism, its unchanging protagonists and its anxious interiority were all original at the time of release, improvements and innovations on the cringe comedy trend. The Office may be the more singular, sculpted achievement, and The Thick of It a greater satire, while Fleabag achieves a level of genuine artistic beauty neither can compete with. But — sprawling, baggy, inconsistent but never far from brilliant — in its totality, Peep Show offers some of the pleasures previously reserved for the English comic novel.

The final frame of Peep Show sees our protagonists slumped at angles to the TV in their flat, both rejected by respective love interests, discussing exactly how they’d murder each other (if the situation arose). For all of its comedy, there’s something existential, something of an English Godot about the scene. And, for better or worse, they sit as our representatives: their schemes for improvement defeated and humiliated. Even if Britain has always found solace in abjection, it’s quite a terminal pair for us to have taken up. Ricky Gervais found the heart to relent on David Brent at the end, granting him that laugh from his colleagues that he always wanted. But, in a world that feels ever more joyless and farcical, manic and dejected, perhaps laughter in the dark is only the natural accompaniment.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

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The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

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The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

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At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

We young people do not do this anymore (television? sitting room?). The sodality of these collective experiences is lost to us, streaming alone in our bedroom-cells. But atomised as we are, generational mood is not completely lost to us. And over the past year, I realised we were all watching Seinfeld. It came around on the Netflix churn in late 2021, arriving like a fresh breeze across the plain of contemporary streaming. Its comic furniture was clearly old — the canned audience laughter, the answerphone messages, those airy flannel shirts tucked into belted jeans. But, in its essential pulse of irony and irreverence, it felt so fresh, so crisp. And, at a time of stultifying, hand-wringing sincerity, something as small as a nasty joke can feel like a punkish, even revolutionary act.

Seinfeld is a faulty sitcom. It doesn’t move properly; it’s missing key parts. It’s “about nothing”, goes the trite assertion. Its triumph is, therefore, one of absence, of refusal. Too incapable to act, Jerry Seinfeld plays himself: stand-up comedian, New Yorker, neat freak and mid-afternoon cereal-eater. But even as a lead he is not the wisecracking protagonist of too many American sitcoms. Instead, he and his apartment often just serve as a planetary centre for his three friends, George, Elaine and Kramer, to orbit. Between them, they exhibit all the vices of man: deceit, spite, narcissism, self-pity, sloth. “No hugging, no learning,” was the mission statement behind the show.

The emotional tenor is therefore pre-Darwinian, any possibility of human mutation, development or evolution flatly rejected. Characters only circle each other, pursued by a supporting cast of cranks, eccentrics and misfits. All motives are low; all manners undignified. Sex is a relentless yet elusive necessity to be pursued through any means, but romantic relationships are too complicated or just embarrassing to maintain. “Sex, that’s meaningless,” says Jerry. “But dinner — that’s heavy. That’s like an hour.” Girlfriends are always new; breakups always imminent. When George does get engaged, he spends the bulk of a season regretting it and trying to break it off.

Such paraphernalia of the predictable sitcom are aggressively boiled away to leave only the relentless imposition of irony: that crushing recognition of the gap between our perspective on things and their bald reality. Consequently, the world can be faced with a shrug or a cackle, too absurd and pointless to take seriously. Jerry can’t even take it seriously — often his mouth simply corpses into a leery smirk halfway through scenes.

The eyeroll, the irreverence, the irony, the stasis, the self-reference — all of this made Seinfeld into the great saga of popular postmodernism. But by the time of its finale, this was a cultural movement many lived in fear of. David Foster Wallace articulated a particularly terrified critique: television, he believed, had bred perilous levels of self-awareness into its viewing public, puncturing our sentimentality and leaving only “flatness, numbness and cynicism”. The critic James Wood agreed, identifying a literary fashion for long absurd novels full of irony, two-dimensional characters and conceptual play. He called it “hysterical realism”, and Seinfeld can be slotted into this genre, a “systems sitcom” in the vein of a Don DeLillo novel.

Between them, Wallace and Wood pointed the way toward the elevated, moralising path that culture has taken ever since. On television came Friends, immediately displacing Seinfeld as the popular chronicle of young America, and later becoming the great millennial sitcom. And, while imitating Seinfeld’s New York, group-of-mates setting, Friends is its irritating, naïve younger sibling, never escaping the frothy fountain of its opening credits. Its Manhattan is a brownstone dreamscape, where you live across the hall from your best friends, renting (where possible) from a monied family member.

And, like a particularly protracted and simplistic Austen novel, it submits tamely to the demands of romantic teleology. Essentially: hang around with your university mates for 10 seasons, and chances are you’ll end up marrying or having kids with at least one of them. Seinfeld’s singletons are achingly self-aware; the Friends friends don’t even know they’re in a TV show. They have shapely, winning flaws, not sordid neuroses. Optimistic, improving, they do silly things to cheer each other up like put turkeys on their head. They move to the suburbs to start families. There’s a lot of hugging.

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Friends was symptomatic of the mood of sincerity which has since overcast much of the culture. For the past two decades, the cultural stock exchange has been led by a boom in conveyed emotion and self-conscious virtue. We listen to heart-baring, confessional-romantic anthems. We read novels about toxic love quadrilaterals. We watch Ted Lasso conquer English football by baking biscuits. But in more recent years, even this has calcified, slipping from the pure emotional sincerity of Friends to a more overbearing preoccupation with moral sincerity.

Irony has come to be seen as a dereliction of our human and political responsibilities. In fiction, the critic Becca Rothfeld gives a name to this millennial middlebrow: “sanctimony literature”. In these books and outside them, writers and their characters exhibit an inquisitorial obsession with “goodness”. They stress over structural racism and their carbon emissions. They mull over the power imbalances of BDSM. And they are attracted by wholesome, generous, unbelievable people, whose complications come in the form of redeemable scars and wounds, not profanities or sins.

Thanks to the politicisation of everyday life, which accelerated in the late 2010s, this is now representative of an entire sanctimony culture. It demands the iterative performance of goodness across everyday life. We do it on social media, striving to display virtues personal (wealth, sociability, romantic success) and political. We willingly upload and surrender our personal lives, commodifying the very emotions that we seek to display. We buy self-care and wellness, a new marketplace which serves this desire for authentic fulfilment. We inspect artists and writers for actionable wrongdoing.

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When art and entertainment are run at such a hysterical temper, irony, detachment and withdrawal are an escape. And, therefore, so is Seinfeld, which makes no such gestures towards value or judgement. Its priorities are visible even at a structural level: for most of its run, each episode began and ended with a stand-up set by Jerry. All narrative momentum, any dramatic peril, dissolves and is then transformed into a framing device of pure humour. In this, Seinfeld is arguably the most straightforwardly comic comedy ever made. Morality is no consideration; politics are only ever an opportunity for social embarrassment. “You don’t have any black friends,” Jerry chides George, “Outside of us, you don’t have any white friends either.”

In this world of ethical grandstanding, where every word and gesture is freighted with political significance, a show about “nothing” is a little revelation. And there are other signs of this backlash. The one truly original form of digital-cultural expression, meme culture, is savagely ironic and two-dimensional, populated by wretched caricatures and vicious stereotypes designed to satirise and undermine the self-righteousness of society. Seinfeld has already become an integrated part of this universe, thoroughly pastiched through clipping and quotation, and it’s no surprise it fits so well. The style of online humour is pithy and generally dark, even existential. And there are a dozen such George lines per episode: “I’m depressed. I’m inadequate. I’ve got it all!”

If irony is back, it is a tool as well as a condition. Seinfeld came at the end of a long tail of postmodern art, which was interested in capturing and critiquing mass media. Our own transactional information age — far more intrusive and involving than even David Foster Wallace could pretend television is — has made a mockery of a generation which sought to use it sincerely, treating their personal lives with the cruelty of a reality TV show producer. The clarity of irony is its strength, burning through pretensions and leaving a behind a reality which is sometimes cold but always honest. This is the mood that is starting to circulate among Gen Z, a vibe shift still in inchoate infancy. And at the generationally-regenerative distance of 25 years, Seinfeld is part of our voice — and our rebellion.

Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.

It’s not the sort of thing that national epics are normally made of. The programme is about three Catholic Priests — Fathers Ted Crilly, Dougal McGuire, and Jack Hackett — on Craggy Island, a remote settlement off the west coast of Ireland. All three priests have been exiled to this purgatory by the terrifying Bishop Len Brennan (their misdemeanours are never referred to directly, but Ted often makes oblique reference to the fact that “the funds were only resting in my account”). Most episodes revolve around an absurdist version of Church life, Ted’s schemes to escape the island and their interactions with the island’s townsfolk.

Rarely for domestic Irish TV, it was a sitcom written by Irish people and it was set within a central Irish institution, the Catholic Church. And the dearth of representations of Irish people in entertainment meant it crystallised many Irish archetypes for the first time. Ireland itself hadn’t always been a welcoming place for satirists. Ted star Dermot Morgan knew this well — his major project before Ted had been a political comedy radio show named Scrap Saturday, which upset all the wrong people, and was eventually cancelled amid allegations of political interference.

Unlike Scrap Saturday, Ted never sought to be political or self-consciously “relevant”. But Craggy Island is a capsule of Irish life at this time of major social change — not least for gender relations and the Church. Take one married couple, John and Mary, who own the corner shop on Craggy Island. They contrive to show a winsome, loving front to the priest whenever they encounter him, but turn to violent bickering once his back is turned. At one point, Mary tries to drown John in a bucket of water; at another, Father Ted comes into the shop and finds John has locked Mary in a cupboard. When he leaves, they’re arguing over a shotgun.

This peck-and-scratch marriage is still funny, but in 2023 the laughter it provokes is nervous. It’s a product of an Irish society still processing the reality of divorce, only legalised by a referendum in Ireland in 1995, the same year Ted first aired. Though it was not uncommon at that time for people to separate, the divorce campaign had been ugly and emotional. One billboard for No bore the slogan “Hello divorce, goodbye daddy”. The referendum was passed by the tiny margin of 9,000 votes.

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Divorce was only one step in the very gradual withering of religious power in Ireland — far more gradual than the rest of Europe. Remember that abortion was only legalised in Ireland five years ago. When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect. 

Ted and Ted therefore stand at a crossroads, and capture the more fundamental social change in Ireland at this time: the collapse in respect for older establishment hierarchies generally. These were not unlike the changes many other countries had experienced in the Sixties, a meritocratic, levelling upheaval against an entitled ruling elite. In a symbolic Late Late Show appearance not long after Ted ended, Irish EU Commissioner Padraig Flynn terminated his career by seeming to brag inappropriately about the extent of his pay-packet, and the attendant difficulties of maintaining multiple houses, housekeepers and cars, and extensive foreign travel. Such blithe venality had been deemed impassable.

The insistent pulse of Irish political life in the Nineties was a series of tribunals on corruption in public life, covering subjects such as tax evasion and illegal payments to politicians. The names of those tribunals — Flood, Mahon, Moriarty, McCracken — are unknown in the UK. But for an Irish person who was politically conscious in 1997, these were seismic events. The Mahon tribunal in particular lasted 15 years and created an endless and era-defining thrum of news stories about shady political dealings that rarely left the front pages. It created the sense that Ireland was run by an elite who fattened themselves while the public starved, but who had finally been exposed — though the extent of their punishment was often limited, pace Ted, to a kick up the arse.

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Even within its small world, Father Ted finds room for these hierarchical upheavals. Bishop Brennan is the terrifying figure at pinnacle of Ted’s world, but his personal failings ultimately allow Ted to, if not topple him, then at least manoeuvre around his influence. On one occasion, he successfully blackmails Brennan when he uncovers a tape showing the Bishop frolicking on the beach with a woman and acting paternally towards a young child. Rarely for the show, this closely parodies the real-life case of the Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, whose secrets were exposed in yet another bombshell Late Late Show interview in 1993.

But perhaps what’s most interesting in Ted are the issues it doesn’t linger on. For obvious reasons — it’s a zany comedy — neither the Northern Irish peace process nor abortion get much airtime. Homosexuality, only legalised in Ireland three years before Ted went on the air, is also largely absent. (The closest the programme came was its introduction of Graham Norton to an unsuspecting world.) Similarly, while the Nineties was also the decade in which Ireland became a country of net immigration, Father Ted remains monoethnic and monocultural — note its famous “I hear you’re a racist now, Father” episode, in which Ted offends Chinese family with an ill-advised impression. But it’s a “Ted, you big eejit” moment, not a herald that Ireland is changing.

These unconscious elisions, as we might now read them, draw attention to the pace and scale of change in Ireland since the programme’s finale, in the passage of barely one generation. The Ireland of the last year — which witnessed immigration protests and the controversy around gender self-ID laws — was unimaginable in 1998, and probably a decade later as well. In this regard, an interesting companion to Father Ted is the 1993 film The Snapper, adapted from Roddy Doyle’s novel and directed by Stephen Frears. It’s the story of a young woman who becomes pregnant outside marriage and the turmoil that ensues in her community. But it ends on a positive note (with its main character and reconciled family crowded round the new baby), and presents a picture of an organic Dublin community that is unimaginably plainer and closer-knit than today.

For anyone who grew up in Ireland, especially Dublin, in the Nineties, returning to Ted and The Snapper is thus a profound and melancholy experience — like looking at a picture of yourself from before a war. This was the genius behind its surreal comedy. Like Ireland, it had its feet in two worlds, occupying that strange place when, as the earth shakes, a chasm opens up between the past and the future.

But lately, the common wisdom about letting comedy or artworks or even facts speak for themselves has been subverted by a deepening fear of what might happen if something gets lost in translation. A guy who doesn’t get the joke might instead get the wrong idea — and what then? Some sort of catastrophe, for sure, if not outright anarchy.

These anxieties were on particularly potent display amid the recent to-do surrounding the Twitter Files, which are either a groundbreaking act of corporate transparency by the tech world’s biggest disruptor — or a giant, embarrassing nothingburger, depending on who you ask. For those not in the know, the Files offer a glimpse behind the scenes at Twitter during various recent controversies, when content moderation arguably crossed the line into censorship. There have been four Files thus far, released in the form of massive tweet threads by journalists hand-picked by Elon Musk. All have offered insights into the challenges of managing speech on the microblogging site, which holds a place of outsized cultural influence owing to its status as a favourite hangout for media folks, but the adverse relationship between Twitter management and humorous content was on fullest display in Matt Taibbi’s recent thread about the site’s collaboration with government agencies to combat misinformation in the leadup to the 2020 election, which culminated in the permanent banning of Donald Trump from the site.

Among the tweets that Twitter employees had highlighted as cause for concern was a joke from October 2020. Former Arkansas governor and one-time presidential hopeful, the Republican Mike Huckabee, took a jab at the mail-in voting system: “Stood in rain for hour to early vote today,” Huckabee wrote. “When I got home I filled in my stack of mail-in ballots and then voted the ballots of my deceased parents and grandparents. They vote just like me!  #Trump2020”

As dumb as this joke was, there’s a certain dark absurdity to the response it inspired behind the scenes at Twitter: “This appears to be a joke, but other people might believe it,” one anonymous employee wrote when the tweet was flagged. Trust and Safety head executive Yoel Roth wrote: “I agree it’s a joke, but he’s also literally admitting in a tweet to a crime.”

He’s literally admitting in a tweet to a crime. If this were a work of fiction, here is the line that would elicit an editorial eyeroll and a polite note about the need to maintain subtlety in satire. But then, in a way, it is fiction. When Roth says, “he’s literally admitting to a crime,” he knows full well that the “crime” in question never happened; he’s telling a joke of his own, concocting a winking pretext for ideological censorship under the guise of policing misinformation.

As Kathleen Stock noted in a recent essay, there are two explanations for this affected literality, this iron-fisted narrative control: either the censor himself is stupid, or he thinks everyone else is. This makes for its own set of problems in the worlds of media and academia, but it has especially worrisome implications for comedy, and for art, where the message of the work, what it makes you think, is a distant second to what it makes you feel. The cult of the fact-check, this notion that we cannot sacrifice accuracy even for the sake of having a laugh, is the antithesis of fun — even when intentions are good.

Last June, Twitter implemented “birdwatch”, “a community-based approach to misinformation”. The feature allowed users to add relevant context to misleading tweets, but people immediately set about not only correcting the record on factually incorrect news items, but also dissecting a whole lot of metaphorical joke-frogs to death. One representative example, a clever jibe about NASA’s history of offering amnesty to Nazis, was instantly ruined by the attachment of an explanation that not only reduced the substance of the joke to a third-grade reading level but reads as though it had been written by an actual third grader (“This is a joke based on the fact that the early days of NASA was ran by Nazis that were granted amnesty in exchange for working for the U.S. government in research and development”). Looking at this note — which a majority of users rated as useful for being “easy to understand” — one wonders whether it is worse to fact-check a joke or to just suppress it outright.  In the latter case, at least the frog survives.

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Beneath the contemporary anxiety over misinformation, it seems something older and more insidious lurks: the eternal, authoritarian urge to stamp out irreverence and imagination lest they give people ideas. The threats to the narrative can come from anywhere: in 2017, for instance, the makers of the video game Minecraft eliminated a whimsical feature that allowed users to feed (digital) chocolate chip cookies to the game’s (digital) parrot population, after an uproar over the possibility that real parrots might be harmed. In 2020, the Auschwitz memorial condemned the Amazon series Hunters, a show about modern-day Nazi hunters, for a depiction of fictional (albeit directionally accurate) wartime atrocities that, per the memorial, was “not only dangerous foolishness” in its injection of imagination into a Holocaust story, but “also welcomes future deniers”. Of course, reasonable people can disagree on whether the show’s human chess match was in good taste, but the notion that aspiring Holocaust deniers are likely to be found watching an Amazon series about a group of Jewish vigilantes hunting down and murdering Nazis seems misplaced at best. Those folks are watching Disney, obviously. (That was a joke.)

This desire to intellectually handhold consumers to the proper conclusions about what they’re watching, reading, or looking at has also found expression lately in the “recontextualisation” of art exhibits. Where paintings were once displayed alongside notes about the artist’s use of light, or the life events that might have influenced the work, some museums now instruct viewers to interpret the art through the timeliest political lens. Last year, a Tate exhibit of paintings by the artist William Hogarth raised hackles for imbuing a wooden chair with sinister subtext: “The chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people”, read the label displayed alongside one of Hogarth’s self-portraits. “Could the chair also stand in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?”

According to this new paradigm, the beauty of the art is a secondary concern — if it’s present at all. Meanwhile, some works have been deemed so offensive that no amount of contextualisation can make them safe for viewing by the general population, as with the cancellation in 2020 of a long-anticipated Philip Guston exhibit. Guston’s depictions of hooded, cartoonish klansmen were always meant as a critical statement on the banality of evil, but how could curators be assured that the public, those fools, would understand this?

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The creative world is increasingly haunted by the spectre of this hypothetical moron, who cannot sort fact from fiction, or art from news, or humorous gags about overconsumption from the mistaken conviction that beer is a fruit. Nobody ever demands contextualisation on their own behalf, of course: they’re not stupid! But other people are — not just stupid, but vapid, a collectively empty chassis awaiting an ideological engine. It’s like the anonymous Twitter employee said: sure, it’s obviously a joke, but other people might believe it.

The irony is that we know more than ever how true this isn’t. The age of social media offers us a far more expansive view of what people think, and why, and how they reach those conclusions, than we have ever had before. Yet as with the Twitter Files, this greater transparency only seems to fuel ever greater mistrust — and a sense that the stakes are far too high to simply leave people to their own devices. And while the impact so far has been largely administrative — a silly museum label here, a fact check there — how likely is it to end there?

This quest to explain art, and in doing so to instruct people how to feel about it, inevitably trickles down until the work itself is being policed at the creation stage. A curator can only do so much to steer patrons to the proper conclusions; the artist, too, must always keep the moron in mind, dumbing down every line, and every punchline, to the lowest common denominator so that it’s comprehensible to everyone (and, coincidentally, truly funny to no one).  Faced with the terrifying prospect that people might get the wrong idea, the best — actually, the only — solution is to get rid of ideas altogether, dissecting them for offence, contextualising the life out of them, until there’s nothing fun — or funny — about any of it.

This was how I opened my review of Jerry Sadowitz’s show for ScotsGay magazine in 2008. I described his performance as “an explosion of hate on stage”, but noted that the effect was both prurient and deliriously funny. That Sadowitz’s unending bile is often interspersed with adroitly executed magic tricks makes his routines all the more compelling. When critics quote his jokes out of context, it’s easy to see why so many are offended — but when it comes to Sadowitz, context is everything.

Such a distinction, however, is lost on many of today’s comedy aficionados. This week, the Pleasance — one of the so-called “big four” venues at the Fringe — cancelled Sadowitz’s show at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. In an incredible feat of doublespeak, Anthony Alderson, Director of the Pleasance, claimed that it is “a venue that champions freedom of speech” and does “not censor comedians’ material” but has nonetheless cancelled this show because it “is not acceptable and does not align with our values”.

There is much to criticise in Alderson’s statement, not least his high-handed claim that “this type of material has no place on the festival”. In recent years, the doyens of the comedy industry have developed a tediously pharisaic approach to the artform. Critics, promoters, and even comedians themselves have behaved like a modern-day clergy, censuring acts who fail to conform to the diktats of the new morality. The comedy industry, in other words, is seemingly dominated by those who are not comedy-literate.

The Pleasance Theatre Trust issued a further statement claiming that “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable”, thereby revealing how little it understands about the essential theatricality of stand-up. Are “jokes” and “opinions” now synonymous? To take stand-up at face value, to attempt to apply moral guidelines to a theatrical performance, is to misapprehend the experience. Denouncing Sadowitz’s onstage persona as racist, sexist, or homophobic makes about as much sense as condemning Macbeth for his ruthless ambition.

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Besides, Sadowitz isn’t the only one affected. The current trend of cancelling comedians is infantilising audience members by deeming them susceptible to corruption through their favourite shows. It is the identical view that underpinned Mary Whitehouse’s “Clean Up TV” campaign in the Sixties. For Whitehouse, it wasn’t sufficient that adults make choices about what they did or did not watch; authority figures were expected to intervene in order to prevent the spread of “dangerous” ideas that might lead the plebeians astray.

Anyone who has undertaken the least research into Sadowitz will know what they are in for. The Pleasance was certainly aware of his style and content (and his tendency to expose his penis) well in advance of the festival. Sadowitz had even posted a promo video in which he referred to himself in the third person, saying: “He’s gonna be funny. He’s gonna be rude. He’s gonna do magic tricks. He’s gonna do impressions. He’s gonna get his dick out. He’s gonna do every fucking thing.”

In another promo, Sadowitz said: “I might just do card tricks and say nothing for a whole hour or I might just do the usual ‘screaming fascist’ schtick. Or both. Patrons may wish to drink alcohol pre-show to avoid boredom, embarrassment and guilt.” His current show is entitled Not For Anyone. When I reviewed his show in 2008, it was called Comedian, Magician, Psychopath II. One can hardly accuse Sadowitz of false advertising.

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So why is it that a show explicitly marketed at adults who enjoy controversial comedy would need to be cancelled? I have been told that some of the complaints originated from members of staff at the Pleasance itself — reminiscent of the revolt at the Canadian branch of Penguin Random House, where junior employees apparently burst into tears and demanded the cancellation of Jordan Peterson’s book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. In Peterson’s case, the publishers refused to be cowed. At the Pleasance, the management capitulated.

This philistine trend gained momentum at the launch of the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe, when Comedy Awards director Nica Burns declared that she was “looking forward to comedy’s future in the woke world”. She went on to compare the current fashion for “woke” to the alternative comedians of the Eighties, claiming that “it is the woke movement which is setting an ever-evolving agenda as it seeks to establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”.

The implied decree was observed by up-and-coming comics in subsequent years; eligibility for awards or plaudits would be reserved for those who toe the ideological line. This is why I continually hear from stand-ups who are choosing to self-censor, who fear that their viability in the industry is contingent on maintaining the status quo. This is why we have seen so many second-rate acts promoted by the industry for conveying the “correct” message, one typically related to the new religion of Group Identity. This is also why so many television comedy shows are failing to attract viewers. For all the industry gatekeepers and their pretensions to moral superiority, comedy audiences would still much rather laugh than hear a sermon.

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Burns had it entirely backwards when she compared the “woke world” to the alternative comedy movement. The complaints we hear today about subversive comedians like Sadowitz are strikingly reminiscent of the anger against the alternative comics of the Eighties, those who dared to challenge establishment norms. When I co-founded Comedy Unleashed, a monthly night in London, it was an effort to provide opportunities to those comics who are by nature non-conforming. It wasn’t about being controversial, it was about creating a show in which ideas could be explored freely, and where the priority would be to be funny rather than preachy.

The unhinged reactions to our recent announcement of a Comedy Unleashed tour have been revealing. One of the acts, Reginald D. Hunter, was trending for the day on Twitter because he had dared to appear on the bill. One comedian tweeted: “If you do that tour: you’re a fucking scab” and “Comedians need to pick a side: I’m an anarchist”. The comedian in question has a show on BBC Radio 4, so his definition of “anarchy” seems dubious at best.

Up until now, Sadowitz has been able to evade the accusatory finger-pointing of culture warriors — those who are determined to see racists and fascists in every shadow — by dint of his status as a luminary among comedians. Stand-ups who have admired Sadowitz for years will baulk at the suggestion that there is no distinction between his act and that of Roy “Chubby” Brown. But for those who have succumbed to the new puritanism, words have a contaminative power. Racist epithets are always racist; context be damned.

In a statement released yesterday, Sadowitz wrote: “I don’t want to humiliate the Pleasance but they are doubling down on their position and I don’t want to be made the victim of that…  My act is now being cheapened and simplified as unsafe, homophobic, misogynistic and racist… A lot of thought goes into my shows and while I don’t always get it right… I am offended by those who, having never seen me before, hear words being shouted in the first five minutes before storming out without listening to the material which I am stupid enough to believe is funny”.

Sadowitz’s frustration is palpable, and rightly so. It is similarly frustrating to see him forced to break character publicly — possibly for the first time in his career — simply because a few know-nothings with too much power cannot comprehend the notion of an onstage persona and its function in stand-up. We have reached a point where the art of comedy has been demeaned by a “progressive” view of language and power relations. Consider how the tax lawyer and Twitter activist Jolyon Maugham responded to an opinion piece about the attack on Salman Rushdie. He claimed that when it comes to free speech, one should “engage with relative power. Who has a platform to speak — and for what purpose do they use it, to challenge or to embed power?”

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This is the basic formulation to which all artistic expression is now reduced. So when Sadowitz screams racial slurs, he is not doing so as part of an unhinged comedic persona, but is perpetuating power structures that maintain his privilege. That he is Jewish doesn’t seem to matter because, as David Baddiel has argued, Jews don’t count.

We have seen comedians investigated by police, members of the public prosecuted for jokes, and the Culture Secretary suggesting that the law ought to be changed to criminalise controversial comedy on streaming services. At each step on this road to Pandemonium, mainstream comedians have remained silent, as though it is of no concern to them that their craft is being subjected to continual battering. There is nothing particularly surprising about the cancellation of Sadowitz’s show; it was simply a matter of time.

Perhaps now that the new puritans are targeting respected comedians like Sadowitz, other stand-ups will wake up to the problem. Comedy cannot exist in an environment where words are deemed to be “unsafe”, and risk-takers are punished with cancellation. This is why Sadowitz deserves your support, even if you cannot stomach his performances. He is one of the few comedians who has been instrumental in pushing boundaries. God forbid we allow these pettifogging authoritarians to re-establish the parameters in accordance with their banal and bloodless creed.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

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The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

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The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

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At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

“Ricky Gervais’ new Netflix special is nothing more than an anti-trans garbage fire,” bawls the headline. Apparently, “Gervais ‘jokes’ at the LGBTQ+ community’s expense throughout the show” and “spends much of the special punching down at trans people”. Of course, framing the word “jokes” in inverted commas is a form of criticism as criminally unoriginally as doing so with the word “comedian”, but when it comes to sophisticated analysis from Pink News, one’s expectations are invariably low.

Other activists have been hastily competing to see who can denounce the show in the most histrionic terms. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) issued a statement in which they refer to Gervais as a “so-called comedian” (another cliché) and claimed that SuperNature is “full of graphic, dangerous, anti-trans rants masquerading as jokes”, “anti-gay rhetoric” and assured us that Netflix would “be held accountable” for content that is “designed to incite hate or violence”.

None of these characterisations of the show is remotely close to the truth, but they do offer us an insight into how comedy is routinely misconstrued in the strange and moiling clamour of the culture wars. Far from “punching down”, Gervais exposes the increasingly unhinged ideology of the ruling class: the sanctification of gender identity.

We live in a time where the most prominent gay charity in the UK is promoting the homophobic myth that lesbians are the equivalent of racists if they exclude men from their dating pool. All major cultural, political, corporate and educational institutions (including the NHS, the BBC and the College of Policing) are in thrall to the new orthodoxy, while policymakers throughout the private and public sectors are urging employees to conform to the quasi-religious notion that we each have an innate gender identity. Are we seriously to believe that mocking this hugely powerful, regressive, and bullying movement is a form of “punching down”?

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Gervais has been explicit in his support for equal rights for trans people. This ought to be a given, but such is the determination of these latter-day puritans to take jokes at face-value that it has become necessary for comedians to provide these caveats. “My target wasn’t trans folk,” Gervais explained, “but trans activist ideology. I’ve always confronted dogma that oppresses people and limits freedom of expression.”

Many of the criticisms levelled at Gervais have inevitably taken the form of straw men. One critic described Gervais’s “core demographic” as being the “sizeable brigade who believe ‘you can’t say anything anymore’”, even though finding anyone who sincerely makes this claim is a near-impossible task. Others have claimed that Gervais’s fans are opposed to free speech because they are responding to those who have taken issue with his special. But criticism is not the same as censorship; just as Gervais’s detractors are free to express their misgivings, so too are those who disagree. As Gervais puts it, “You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won’t like it and they will tell you they don’t like it. And then it’s up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It’s a good system.”

It’s true that a comedy show which does not stimulate laughter feels more like a lecture, and so it might be natural for those who watch Gervais without breaking a smile to reclassify it according to their tastes: a form of “hate speech”. But it takes quite a degree of narcissism to assume that one’s own view of what is and isn’t amusing should be the benchmark for all of humanity. To say “I don’t find that funny” is irrefutable and fair, given that humour is inherently subjective. To say “That’s not funny” is the most useless of criticisms because it is objectively false; anything can be funny to somebody.

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More persuasive is the accusation that humour can be used as a form of bullying. Anyone who was ever bullied at school will be aware that the standard get-out clause is “it was only a joke!” I have seen a number of unscrupulous people libel others online, only to backtrack with the claim that they “were only joking”. Similarly, we are all aware of jokes that operate on the grim assumption that minority groups are inferior or ought to be treated with derision. Such jokes were popular many decades ago, but you would be hard-pushed to find a professional comedian who peddles such material today.

Yet activists are determined to interpret certain forms of comedy as manifestations of this outdated fashion for “punching down”. Largely, this originates in a lack of familiarity with the contemporary comedy circuit. We know this because whenever commentators claim that “Right-wing comedy” is racist, homophobic or sexist, they invariably cite examples of long-dead comics such as Bernard Manning.  But “Right-wing comedy” is a delicate shapeshifter; as a classification it beyond useless because it so often is applied indiscriminately; I was branded a “Right-wing comedian” in an article for Byline Times this week, even though my political views are largely more in accordance with the traditional Left.

Cenk Uygur, for example, claimed that Gervais was only making his jokes about gender identity to “get Right-wing love” and a “lucrative special”, as though Netflix’s commission was in any way dependent on the topics he chose to lampoon. But Gervais is not Right-wing, and it is laughable to suggest that he is attempting to woo a specific political demographic. Moreover, the most determined push-back against the pseudo-religion of gender identity has come from the Left; most notably feminists and gay activists who are rightly concerned about an ideology that is so explicitly hostile towards them.

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Uygur’s attempt at mind-reading is par for the course. Much of the criticism levelled at Gervais, and subversive comedians more generally, tends to take the form of cod-psychological analysis. Musician Steve Albini launched into an extended variation on the genre, in which he explained that Gervais has morphed into his “boorish, selfish, unaware” comedy persona because “indulging the pretence eventually becomes so comfortable that it fuses with the person underneath”. What is actually happening is that Albini is making wild speculations about a total stranger’s artistic choices on the basis of his own misinterpretations.  In all such cases, the sheer certainty of these amateur psychoanalysts and mind-readers is striking.

Gervais is the latest in a long tradition of comedians successfully puncturing the pretensions of the powerful; he fulfils a similar role to the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, innocently observing that the emperor is naked when everyone else is too cowardly to do so. We have seen recently how many of our elected representatives are willing to nod along with the lie that the word “woman” cannot be satisfactorily defined. At times like these, we need the jester more than ever, for the jangling bells of his coxcomb to break the earnest silence of the court.

But even where the po-faced stop short of lamping the smart-arsed, it’s widely noted that there’s a growing societal intolerance towards offensive comedy. Discussion of this in the media tends to assume a predictable form. First, someone well-known for being funny — Maureen Lipman, or John Cleese, or Dawn French — will say that wokeism is stifling comedic impulses by making comedians (and managers, and booking agents) afraid of backlash. Editors will then scramble to find someone authoritative to say there’s no evidence of this.

If anything, though, the resulting defensive responses tend only to increase the sense that there’s a problem here. Take, for instance, comedian Russell Kane’s response to Maureen Lipman: “I don’t think anyone is saying you can’t be offended, nobody is saying that, what we’re saying is you can’t use hate speech that would prompt a gender-related crime, a sex-related crime or a race-related crime.” Phew — that’s a relief! What this answer obviously ignores is that in the feverish imaginations of many, the bar for what’s considered likely to prompt a crime is getting lower every day.

Or take this Guardian op-ed from last year by comedy commentator Rachel Aroesti. With perhaps telling overkill, Aroesti writes off each and every concern about comedy cancel culture as “scaremongering about progressive politics”, “nonsense”, and (of course) “an absurdist joke”. In prosecuting her argument, she points out, accurately, that the careers of some high-profile comedians — Jimmy Carr, say, or Chappelle again — have been boosted from scandals surrounding their routines. Differently rendered, the very same evidence might have been used to provide comfort and reassurance to would-be shock merchants, along the lines of: Dear comedians, there’s no evidence your career will suffer if you are disgustingly obnoxious on stage. So relax, get back out there, and start making no-holds-barred jokes about transmen and Roma people once more!

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Probably unsurprisingly, though, that’s not how the piece reads. Even as Aroesti insists that cancel culture doesn’t affect people’s ability to make jokes that refer to minorities, her evident disapproval for the sort of person that would do this undermines her point. An accompanying eyeroll seems to say: no, of course you haven’t been cancelled, idiots — but you probably should be. This eyeroll can be sensed, too, in an exceptionally moralistic review of Catherine Tate’s body of work, written by Aroesti last month, which stops just short of calling Tate’s material “racist and homophobic” — but only just.

The real reason that the careers of comics like Carr, Rock, and Chappelle continue to flourish in spite of, or even because of, their deliberate minority-baiting, is that, in going as far as they gleefully do, they signal that there is little real point in coming after them. Unlike cancellers on the Right, who are mostly interested in targeting the opposition, cancellers on the Left tend to go for those they think are likely to be psychologically susceptible to their criticism.

For the purposes of speech control, a good target is someone who is likely to care about being called a “misogynist”, “racist” or “transphobe” by fellow tribe-members. And it’s even better if the transgression in question has the air of an inadvertent slip-up — because in that case you’re more likely to be able to extract an abject apology from the perpetrator, simply by pointing out that offence has been caused. Comedians who stoke outrage in front of millions don’t exactly scream potential in this respect. There’s nothing that says resilience to progressive guilt trips like deliberately savage jokes on stage about vulnerable groups.

What this suggests is that the comedians most at risk of the effects of cancellation are not the big names building their brands by pushing the limits of taste and decency. Rather, it’s the more strait-laced and less confrontational ones, sticking mainly to whimsical observation but with occasional tentative forays into edginess, who are most in danger — those from whom routines that inadvertently hit a cultural nerve would stand out far more vividly.

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It’s a strange world where Catherine Tate is more likely to be criticised for the supposed immorality of her comic choices than, say, Jerry Sadowitz — described with admiration by the Guardian in 2017 as the “twisted granddaddy of abusive comedy”. But I think it’s probably the world we live in. (To be clear — as far as I’m concerned, the answer here is not to level things out by going after Sadowitz, too.)

In effect, the progressive Left has moralised huge swathes of communication, both within comedy and beyond it. Any utterance that involves a reference to a minority tends to be sliced from its surrounding context. The intentions or character of its owner are ignored. The implication is reduced to the version that the most sensitive representative of that particular minority might choose to hear, and then connected in full, psychic technicolour with hideous potential repercussions for that often completely imaginary person.

You can see this in Kane’s response to Maureen Lipman, and you can also see it in Aroesti’s review of Catherine Tate, in which the supposedly “racist and homophobic” material she mentions turns out to have come from the mouth of Tate’s Nan character — surely an important difference. Perversely, the best way for a comedian to circumvent these censorious effects seems to be to boldly march up to statements that might genuinely stoke up bad feeling against a group and then spit them out in your own voice, smirking knowingly as you do it.

Like many other parts of culture then, comedy is polarised. If you’re a comedian, you now have one of two choices: either avoid controversy like the plague or run happily towards it. There’s not much in between, and comedy has lost some of its richness because of it.

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But there is another loss here too, and it’s a loss to the political culture of the Left. For as the progressive wing has embraced the ever-evolving permutations of identity politics so enthusiastically, it has also — and probably non-coincidentally — made it impossible for anyone on its own side to laugh at these permutations, or at identity politics generally. In the reductive algebra of progressive offence-seekers, mocking identity politics is equated with mocking minorities. Of course, all politics is tribal, and no political party or movement, Right or Left, can easily tolerate mockery, especially from within its own ranks. But this is not just an understandable dislike of being laughed at by those on the same side as oneself. It is a positive taboo against it, with all the enforcing of speech codes, wilfully reductive misunderstandings, and attempted humiliation of miscreants that this implies.

And yet there is so much to laugh at! Last week alone gave us the Head of Trans Inclusion at Stonewall, on a hefty salary to oversee Stonewall’s many trans-related programmes, asking to be accompanied by a support worker, his mother, and a support dog during cross-questioning at Allison Bailey’s employment tribunal. (The judge instructed him not to discuss the case with his mother during a break; whether he was allowed to discuss it with the dog wasn’t mentioned).

We also were treated to the spectacle of 61 mainly Labour MPs, holding placards at the behest of nameless LGBTQ+ campaigners, and passing on the bonkers message to the general public that confused adolescents shouldn’t be given any therapy in their hasty rush to get rid of various body parts. Brass Eye’s Chris Morris — famous for getting celebrities to unwittingly humiliate themselves on camera in the name of various confected moral panics — couldn’t have done any better if he’d tried.

Lots of people on the Left want to mock events like these — they are, after all, preposterous. But they also know that the pinched-mouthed censors on their own side would reduce any attempts at humour to, at best, unkindness, and, at worst, hatred towards trans people. The same goes with relevant adjustments for any mockery of BLM, or indeed of any activist movement claiming to speak on behalf of a minority. And this needlessly forces those uncomfortable with the simplistic logic of identity politics to pick a side.

Those with enough rebellious spirit will eventually seek to break free from their suffocatingly humourless companions, making the Left less diverse and less robust. Worse than that, freed from exposure to that particularly bracing form of critique that is trenchant piss-taking from people whose opinions you care about, the Left’s representatives are likely to carry on doing ridiculous things in public, to the befuddlement of the voter. Until progressives are better able to take a joke — or even to understand one — I predict that Labour will give us lots more to laugh at in the next few years. And the amusement will all be that of the Tories.

In all this, the fall of filmmaker and comedian Louis CK was a blockbuster moment. The comedian’s predilection for masturbating in front of his peers had been an open secret for ages. But now the tide seemed to be turning. A massive story in the New York Times alleged that he had harassed five women, most of them fellow comedians, in the early 2000s. The response was outrage, and more importantly, consequences: Louis CK confessed, apologised, and dutifully vanished from public life for nearly a year.

“These stories are true,” the comedian acknowledged in a statement. “At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question.”

The damage was not just reputational. It was quantifiable. His new movie, I Love You, Daddy, was abruptly shelved, never to be released. His management company cut him loose; his contracts with FX and TBS were cancelled; his past work was pulled from streaming services. Forbes estimated that the comedian’s immediate losses counted in the tens of millions. And that was before you counted all the income he’d never make now that, as the writer boldly predicted, his career was permanent toast.

It was enough to make even the most coolheaded feminist start to imagine a time, surely not too far off, when the movement would rise to absolute power and the patriarchy would lie in ruins. But this week, Louis CK punched a Grammy-shaped hole right through that little fantasy, by winning the music industry’s biggest award for Best Comedy Album. “Sincerely Louis CK” was the comedian’s first release since 2017, when the story of his sexual misconduct broke.

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At the time of its release, the reaction to the new special was as much a microcosm for the divide between elite tastemakers and ordinary consumers as it was a response to the content itself. Critics mainly complained that Louis CK didn’t do enough to address and apologise for his inappropriate behaviour, while those who bought the album mainly laughed until they couldn’t breathe — a reaction for which they, too, were mercilessly indicted. (Slate’s review of the special scolded that these jokes might have been funny if told by a less repulsive entertainer to a less repulsive audience, before condemning both Louis CK and his fans in a single breath: “Everyone involved in that transaction deserves one another.”) At the time of writing, the show’s Rotten Tomatoes rating from viewers is a stellar 93%.

And yet, those same tastemakers still managed to be shocked, and to take it deeply personally, when the Grammy win was announced. “[Thanks] so much to our industry for once again telling us that survivors don’t matter,” tweeted writer and producer Sarah Ann Masse. To outraged critics, Louis CK’s comeback was like five years’ worth of progress undone.

But looking back, it’s hard to believe we were ever so confident in our ability to permanently separate a massively successful entertainer from an audience that still clamoured for his work. Even when Louis CK began popping up at comedy clubs in late 2018, the response from media folks and comedy scene critics was a chorus of “too soons” — as if their opinions mattered, when audiences at these events greeted him with wild applause.

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Meanwhile, not only did those who’d cancelled the comedian continue to act as if his redemption request was theirs to reject or approve, they also adamantly refused to sketch out a framework for how a #MeToo’d man might return to normal life. When pressed — if not now, when? if not like this, then how? — the answer was a shrug. Who knows? And more importantly, who cares? Eventually, this question would be turned back on the asker: how could you even ask about redemption for cancelled men when their victims were still reeling from the trauma? “How do you come back from having your mentor destroy your career? How to you come back from having your boss ask for sexual favours?” scolded an NPR interviewee. “Those are the questions I think we should be taking up, not how guys get to come back and have the next stage of their careers.”

In fact, in 2018 Louis CK was already showing signs that he’d reached the limit of his willingness to play this particular game of rhetorical Calvinball. He was done apologising when there was no forgiveness on offer, done asking permission to live from people who not only weren’t going to grant it, but were clearly getting off on rejecting his pleas for clemency. In one of his first appearances on stage after the scandal broke, he asked: “What, are you going to take away my birthday? My life is over, I don’t give a shit.”

This line was dismissed at the time as mere bitter raving from a washed-up nobody. Now, it feels like a pretty incisive indictment of the hubris that had taken hold amongst the movement’s most strident activists. After all, #MeToo had already managed to radically dilute the concept of sexual assault to include not just the Weinsteins of the world but also things like ghosting, cheating, or preferring that one’s partner wear a certain type of eye makeup during sexual activity.

Aziz Ansari was #MeToo’d for being too pushy while seeking consent during a hookup and failing to intuit that his date wasn’t enjoying herself. Al Franken was forced out of public life after what has since been widely acknowledged as a politically-motivated smear campaign by a Right-wing talk radio host. Ansel Elgort continues to be dogged by allegations of “grooming” based on a handful of years-old, flirtatious snapchat exchanges by the then 20 year-old with teenaged fans.

So you could be forgiven, as man after man was toppled for increasingly esoteric violations of the rapidly-evolving norms, for thinking that you could cancel pretty much anyone for anything.

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But in truth, the power of #MeToo to hold a cancelled man’s feet to the fire was already on the wane, diminishing with every renewed demand for more grovelling, more apologies, a few more slivers of flesh atop the pound that had already been collected. At the height of the movement’s influence, a choice was made: to be relentless, to rejoice in punishing those who not only transgressed but questioned the orthodoxy, and to scoff at the idea that these excesses might ever come back to haunt us. Had the movement gone too far? No! It hadn’t gone far enough!

It took a while to realise that we had created a toxic culture in which contrition was seen as pointless. And it was, ironically, the greatest gift the movement could give to its enemies: the courage that comes from having nothing to lose.

And now, we reap what we sowed. For all its influence over the discourse, and for all the scalps it’s collected from men who lacked the comeback capacity of someone like Louis CK, #MeToo cannot ultimately stop a popular entertainer from making money off his art — nor has it managed to persuade a plurality of people that the punishment for every weird sexual transgression should be permanent professional death.

One by one, the men we cancelled are coming back — if they ever left. Aziz Ansari is back on the comedy circuit. James Franco is still making movies. Christiano Ronaldo settled a lawsuit after a rape allegation and promptly returned to the soccer field. Ansel Elgort just starred in Spielberg’s West Side Story. The market, not the movement, still holds the power here.

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But more importantly, the refusal of #MeToo gatekeepers to even imagine that the men they toppled might not stay gone forever is exposing the movement itself as something far less groundbreaking than its most fervent adherents might have hoped. The promise of a better, fairer, more ethical framework for women’s workplace equality simply never came to pass — not least because we couldn’t bring ourselves to abandon the fantasy of throwing transgressors into the bin and letting them rot. And in our focus on punishment above all, we abandoned the principles that any real, working system of justice requires: of proportionate punishments that fit the crime. Of fairness and humility. Of a path back into grace for those who’ve transgressed but atoned.

Instead, the movement has been reduced to a revenge-seeking apparatus that takes grievances at one end and produces the instant gratification of an internet outrage cycle at the other. We were promised sweeping social change. What we got was a ritual spanking machine. And while some people might be sustained by this, riding the outrage rollercoaster from one cancellation to the next, it’s depressing to see it come to this — even as Louis CK and his Grammy award laugh all the way to the bank.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister echoed her response, saying that he is looking into “toughening measures for social media and streaming platforms which don’t tackle harmful content on their platforms”. SNP Councillor Julie McKenzie has called for Carr to be “prosecuted” along with “his applauding audience”. Liam Evans, it seems, was simply ahead of his time.

The key difference is that Liam Evans does not exist. The article was a hoax, intended to draw attention to the ideological drift of the mainstream media. (For those who are interested, if you take the fourth letter of every sentence in the article the true author is revealed.)

But the success of the hoax raised a number of questions. How is it that a national media organisation would publish such absurd and authoritarian drivel by a complete unknown? Are their editorial standards really so low? And does their decision to publish the article suggest that they support the author’s calls for comedy to be regulated by the state? If so, Liam Evans was simply a useful tool, someone the Independent could promote who was prepared to say the quiet part out loud.

There has always been satirical potential in hoaxing. In the Sixties, for instance, a series of letters was dispatched to the press by Mrs Edna Welthorpe, who was enraged by the depravity of Joe Orton’s farces, which were dominating the West End. Of Entertaining Mr Sloane, Welthorpe wrote: “I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion. And to be told that such a disgusting piece of filth now passes for humour!”

When an audience member wrote a letter of complaint to the Criterion Theatre about Orton’s Loot, Welthorpe responded directly, claiming that she was an employee and that the letter had been passed to her for filing. “Please, please, as a fellow Christian, let me applaud your design in writing to the Lord Chamberlain,” she wrote. “This truly horrible play shouldn’t contaminate our streets.”

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That Orton should assume a persona to fulminate against his own plays was simply his way of broadening the scope of his satirical work from the stage to the real world. He was obsessed with the sham gentility of a society that was, to his mind, essentially rotten. Orton loved to shock, perhaps because he was seemingly incapable of being shocked by anything. In his plays, he was able to take a hacksaw to those figures of authority he so despised, be they doctors, police officers, or any other breed of moralising hypocrite. But the hoax letters served a different purpose. They mocked their targets through the pretence of sympathy, effectively encouraging more of the kind of behaviour that his farces sought to lampoon.

This technique is the precursor to what we now call “trolling”. The term is often misused as a synonym for malicious and bullying online behaviour but, as traditionally understood, trolling is the art of coaxing people into a reaction. Motivations vary from troll to troll. For some, it is simply a matter of revelling in the gullibility of strangers. For others, the intention is to expose the vices and shortcomings of those in power.

Jonathan Swift was an early exponent of this kind of trolling in the creation of his alter-ego Isaac Bickerstaff, who wrote pamphlets which predicted, and then announced, the death of the astrologer John Partridge. Swift resented Partridge because of his attacks on the church, and must have been immensely gratified that Bickerstaff’s announcement had been taken on trust by so many. It is said that Partridge was thereafter continually having to fend off queries about his uncanny resemblance to a dead man.

Of course, many hoaxers are driven purely by self-interest. When, in 1806, Mary Bateman used concentrated vinegar to write “Christ is coming” onto her chicken’s eggs, and then charged members of the community to visit her “Prophet Hen of Leeds”, it is unlikely that she intended to make any kind of satirical point.

Yet one might argue that even in hoaxes of this kind there is some societal insight to be gleaned, however inadvertently. Mary Toft managed to destroy the reputations of a number of prominent surgeons who, in 1726, believed that she had given birth to rabbits. One of the king’s doctors, Nathaniel St. André, was so convinced that he published A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets. Soon after, William Hogarth produced his Cunicularii, which depicts Mary Toft in labour, surrounded by learned men of the medical profession, while multiple rabbits roam at their feet. If Toft was no satirist, she at least inspired some of the best of her age.

Perhaps the most celebrated instance of satirical hoaxing in our lifetime was Chris Morris’s television series Brass Eye (1997), which took aim at celebrity and media culture by inviting public figures to join campaigns against entirely fabricated social justice causes. In one episode, Bernard Manning, Rolf Harris and Noel Edmonds were enlisted to warn against the dangers of “cake”, a fictitious drug that, as Manning dutifully informed viewers, caused one girl to vomit out her own pelvis.

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In another episode, Nick Owen expounded on the dangers of “heavy electricity” which, due to the effect of “sodomised electrons” was “regularly flattening cattle in Sri Lanka”.  Then there was the radio DJ Neil Fox, who was tricked into making this astonishing claim: “Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now, that is scientific fact. There’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.”

Many of those duped by Morris were seemingly happy to read aloud any hogwash from an autocue in return for television exposure and the impression that they were on the right side of history. Such hoaxes could potentially be even more effective in today’s climate, with so many soft-witted celebrities eager to endorse fashionable but illiberal notions they barely understand. All major political, educational, artistic and corporate bodies are seemingly in submission to a new identity-obsessed religion of “social justice” that couches its regressive ideas in progressive terminology.

But, unlike the days of Brass Eye, the jesters are now in lockstep with these establishment lines, and so the most pertinent sources for satire are generally left untapped. They are, as Morris recently put it, more interested in “doing some kind of exotic display for the court” than exposing the follies of the powerful.

It is perhaps inevitable, then, that one of the most impressive hoaxes of recent years has come from outside the comedy industry. In October 2018, it was revealed that Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose had spent a year writing and submitting bogus academic papers to various journals in order to show how certain branches of the humanities were now routinely prioritising ideological goals over the pursuit of truth and knowledge. By the time the hoax was exposed, seven of their 20 articles had been accepted for publication, and a further seven were in the process of review.

As a work of satire, this project was an undoubted success. It provided evidence of what many had long suspected, that nonsensical ideas could thrive within the academy so long as they were camouflaged in vogueish jargon. One paper purported to be a study of the sexual activity of dogs in urban parks, and used this phoney data to draw conclusions about contemporary “rape culture”. Another argued that white male students ought to be chained to the floor during lessons as a form of reparation for slavery. Most audacious of all was the article based entirely on a chapter of Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of intersectional feminist theory.

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That all of these articles were accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals should have alerted academics to a troubling strain of corruption and fraudulence in their field. They should have resolved to rectify the problem, but instead chose to demonise and smear the hoaxers who had exposed it. When satirists hit on uncomfortable truths, they are rarely thanked for their efforts.

It has become a truism that we are living during a period in which satire and reality are not easily distinguishable. Ten years ago, headlines such as “Can my children be friends with white people?” and “Transgender man gives birth to non-binary partner’s baby with female sperm donor” would have been dismissed as the fevered concoctions of Viz or the National Enquirer (they are, in fact, from the New York Times and the Mirror).

For all that, there are opportunities to be seized in such a climate of institutionalised asininity. While trust in figures of authority is plummeting, and people are no longer sure who or what can be believed, the conditions are ripe for a new generation of Joe Ortons and Mary Tofts to cause some necessary mischief. In an age of unreason, the hoaxer can thrive.

In the UK, Hicks was acclaimed as the stand-up who might define the Nineties but back in the US he felt stuck. “Today he would be a mad prophet of the airwaves,” comedy manager Jimmy Miller says in Cynthia True’s Hicks biography American Scream. “He’d be on HBO, interviewing people, saying whatever’s on his mind. But back then the comedy business just hadn’t matured. They didn’t know what to do with him.” Miller said that in 2002. Twenty years on, Hicks, who died of cancer in 1994, wouldn’t need an HBO deal; he would be hosting a podcast.

Stand-ups played a foundational role in the podcast industry. In 2009, just as the format was becoming mainstream, Marc Maron launched the interview show WTF and Joe Rogan recorded the first episode of what became The Joe Rogan Experience. Two early podcast networks, Earwolf and Nerdist, were established by comedians; Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick compared podcasting to the comedy LP boom of the Sixties.

The symbiosis of comedy and podcasting isn’t hard to understand. Stand-ups love to hear themselves talk and a rambling chat is a much more congenial vehicle than the intense, time-consuming labour of writing and honing a tight one hour of killer material. With a successful podcast, a comedian can circumvent the usual gatekeepers and build a cultishly loyal fanbase without even having to leave the house or — and this is crucial — worry about being funny. What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster. Ba dum tss.

While old-fashioned one-liners and wry observations are doing just fine, many of the innovations in comedy are in the realm I call post-funny. Some of the most acclaimed comedian-fronted projects of recent years — including Master of None, Feel Good and Bo Burnham: Inside — see laughter as a secondary concern. The Closer, Dave Chappelle’s final Netflix special, is a prickly monologue about cancel culture and why he’s not actually transphobic, with occasional jokes. Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette was a Netflix sensation in 2018 precisely because Gadsby deconstructed her duty to make people laugh: “I must quit comedy. Because the only way I can tell my truth and put tension in the room is with anger.”

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By Alwyn Turner

Comedians increasingly want to be philosophers. (No philosophers want to be comedians, except perhaps Slavoj Žižek.) This can make them rather pompous. Over the weekend, Whitney Cummings tweeted: “Comedians did not sign up to be your hero. It’s our job to be irreverent and dangerous, to question authority and take you through a spooky mental haunted house so you can arrive at your own conclusions.” To which Marc Maron replied: “Maybe add ‘to be funny’ to the list.”

The first great philosopher-comic was Lenny Bruce. In Comedy at the Edge, Richard Zoglin describes the evolution of stand-up comedy between the Forties and the Seventies as “a long march from joke-telling to truth-telling”, with Lenny Bruce as its gung-ho general. Starting in 1953, he was not alone in reinventing comedy but he established a new template for the stand-up: raw, authentic, discomfitingly honest, ferociously intolerant of hypocrisy and cant and sometimes messy. Comedians in that mould couldn’t just make people laugh; they had to offer a point of view. “With Bruce a smile is not an end in itself, it is invariably a means,” wrote the critic Kenneth Tynan.

As Kliph Nesteroff explains in The Comedians, some critics didn’t consider what Bruce was doing to be comedy at all. Time complained that he “merely shouts angrily and tastelessly at the world”, while the Los Angeles Times deplored his “soaring, if uncertain, egotism rooted in the eroded soil of unlettered knowledge, snippets of cliché liberalism, borrowed erudition, and a conviction he has a Messianic message”. Bruce, who died of a drug overdose in 1966, claimed for comedians the radical freedom not to be funny all the time.

At that time, only three kinds of people enjoyed the privilege of speaking their minds to an audience for an hour: politicians, preachers and comedians. In fact, the priest delivering Bruce’s eulogy said “he was in a sense an evangelist, on a street corner”. After Bruce’s death, the baton of comedian as social critic passed to the likes of Richard Pryor (“the Picasso of our profession,” according to Jerry Seinfeld) and George Carlin, whose aphorisms now circulate, like Orwell’s or Gandhi’s, in the form of earnest Twitter memes.

These pioneers cast a long shadow. A 2017 Rolling Stone list of the best stand-ups of all time was topped by Pryor, Carlin and Bruce, with others in the same tradition — Louis CK, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle — close behind. At number 13 was Bill Hicks. “To me, the comic is the guy who says ‘Wait a minute’ as the consensus forms,” Hicks told the New Yorker in 1993. “He’s the antithesis of the mob mentality.”

The politics of this brand of comedy are, more often than not, libertarian. Comics want the freedom to say whatever they like as long as it’s funny so have often ended up on the frontlines of the battle for free speech. Bruce was twice tried on obscenity charges, while Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace when he performed his celebrated routine ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’ in 1972. When an English vicar complained of blasphemy in Bill Hicks’s 1992 show Revelations, he replied: “This is about freedom and freedom of speech and words can’t hurt you.”

The culture has changed somewhat since then. In comedy, at least, there are now more taboos on the Left than on the Right and the spectre of cancel culture is to someone like Chappelle what the NYPD was to Lenny Bruce, minus the court cases. In The Closer, Chappelle expresses the comedian’s licence to say anything in a less noble form than Hicks: “Comedians have a responsibility to speak recklessly. Sometimes the funniest thing to say is mean. Remember, I’m not saying it to be mean: I’m saying it because it’s funny.”

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This licence is immensely powerful. Take Jimmy Carr’s Roma Holocaust joke, for example. In the context of his recent Netflix special, it’s still, I think, grotesquely misjudged — but Carr goes on to talk about the forgotten victims of the Nazis and why he made the joke. It clearly didn’t shock the audience in the room, nor the huge number of people who watched the special during its first six weeks. It only became scandalous when a 40-second clip went viral on TikTok and Twitter: the land of no context.

Even in a stand-up environment, though, Chappelle’s disclaimer isn’t enough. I don’t buy the popular binary division between comedy that “punches up” (good) and the kind that “punches down” (bad). Comedy doesn’t cleave so neatly, and nor does society. But I’m equally unconvinced by the “just jokes” defence.

For one thing, it’s not the case that anything goes. No major comedian currently delivers the kind of racist jokes that were commonplace in the Seventies, however deftly constructed they might be. (Carr celebrates Black Lives Matter in his Netflix show before getting laughs out of the Roma.) For another, it’s inconsistently applied. Ricky Gervais has arguably replaced Richard Dawkins as Britain’s most famous atheist and on that issue he wants to be taken seriously. Increasingly, comedians want to say whatever they like even when they’re not being funny.

You can see this double standard at work in Jon Stewart’s famous appearance on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004. I agreed with Stewart that Crossfire was a toxic travesty of debate but notice how he positioned himself. When Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson criticised him for asking politicians soft questions, Stewart replied that he’s on Comedy Central: “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.” But when Carlson complained, “I thought you were going to be funny, come on, be funny,” Stewart said, “No, I’m not going to be your monkey.” Depending on the moment, he is Schrödinger’s comedian: just a funnyman but also not just a funnyman.

Rogan uses this trick, too. He would not be interviewing politicians, authors and epidemiologists if he were only about the laughs, but he keeps his comedian’s licence in his back pocket in case of emergency. Last April, Dr Anthony Fauci criticised him for advising young, healthy people not to get vaccinated. In his self-deprecating response, Rogan said: “I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking moron and I’m a cage fighting commentator who’s a dirty stand-up comedian who just told you I’m drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed. I’m not a respected source of information, even for me.”

This is very convenient. Rogan is half a conspiracy theorist: he has the curiosity but not the commitment. To his credit, he sometimes admits to being wrong. But he has that particular blend of scepticism (towards mainstream expertise) and credulity (towards anybody challenging it), so he becomes a conduit for false information, even when he’s not explicitly endorsing it. In the case of the present Spotify controversy, whether Rogan himself is an anti-vaxxer (he claims he isn’t) is a moot point if he is sympathetically conversing with vaccine sceptics to an audience of millions.

Russell Brand, too, has been described as “a powerful voice for anti-vaxxers”. He’s been on a journey. In 2013, Brand abruptly transformed himself from verbose dandy lothario into revolutionary seer in a Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman in which he urged people not to vote. His ensuing book, Revolution, was a peculiar mix of rehab memoir, New Age mysticism and solid policy proposals from Left-wing thinkers such as David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, liberally salted with self-deprecation: “I’m not Noam Chomsky, you’ve probably noticed; I’m happy to be Norman Wisdom.”

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During the pandemic, Brand’s obsession with political alienation and challenging official narratives has led him a long way from Piketty. The breathlessly clickbaity titles of his YouTube videos are often indistinguishable from those of the conservative guests he gently interviews on a regular basis: “Why The Left Can’t Handle Donald Trump”, “Vaccine Gold Rush: Do You Trust Gates?”, “They’re Eliminating FREE THOUGHT!! Billionaires’ Plan To CONTROL The Internet”, the latter bearing the hashtag #GeorgeSoros.

Brand claims that he is “breaking down the news, providing you with information you won’t get in mainstream media”. Is it true? It doesn’t matter. “What do I know?” he says in a recent video defending Rogan. “What could I claim to know? I’ve never been to university or higher education of any kind, except for showing-off school.” To his fans, of course, this makes him all the more reliable: one of them, not one of Them. That video is called “The Truth”.

Comedians should be free to switch lanes, but when Al Franken runs for the US Senate, or David Baddiel writes Jews Don’t Count, they aren’t doing so as comedians and they are making a choice. Comedians who express political opinions through the discipline of stand-up (a discipline which inevitably tests and sharpens those opinions) are also making a choice. Just as a musician has more freedom in a protest song than in an essay, or a film-maker more liberty in a drama based on a true story than in a documentary, the criteria are relatively clear. Rogan and Brand raise an interesting question: does the privilege of comedy apply even when you’re not doing comedy?

I do wonder if Hicks, with his nascent taste for conspiracy theories and spiritual self-discovery, would have wound up in a similar role. 70 years after Lenny Bruce’s comedy revolution, Rogan and Brand represent a very modern, very online mutation which is both post-funny and post-truth-telling. Rather than establishing a point of view and crafting it into a routine, they offer a muddy, non-committal version of “anything goes” in which misinformation is simply another interesting idea for the open-minded to consider and pushback is establishment intolerance of free speech.

By hedging their bets, they have achieved a freedom that Carlin and Hicks could only have dreamt of. If you say they should clarify their own positions, or take responsibility for the opinions they promote, well, they say, they’re comedians, not intellectuals. Why so serious?

Sitting respectfully in our ‘pews’, we put our hands together… and clap. This is not a service but a comedy night. And Amsterdam’s newest ‘church’ is really a theatre for debate and cultural centre in disguise. Incensed by the illogical nature of the current Dutch coronavirus restrictions, Yoeri Albrecht, director of De Balie, last week changed the statutes of his organisation and registered it with the chamber of commerce as a faith-based movement: overnight, The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason was born.

It is unlikely to be the last. His example, a group of Dutch mayors predicted wryly in an open letter to the government, is likely to mark the start of “an unprecedented religious revival in the coming weeks”.

The Netherlands has been in partial or full lockdown since November, primarily due to the pressure of patients with the Delta variant on the hospital system and one of Europe’s least efficient booster campaigns. But just over a week ago, the restrictions were loosened — albeit in a strikingly surreal fashion.

In the Netherlands today, brothels can open but museums can’t. You can sweat, unmasked, in a gym but you can’t sit in a bar nursing a quiet gin. “You can come together in the Veluwe [in the country’s Bible Belt] to talk about a 2,000-year-old book, but you can’t get together in Amsterdam to talk about a book from last month,” as Albrecht put it.

So last Friday night, I was among 50 people who snuck into De Balie under the cover of darkness — for fear of the police turning up — who signed a big, black book to join the community, and prepared to enjoy a night of much-missed comedy. “The Philosophical Society; the Community of Reason is about democracy and the rule of law, the solace and consolation of culture, experiencing something together that culture can give, seeing a bit of light after two years of darkness,” said Albrecht – something of an unusual opening blessing.

Everything about the evening was as absurd as the situation in the Netherlands. The crowd devoutly wore face masks and staff religiously scanned coronavirus ‘QR code passes’. But the comics were not announced in advance, photos and recording were banned, and the whole affair had the illicit frisson of an under-age boozing session.

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Yet De Balie is far from alone in its rebellion. Across the Netherlands, bars and restaurants have been opening regardless of the restrictions – especially in towns near the German and Belgian borders. On Saturday, for instance, 30 hospitality venues threw open their doors in Horst aan de Maas in protest. Last Wednesday, some 70 museums and galleries around the country decided to ‘open’ as temporary hairdressers, beauty salons and gyms – including world-renowned institutions such as the Van Gogh Museum, the Concertgebouw, and Amsterdam’s oldest theatre, De Kleine Komedie.

“We have a problem with the fact that hairdressers and nail bars and commercial activities can be open, and we can’t,” explained Van Gogh Museum director Emilie Gordenker. “We support everything we need to do in order to keep people safe. But this policy just seems contradictory and it seems to favour the commercial sector over the cultural one.”

Even the Dutch government appears to recognise this inconsistency. In a bizarre moment during a recent press conference, Mark Rutte emphasised that the Dutch have a constitutional right to protest, and that temporary openings could be viewed in this regard. “The right to demonstrate also applies to sectors like the hospitality industry, and I can imagine that mayors could look at ‘what’s allowed for a little while’… with the emphasis on ‘a little while’,” he said. “So if they want to open for a few hours to show ‘we are demonstrating’, then it’s up to the mayors how they deal with that.”

If it was an attempt to shunt on responsibility for enforcing his restrictions to local government (even though this is actually their structural role in the Netherlands), it soon backfired. Last week, 31 mayors — including Amsterdam chief Femke Halsema and non-conformist Breda mayor Paul Depla — wrote to the Government, pointing out that short-term policy-making is “reaching its limits” and putting local enforcers in a perilous position against a growing mood of civic disobedience. “It is in fact impossible but also undesirable for the state to use repression to forcibly convince Dutch citizens that the measures are correct,” they pointed out.

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Ahead of the Government’s next coronavirus press conference tomorrow, it also emerged at the weekend that the country’s medical advisory body, the Outbreak Management Team, wants cultural and hospitality venues to reopen alongside everything else until 8pm each day.

No doubt it would be a welcome move; but is it too little too late? In the Netherlands, the damage from these lockdowns has become increasingly evident. In the government’s most recent press conference, new health minister Ernst Kuipers admitted that two-thirds of young people are suffering from loneliness. Even since the November partial lockdown, the SCP, a social and cultural government think tank, has found that psychological wellbeing had dropped, particularly among the young.

And as for the affected industries, it’s unlikely that, even if the restrictions are lifted, business will be able to return to normal any time soon. Thousands of people working in the hospitality and culture sectors have simply given up and looked for work elsewhere. Many will be in coronavirus quarantine, after coming into contact with someone who has been infected. And for those who do want to return, it won’t simply be a matter of turning up to work the day after an announcement is made. An orchestra can’t just suddenly pick up bows and be ready to perform again next week: they need advance notice to plan.

“You see that the Netherlands is mentally exhausted with the pandemic and all of the restrictions — young people but also a lot of others,” said Concertgebouw managing director Simon Reinink on Wednesday, as the orchestra gave a protest rehearsal in front of a crowd of 50 people. “The one thing that can give meaning to life is the cultural sector. There has been a chronic underestimation of the importance of culture for people’s psychological health and wellbeing — and this is a huge problem.”

And as more rules are broken, mainstream civic disobedience risks becoming a habit; this is a country where ‘rules’ (like soft drug laws) are already treated flexibly and even the prime minister admits society tends to be “slightly anarchistic”. “Rules only work if they rest upon social and political agreement,” pointed out the group of mayors in their letter last week. “For example, almost everyone in the Netherlands understands and respects the importance of stopping for a red light. Enforcement powers are there to bring the few offenders into line and issue fines.”

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Despite last week’s mini-revolts, that remains a sentiment shared by most of the country. While “wappie” Dutch vaccine sceptics and pugilistic rioters sometimes make a lot of noise, 89.2% of the population is double jabbed, and almost 55% are boosted. Most of us have done our bit, we’ve followed the rules, despite their inconsistency and blunt capriciousness.

But all the signs suggest that we have reached a turning point: the latest reports suggest that while mostly-Omicron coronavirus infections are ramping up, the number of people needing hospital treatment is relatively stable.

Humour has long been a magic ingredient in unlocking political change. In the medieval court, jesters had an almost unique privilege in being able to tell the monarch what he didn’t want to hear, and were often tasked with presenting bad news. In totalitarian regimes humour was a daily act of undermining the regime, to the extent that on Stalin’s death 200,000 of the Gulag’s 2.5m population were there for telling jokes.

In recent years, unpalatable political ideas have often been presented under the cover of humour. Nigel Farage, Britain’s most successful politician of the early 21st century, has always employed a particularly English jocularity to sell what was a controversial platform, laughing us out of the EU eventually. But he’s not alone – in Italy and the Ukraine, comedians have risen to very highest office, and France may be next.

Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals that “through humour much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously”. Or as comedian Andrew Doyle put it: “You’re far more likely to remember a joke than an argument.” But perhaps because we live in such a serious and pious climate, the authorities have never been more scared of jokes.

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The West's cultural revolution is over

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Earlier this year an EU report warned that online memes were a menace to society, potentially dangerous to social peace. These memes, it said, are being used “to rebrand extremist positions in an ironic guise, blurring the lines between mischief and potentially radicalising messaging. The result is a nihilistic form of humour that is directed against ethnic and sexual minorities and deemed to inspire violent fantasies — and eventually action.”

The document identified a number of popular Right-wing memes, including Pepe the Frog and Wojak, the former symbolising “a kind of superior nonchalance toward others, helping to normalise hostile attitudes toward minorities and political opponents” and “anti-elite arrogance and condescension”.

Pepe the Frog became a household name about five years ago during an election that involved humour to an unusual degree. At the start of September 2016, after Hilary Clinton had made a speech attacking her opponents as a “basket of deplorables”, Donald Trump Jr posted on Instagram a doctored photo of the Sylvester Stallone film The Expendables replaced with The Deplorables, with a line-up of Trumpians, including the Donald, his even more repellent son, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and… Pepe the Frog.

Pepe was originally a harmless cartoon amphibian who occasionally peed himself, so old in internet terms that he first appeared on MySpace, back in 2005, and it was only in 2015 that it begun to be adopted by users of the notorious 4chan website.

When Trump announced his candidacy in June that year countless images of Pepe wearing a Make America Great Again cap began appearing on the site, seen as a veritable womb of trolling. Clinton then denounced Pepe as a symbol of white supremacism, joining a long list of often arcane supposed white nationalist signals, from milk to the okay sign.

The frog came to represent an online movement of meme-creating, often involving quite creative pranks. During that election, countless online comment pieces and reports focused on the influence of 4chan, written with the horror of a strait-laced reporter investigating the dangerous phenomenon of Mods or hippies (and continuing a long history of journalists misunderstanding the site). Trump’s win was viewed as a sort of 4chan troll that got out of hand, or as one user put it: “We actually elected a meme as president.”

Some of the site’s users were clearly delighted about the election win, but it seemed primarily motivated by the pain it would cause to pious, sanctimonious actors, hysterical commentators and the rest of the progressive establishment. The meme-creating trolls aim to shock and to wind up, and journalists – privileged, pompous and partisan – are obvious targets.

It’s this very organic nature of memes that makes them effective, an in-joke magnified. They cannot really be controlled or faked. Their power depends on who is using them, and the Meme life cycle means that, by the time a 43-year-old journalist is writing about a meme, it’s probably dead.

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Authenticity is the key, and Clinton’s attempt at making popular cultural references aimed at younger voters always sounded flat. Similarly, just as Hillary’s Twitter account was clearly written by a group of insufferable Ivy League graduates, especially crafted for the election strategy, Trump’s tweets were obviously written by the mad bastard himself; they were authentic, just as he was authentic, and, despite his immense faults as a human being, also very funny.

Many memes aren’t necessarily far-Right or even Right-wing but are just socially obscene, which is basically the same thing now. For example, Norf FC, a satire of English football fans, would certainly be considered “problematic”, to use the language of sanctimonious bores who police discourse. Originating on 4chan, it’s decidedly offensive but also funny, at its best a modern-day Hogarth, making fun of certain aspects of English life, including the English abroad, their obsession with football above all else, and their tendency to drink and fight. But it has also expanded organically to cover our history, including the Napoleonic Wars and the Roman invasion. (A remake of Our Island Story but illustrated with Norf FC would make an excellent book).

Then there is Wojak, perhaps the most popular of Right-wing memes, and arguably the bleakest. The EU report describes how the meme “has gradually been adapted and advanced by far-Right meme culture to portray liberals with blank expressions” who “do not question the information that comes from mainstream press and politics”.

One of the earliest variations of Wojak was NPC, or Non-Player Character Wojak, a grey, lifeless figure who repeats empty phrases like ‘‘The future is female” and “Reality has a liberal bias”. “NPC” comes from online gaming, and reflects the view that most of the population are mindlessly conformist, lapping up the low-brow mass culture which carries a shallow progressive message, and repeating it.

Wojak has evolved into various other forms — Withered Wojak is a favourite, often used in response to the latest self-harm masquerading as life advice spread by journalists and other opinion formers, or to children being exposed to drag queens, or the most recent race-baiting directives from on high. He represents despair that this will never be over and will only get worse.

Then there is Soyjak, who with his mouth agape in pathetic admiration is not just physically unimpressive, but mentally emasculated, desperate to win the approval of women and of polite society. The name stems from the common Right-wing belief that the consumption of soy reduces testosterone, while the facial expression – also known as “cuckface” – comes from the idea that an open mouth is associated with lower social status and submissiveness among male primates. This was a scientific theory first posted on a 4chan messageboard, which is good enough citation for me.

Soyjak is often paired with Gigachad, a manly, ubermensch figure (in reality an Azeri model called Ernest Khalimov, who apparently is vaguely aware of how his image has become a meme but otherwise lives a wholesome life far away from this madness). Soyjak and Gigachad often appear together in memes, the former hysterical about something of little real importance, the latter relaxed and happy, unafflicted by modernity-afflicted neurosis.

Strangely, the Soyjak and Gigachad meme has its antecedent in Soviet propaganda about cuckface factory bosses and Gigachad communists. However, the muscle-bound Gigachad is a sort of Right-wing masculine ideal, although a cynic might suspect that most of the people posting these memes have a stronger resemblance to Soyjak (just a wild guess).

Some of the memes are funny and imaginative; “Should have let us grill” pays tribute to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matters protesters trespassing on their estate. It’s a play on “grillpill”, a Left-wing meme about babyboomers and their “I don’t care about politics, I just wanna grill” mindset. The McCloskey meme, in contrast, laments a hellish progressive world where everything is political and no one can be left to grill in peace without being bothered by ideological fanatics. Those ideologues now seem to be in control, which explains why so many popular memes come from the Right; hence the popular expression “The Left can’t meme” – which is a meme itself.

If this is the first art form since the late 19^th century in which the Right has dominated, that only reflects who is in control of culture, and particular its taboos; it’s the very willingness of meme-creators to upset these taboos that the likes of the EU Commission find so disturbing, since without them all sorts of social norms might break down.

Yet that is what art has often sought to do. While writers, playwrights and artists from the late 19^th century increasingly saw themselves in moral opposition to the establishment — the monarch, the church, even to bourgeoise sexual morality — since the 1960s progressives have taken over the commanding heights of culture both in the United States and Britain, meaning that much of the art world has lost the place of opposition in which it feels most comfortable.

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Revolutionaries in the past have faced a similar problem. The EU report looked at the possibilities of “attempting to counter extremist humour with a form of alternative humour”, which it concedes is very difficult, and this is indeed what was attempted after the revolution in Russia. There, political jokes were banned as “anti-Soviet propaganda” and were replaced “with their own brand of dull official humour, which they disseminated in satirical magazines”, in the words of Ben Lewis, author of Hammer and Tickle.

These new official jokes were often about peasant stupidity, or when they made fun of the system, it was because it wasn’t being properly implemented by local officials; the beliefs behind that system were sacrosanct. As a result “there were now two kinds of humour: official and unofficial – the written and the spoken, the public and the private. In the censored void, a culture of the spoken joke would develop, a collective satirical work produced by the whole population”.

A similar pattern occurred in the West when, following our cultural revolution, new taboos replaced old ones, but mainstream humour failed to maintain its role of undermining them. Satirical comedy stopped laughing at prevailing ideas but instead, with Michael Moore and then The Daily Show, began making stupid peasants – older, rural Republican voters – the punchline.

The same is true in Britain, where the Right has limited political power and the Left has unlimited cultural power; following the American lead with Wojak-like conformity, British clapter-comedy such as the Mash Report, where the audience applauds rather than laughs, has made the political out-group the butt of jokes, while avoiding the sort of unspoken, absurd truths that make political humour bite.

The same is largely true of consciously “anti-woke” comedy, much of which is very poor quality; or, if I were to be charitable, is aimed at older people. Perhaps it is because it employs a similar tactic to clapter, using a political out-group as a punchline, without in any way hitting a taboo. Memes, in contrast, are more provocative and darker, coming from a place of genuine contempt and despair.

Whoever the people making it, anything that grinds away at taboos is going to be at least mildly funny; laughter is a release from social norms. When I was a child, there was still the great British tradition of schoolboys drawing pictures of penises on religious figures in books, an almost instinctive desire to shock and mock; it’s funny because of the reaction it would provoke. Today even publicly desecrating Christ barely registers, yet when a pissed Man City fan drew a willy on a Marcus Rashford mural it led to a public meltdown — and even a vigil — because of a fear it had broken our number one taboo, race.

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It’s not that the Left can’t meme, it’s just that Left-wing beliefs don’t trigger taboos, even quite extreme Left-wing beliefs, so there is no need for them to employ the memetic equivalent of criminal cant to conceal their views. The sort of internet culture epitomised by 4chan aims to shock, and as the prevailing culture has become more progressive and censorious, it has grown more outrageous in blaspheming that new moral code.

If the likes of Wojak are popular, it’s partly because the cultural atmosphere feels quite heavy at times, so much so that many conservatives live a sort of coded existence in public life, the equivalent of taqiyya, the Shia Muslim practice of shielding your true opinions. They can either learn to keep their views quiet, or heavily-qualified, or they can become social pariahs. Humour, especially arcane, coded humour, is an escape.

Offensive as these memes are to polite society, the idea that Pepe and Wojak are going to normalise extreme-Right politics, or even centre-Right politics, is outlandish. Much of the time they are shared to provoke, or as a joke, but it’s also the case that much of the online Right is play-acting anyway, whether pretend trads or fake fascists – they’re all the children of liberalism. The problem is that, like the Russian revolutionaries before them, the post-1968 progressives now find themselves no longer rebels but rulers, and facing the difficult task of policing social norms and keeping the peasants in line.

The complex relationship between leaders and satirists is as old as politics itself. Aristophanes attacks Socrates in his comedies, Plato accuses Aristophanes of misrepresentation and whipping up the mob. Nearly two and a half thousand years before the invention of the internet, the same issues surface again and again: hypocritical public figures, comedic put-downs, public anger, the manipulation of public anger. But have satirists ever had this much of the upper hand? Those who would expose political deceit have so many more means of detecting hypocrisy — cameras in Government offices, for heaven’s sake — and increasing access to audiences to expose it to.

The jester used to sit in the corner of the royal court, occasionally telling the truth about the king in the apparently innocuous form of comedic banter. Now the jester has a court of his own. Sometimes he is better paid than his targets. He may have a larger public profile, perhaps even more political clout that those he mocks. As the satirist Steve Punt joked on Private Passions, there are some young people who watch Have I Got News For You but won’t watch the news itself. Comedians have real power in holding politicians to account; but how do we hold them to account?

Part of the trouble is to be found in the complex eddies of truth that swirl around the notion of hypocrisy. The exposure of hypocrisy is the satirist’s stock in trade. The danger however is that the satirist can all too easily presume that he or she is above it. As R. Jay Magill writes in his fascinating little book on Sincerity, “satirists mean sincere things by saying them insincerely, hypocrites say sincere things but actually mean them insincerely.” In other words, despite their superficially self-deprecating irony, the purpose of the satirist is one of deep sincerity and moral seriousness. They possess the true heart, so beloved of religious Puritans since the sixteenth century.

And this may be part of the problem: the mocker becomes the moral hero. Those who would cast our political life as a parade of stupidity and hypocrisy understand themselves to be above the very things they point to in others. Often, we don’t even know who they are. Who produced all those Hancock memes? I have no idea. And no idea whether their own lives match up to the moral seriousness they see lacking in their target.

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One explanation for our increasing concern with sincerity — with whether people are who they say they are — is that it came about following the Industrial Revolution, as people moved from a settled rural life to an increasingly transitory urban one. In the rural village setting, if you are born and die in the same place, people can eventually work out who you are. If you say one thing and do another, others notice. Your true nature emerges over time. But when people move about more frequently, the question of whether someone is as they profess to be becomes much trickier to establish.

Something similar is also produced by the way our relationships are now so mediated by technology. Where there is a screen between you and me, I no longer feel I have access to the social cues that can reassure me of your sincerity. In such a context, we often insist upon our own sincerity by signalling it to others in increasingly deliberate ways. Ironically, there then becomes something increasingly artificial about the profession of sincerity – which only intensifies the cycle of distrust and the need for a more genuine expression of sincerity. With so much work, and even socialising, done on Zoom, the whole of our lives seem to resemble a kind of demonic Turing Test, an attempt to work out the truth of the other at some impossibly digital distance.

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By Sarah Ditum

There are many echoes of the past here. The Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries were gripped by the fear that others did not sincerely hold to the faith that they professed. Was the conversion of others genuine? Or was it mere outward performance? How could you tell? It is no coincidence that with this Puritan anxiety came a new proliferation of testimonies and autobiographies, all attempts to show the inner self to the outside world, proving sincerity.

Much has been made of the idea that we are now in an age of New Puritanism, a new era of moral intensity. Some call it woke, but I wonder if the more interesting comparison is with the anxiety about sincerity. As our lives are more mediated by technology, and as the wearing of masks has become standard practice, the question of the truthfulness of the other is once again intensified. The very word hypocrisy derives etymologically from the Greek for play acting, referencing actors who wore masks on stage. Now we all wear masks. And so now the question of hypocrisy has intensified, generating renewed social anxiety.

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This is where the satirists come in, and why they are the crack troops of the New Puritanism. Imbued with a sense of moral righteousness, they set about trying to unmask the deceivers. And politicians make for a ready and easy target. Don’t get me wrong, they often deserve it. And satire is a vital component of a society saturated with bullshit, political and otherwise. But the rise in the importance of, and our need for, satire is also a consequence of the weakening of the social bonds that used to form the basis for our mutual understanding. Increasingly, is is also a consequence of the kind of mediated and distanced lives we are being forced to live through technology.

Like the Puritans of old, we are obsessed with the fact that others might not be as they seem, with hypocrisy, with transparency. And like the Puritans, we are obsessed with parading our inner righteousness in moral testimonies for all to see, making public demonstrations of sincerity. We now call this virtue signalling — which is not about younger people being more self-righteous, but more about the need to demonstrate moral sincerity in a context where so many of the traditional mechanisms for establishing it have collapsed.

In the end, however, the old-style Puritans had God to settle the matter. He alone would know the secrets of your heart, He alone would unmask the truth. The new-style Puritans give this role to The Now Show and Mock the Week.

But immediately after the first episode aired, it was clear that The Office would defy these mediocre expectations. I was working in the TV industry, and I remember an unusual flurry of surprised, word-of-mouth recommendations pinging round the pre-social media internet the very next day. Gervais had taken the mockumentary genre pioneered by Morton — with no laughter track and an unseen supposed documentary camera crew — and rocket-powered it.

There were big laughs to be had in The Office, but much of its excellence was found in smaller moments located in the excruciating gap between the characters’ projected self-image and the tawdry reality. Unlike the hapless Roy Mallard of People Like Us or the often-surreal Alan Partridge, David Brent, Gervais’s character, made your entire body clench with mortifying shame. He thinks he is a cheeky barrel of fun who keeps everyone else’s spirits up. “You will never work in a place like this again,” he says. “You’ll never have another boss like me, someone who’s basically a chilled-out entertainer.” Meanwhile it’s obvious to everybody that he is weapons-grade cringe.

But we loved him. After a very shaky start, the ratings for an unusually swift repeat of the first series jumped up, and the final episode got the highest figures of Christmas 2003, now on BBC1. Then, The Office’s enormous success transformed British comedy forever. While it had always had an element of cringe, from Twelfth Night’s Malvolio to Basil Fawlty, cringe now went from being one of the side plates to being the main course. Awkwardness had to be a central feature.

For the next two decades, most of our comedy successes (with two notable exceptions) have been riffing off The Office’s template. Peep Show, The Thick Of It, Gavin and Stacey, Friday Night Dinner — they are all comedies of embarrassment and verging-on-painful unease, filmed entirely in real locations with no laughter track, and greater or lesser amounts of men’s clumsiness and gaucheness. (In fact, there’s a curious cultural disconnect between how we exhort men to open up about their emotions for the sake of their mental health, and then laugh at them when they do.)

But we have cringed too much for too long. At its best (Gavin and Stacey, Derry Girls), cringe comedy revels in the silly little ways we socialise. The terrifying pub quiz and Red Nose Day episodes of The Office set the gold standard for this. At its worst, cringe comedy is ungenerous, snarky and sneering: take the passive-aggressiveness of Louis Theroux with a guileless expression, trying to trip up one of his victims.

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And this is the side that has become dominant, though also darker and snarkier to still have an impact. We are beset, today, by low-on-gags comedy-dramas, often set far from the workaday world of Wernham Hogg. The Office now looks almost sweet and innocent by comparison.

There is a weary and wearying sneer to Channel 4’s recent Back, the latest offering from Mitchell and Webb, which is almost entirely cringe and very little com. “As drearily British as Brexit!” gushed the Guardian’s five-star review, which really tells you all you need to know about this grim, wan tale of “broken masculinity”. Hi-de-Hi! it ain’t.

But British comedy wasn’t always like this. Mainstream, studio-based sitcoms with a live audience and a broad appeal were the mainstay not so very long ago, before technology fragmented society. There were hours of this stuff, good and bad, dotted around the schedules. Now, the communal, uplifting, broad belly laughs of the studio sitcom are regarded as terminally dated and naff. Tellingly, Extras, Ricky Gervais’s project after The Office, was about the cringe of making such a show — shop-floor comedy When The Whistle Blows, with its catchphrases (“Are you ‘avin a laugh?”) and stock characters (the thick one, the brainy one). Meanwhile, the astonishing ratings success of Mrs Brown’s Boys and Miranda (the notable exceptions from before) didn’t register in the zeitgeist of creatives. It’s as if their eyes can see them, and their brains register the information, but they never act on it; they never think of tailoring their output to what people actually like, rather than what they think people ought to like.

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This current lack of uplifting, mass-appeal comedy has lent a curious sheen to the forgotten staples of old. I recently revisited Me And My Girl, an Eighties ITV studio sitcom about a single father and his teenage daughter. It’s the kind of uplifting, jolly fare that seemed ho-hum back then, but which now looks like a work of staggering genius: it has a lightness of touch, likeable characters, a warm heart and, crucially, lots and lots and lots of jokes, with a very high strike rate.

Unfortunately, the supposedly important, talkative demographics who hold huge sway decided such stuff was rubbish, so we chucked it. This despite the fact that nobody much is watching the supposedly important people’s programmes: the most recent Alan Partridge struggled to raise a million viewers on Friday night prime time. Prestige has become more important than getting bums on seats. Meanwhile Dad’s Army, on its zillionth repeat, is still often the highest-rated show of any kind on BBC2.

Producing a show so bouncy and cheering — light, but with just enough ballast to keep it from floating off like an untethered balloon — turned out to be a special kind of alchemy. And it has become almost impossible to recreate deliberately what had happened by accident. But, then, TV channels can only pour out of a jug what is going into the jug. Wider cultural and social changes have ripped up the desire to make populist comedies. And you can’t produce something the viewers would like to see if nobody wants to make it.

In fact, Ricky Gervais said last year that The Office would not get made today, as any kind of nuance and context is too much of a risk in the age of the Twitter mob. We forget at our peril that laughter is a vent for the release of steam under pressure.

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When I started out in television in the mid-Nineties, it was a very different place. The prestige, progressive TV sector  — middle-class and socially conscious — was still boxed off, and regarded with some suspicion by executives whose main concern was snaring large audiences. You might still encounter “creatives” who didn’t have a university degree. Such people are now vanishingly rare.

The very idea that TV is primarily entertainment and diversion is now looked upon with suspicion. Something of supposed social value has to be attached. And it is nearly always the same thing, coming from the same middle-class, Remain-y place, with all its cemented doctrines, dished out as if it were the original and startlingly innovative telling of truth to power. Recently the Daleks, Inside No. 9 and even the BBC adaptation of The Pursuit Of Love gave us a good scolding for Brexit. This is not art, not even low art, but mutual masturbation.

There was always a gap between the people who make television and the people who watch it. But that has now become a chasm, as with many other areas of public life. Viewers are low-status and embarrassing. They need to be jolly well educated, whether they like it or not. The mass audience, though, can smell this stuff a mile away, and it finds something else to do. It doesn’t want to sit down after a hard day’s work only to be scolded. It’s no coincidence that the biggest TV hits — Strictly, Bake-Off, Love Island — are not trying to improve or lecture people; the dropping off in viewing figures is not solely the result of technology and the proliferation of choice.

So While The Office revolutionised TV comedy, it also ruined it. It wasn’t trying to improve us. In fact, it depended on us being a bit silly, a bit worn-out, a bit impatient with the way things are — but never all that committed to change. Just like its characters, that is. And if it were to want to make a comeback, it would have to sack off the sneer and snark, and start loving the office workers of Slough, again.

Coming on stage to an enthusiastic audience chant of “You fat bastard!”, Chubby Brown was a skittle-shaped, bespectacled figure wearing a garish patchworked suit, topped with 1930s flying helmet and goggles. He’d greet the audience – “Ey-oop, cunts!” – and then for the next ninety minutes he’d deliver an old-fashioned mix of one-liners, stories and songs. His material centred on sex, full of women who were up for it and women who were not, men who were frustrated or cuckolded or who had fantasies way out of their league; above all, it was rooted in his own grubbily implausible exploits and failures. Like the suit, the act was a vulgar, bastardised reminiscence of Max Miller half a century earlier, delivered with foul-mouthed glee.

He wasn’t welcome on television, but he built a sizeable audience with audio cassettes in the Eighties (Thick as Shit, Fucked If I Know, Kiss My Arse), and then with live videos and ultimately DVDs. They emerged every November and did very good festive business: in the run-up to Christmas 2009, his Too Fat to Be Gay was reported to be outselling Hello Wembley!, the latest Michael McIntyre release.

The two men could not have been further apart, in terms of style, appeal, even geography. As its title suggested, the BBC-approved McIntyre had recorded his DVD during his record-breaking six-night stint at the Wembley Arena, London; Brown’s was filmed at the Civic Hall, Wolverhampton. His heartlands were not London and the south-east; over the course of the Noughties he also filmed in Billingham, Birmingham (twice), Blackpool, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northampton and Stoke-on-Trent.

His live audience was mostly male, almost exclusively white, rarely sober. They were considerably younger than him, and they were working class. “I entertain lorry drivers, road sweepers and people like that,” he said. “Fitters, welders.” You were more likely to encounter lagered-up lads on a stag weekend than students on a gap year.

Amid the filth, there were occasional dips into politics. “I was a Labour man all my life,” he reflected in an interview. “My father was a Labour man. We’re not posh people, we’re off council estates.” His response to the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013 was to put ten minutes of abuse into his act: “Where I’m from, everybody hated her.”

He wasn’t New Labour, though. “So what has Iraqi freedom meant to you, then?” he challenged his audience. “Is your petrol cheaper? Does your lager taste better? Are you getting more pussy than you can handle?” Behind the typically earthy set of priorities, there lay a distinct lack of interest in “punching above our weight’”. And he was clear where he stood on Iraq. “Tony Blair should be hung,” he said in an interview. “He got us into a war that we should not have been involved in.”

And then there was the racist material, a minor but significant strand. Some of these gags were constructed in conventional fashion. “They’re fucking taking over,” he’d say (assuming we knew who “they” were); “before long, that fish shop’ll be called fucking Harry Ramadan’s.” Other bits, though, didn’t quite work as comedy. “I’m not saying that all Muslims are terrorists,” ran one line. “But isn’t it funny how all terrorists are fucking Muslims?” The rhythm is right, but the structure promises wordplay that doesn’t come. That was unusual. Brown wrote his own material and was a good technician — he had to be to achieve and sustain his level of success — yet when it came to immigration, he seemed to neglect his craft. And there were occasions when there was simply no joke at all, just frustration: “I don’t mind asylum seekers driving taxis, but I wish they’d learn to speak fucking English.”

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That line got a massive roar from his audience. It wasn’t, though, a howl of hatred. Rather it resembled the dark delight of a football crowd cheering a particularly heavy tackle by a defender who was one of their own. He was the village idiot, licensed to say the unsayable on behalf of the serfs, to mock the morals that govern society, and ridicule the po-faced puritans who would police speech and culture. This stuff didn’t have to be crafted; simply the fact that it was uttered was sufficient. The audience reaction was the punchline.

Brown was, in effect, creating a bubble in which normal rules didn’t apply, a place where impure thoughts could be spoken aloud. But it was very definitely a comedy gig, not a political rally. The audience was not being incited by the clown onstage, not being wound up and charged to go out into the world. On the contrary, the roar sounded like a release of tension, so that the punters might return to normal life, having been purged. It was a comic catharsis.

It did, though, have a political element. Brown said in a 2007 interview that he’d noticed a change in how this material was being received. “When asylum seekers first started coming here I was talking about it on stage, but now that it’s in the news, when I talk about it people are on their feet applauding.” And he was clear that he meant what he said in his act: “behind every joke a comedian makes there’s a serious point”. The roar of approval was also the sound of the audience registering their acknowledgement of the serious point.

“I’m not a racist, or a sexist,” he protested, when those charges were laid against him; “I’m a humorist”. But the vocabulary alone — with its “poofters” and “cunts” — was enough to see him condemned. And increasingly he faced restrictions on where he could perform. Many of the medium-sized theatres in the country were owned by local councils, and there were some, particularly Labour administrations, who didn’t like the idea of him being on their property. He was banned at various times from civic venues in, among others, Ashfield, Bradford, Cambridge, Cardiff, Egremont, Hamilton, Ipswich, Leeds, Leicester, Llandudno, Oldham, even his home town of Middlesbrough.

Those bans enhanced his outsider status, but they were also a threat to his livelihood, and they left him bemused. “Compared to Jimmy Carr’s act, I’m like the archbishop of Canterbury,” he protested.

It was an intriguing comparison to invite. Because Carr’s material was based on a similar offence against politically correct politeness, with jokes about disability, homosexuals, paedophilia, the Holocaust, rape, domestic violence. The same could be said of Frankie Boyle. Each was creating a comfortably unsafe space where people could come together and listen to wicked thoughts that were forbidden in the real world. They were doing what comedians have always done: cheeking their betters, poking fun at public morality, pointing up the fallen nature of humanity and the frailties of the human body. And a huge part of the appeal was saying naughty things that jarred with the state-endorsed, non-judgemental celebration of diversity and inclusion.

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There remained, though, a stubborn disparity between these comedians. However much outrage Carr and Boyle were said to provoke, it didn’t stop them appearing on television; indeed, they still present shows on mainstream channels. Brown, by contrast, was a broadcaster non grata throughout his career. There was little doubt who was the truly transgressive artist. But what precisely was his offence?

In Brown’s early days, the language he used was sufficient to keep him off the screen, but the standards of what was permissible had changed since then. In any event, he was intelligent enough to know that, like Carr and Boyle, he’d have to tone it down should he ever get the chance to appear on television. Nor was ribald material quite as frowned upon as once it had been.

In truth, it wasn’t vocabulary or subject matter that kept Brown off television, it was the fear that he meant what he said. As Ricky Gervais, another often controversial comic, explained, “You tell a sick joke with the express understanding that neither party is really like that.” It was doubted that Brown and — more importantly — his audience had that understanding, and the reason for the doubt was class. “Roy Chubby Brown is the most significant English male comedian of the past quarter-century,” wrote the academic Andy Medhurst; “he is a living, breathing, swearing, shocking (to some) reminder that class matters.” More specifically, Brown’s problem was one of education. He hadn’t been to university, and neither had his audience, so it was suspected that he and they were not properly schooled in modern manners.

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Here was the great division in British comedy and, perhaps, in society more generally, a line drawn in the sand by tertiary education. From John Major onward, governments pursued a policy of increasing the number of students, and the gulf in society between those who had been to university and those who had not was becoming ever more apparent.

That gulf was cultural more than economic or even academic. In addition to their educational role, universities passed on orthodox values of liberal decency. In the context of comedy, a degree certificate was a licence to laugh at taboos, because it proved you knew why those taboos were important and could be trusted to place an ironic fig leaf over the offending areas. The subject of the degree mattered less than the fact it existed.

There was a potential danger here, of course. If taboo-breaking comedians did have a cathartic role, acting as a pressure valve to release feelings we knew we shouldn’t have and wished to vent safely, what were the consequences of denying this to half the country? Brown’s absence from television, combined with the council bans, made it look to his fans rather as though they themselves had been deemed unacceptable, too ill educated to be allowed access to their own culture. The fact that it was the same councils that had been responsible for their education merely added injury to insult.

Alwyn Turner’s All in It Together: England in the Early 21st Century is available now.

Yet within a few months I realised they were right: I had a favourite garden centre, I had joined the National Trust and, most terrifying of all, I had found myself listening to Steve Wright in the afternoon on Radio 2. That’s not even the end of the story. I loved the show, until Wright played Pulp’s “Common People” and, at the end, mentioned that it was one of the afternoon’s “Oldies”. I switched the radio off and sat in silence for the rest of my journey. Within a year or two, I had given up comedy, moved to Cornwall and taken up wild swimming.

Today, I am tempted to buy that tweet as a non-fungible token — if that wasn’t an extremely silly thing to do — as it changed my life. Perhaps the tweeter would throw in the rest of their thread, in which they expanded on my problematic cisheteronormativity and other middle-aged attitudes. It is striking that the same person who believes that gender can be totally separated from biology will assume without thinking that being middle-aged is biologically predetermined; social constructionists like Margaret Morganroth Gullette thought that we are aged not primarily by biology but by culture.

The opposite was believed by William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, who insisted on the “comparative uselessness” of men over 40: “the effective, moving, vitalising work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty — these fifteen golden years of plenty, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and credit is still good”. After 40, you are only frittering away the capital; you could look on the midlife crisis, then, as the last attempt to get something in the bank for a rainy day.

Mark Jackson’s “intimate history of the Midlife Crisis”, Broken Dreams, is an attempt to synthesise these two viewpoints. Just as it would be foolish to deny that the drop in hormone levels on hitting middle age has any effect, it would be wrong to suggest that there are no cultural factors in the midlife crisis.

Before the twentieth century, the concept was unknown, partly because there was no middle age to speak of: those born in 1891 could expect to inherit from their parents at the age of 37, but baby boomers had to wait, on average, until they were 56. With people having children younger — or, at least, drawing a line under having children younger — this created a new demographic, sandwiched between the elderly and the youth.

At first, this age seemed full of promise: the best-selling book of 1933 was Life Begins at Forty, in which Walter Pitkin argued that while men “wore out at 40” in previous ages, with modern medicines and mechanisation increasing the active lifespan, “men and women alike turn from the ancient task of making a living to the strange new task of living”.

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But it is just as true to say that “death begins at 40”. As one of the books cited by Professor Jackson, the Ladybird Book of the Midlife Crisis, puts it: “When we are young, we all dream of doing something wonderful and exciting with our lives. What will we be? A cosmonaut? An underwater detective? A tommy gunner? A groin surgeon? Anything is possible. And then, one day, it isn’t.”

Change is — to quote Brideshead Revisited, the best novel about middle age — “the only evidence of life”; and the moment you realise that promise will not be fulfilled is the day that you die. As Jane Pearce and Saul Newton of the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis wrote, “many people die during middle age, although they may wander through the world like zombies waiting to be buried decently for thirty years or more”.  It is no accident that Reginald Iolanthe Perrin carried a briefcase with the initials “RIP”.

The midlife crisis, then, is a choice between Death and Life; it is no wonder it is stressful. The phrase comes from a 1959 lecture by Elliott Jaques, who defined its parameters: “entering the prime of life, the stage of fulfilment, but at the same time the prime and fulfilment are dated. Death lies beyond…” Efforts to remain young — “the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life, and the frequency of religious concern” — are all “attempts at a race against time”.

Although Jaques was a psychoanalyst, this diagnosis was not based on his practice; he only had one case study, a middle-aged man named “Mr N”. In an interview some years afterwards, he admitted that he was Mr N. (Professor Jackson fails to mention this; perhaps it would give rise to the outrageous suggestion that there is an element of narcissism in the midlife crisis.)

This book starts, quite rightly, with the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Reggie Perrin is stuck in a rut; his children have left home, and he is bored with a pointless job that will take up his time until he retires. So he runs naked into the sea on the beach in Broadchurch, supposedly to commit suicide. The first series ends happily, however, when he returns in disguise as Martin Wellborn, and gets back together with the wife he abandoned. A happy ending, if you are willing to accept Elizabeth Perrin as someone who only exists in relation to her husband. (Where’s her midlife crisis?)

Professor Jackson uses the story of Reggie Perrin to illustrate the factors in the midlife crisis, with one curious omission. This is clearly a spiritual crisis — and I have seen Christian readings of the series as a self-emptying or kenosis as part of a spiritual journey; and other, less convincing readings, which point out that CJ, Perrin’s boss at Sunshine Desserts, is JC (or Jesus Christ) backwards or that Perrin dies and is reborn through water, and so forth.

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David Nobbs, the writer of the novel and the TV series, was a fervent humanist, but even he accepted that there might be something in a Christian reading: “[Reggie] was a man trying to find an individual way through a corporate world. It was implicit that he was without religious faith. He was searching for value, for moral certainty.”

This is puzzling since even Jaques’s original diagnosis of the Midlife Crisis took as its starting point Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Certainly a spiritual solution would have been of more use to Reggie Perrin than to have his crisis ascribed to his age, class and other demographic factors; it is clear that medical intervention was not going to work. I fully accept that the company doctor at Perrin’s office was not at the cutting edge of medical science, but this is as far as that will take you:

Doc Morrissey: Do you find you can’t finish the crossword like you used to, nasty taste in the mouth in the mornings, can’t stop thinking about sex, can’t start doing anything about sex, wake up with a sweat in the mornings, keep falling asleep during ‘”Play For Today”?

Reginald Perrin: That’s extraordinary, Doc! That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling.

Doc Morrissey: So have I. I wonder what it is?

A few weeks ago, for instance, the headlines told us that an episode of Fawlty Towers was being removed from circulation for its use of racist language. It was. But briefly and from only one platform, UKTV, during which time it remained freely available from Britbox, Netflix and iTunes. After a few days, it returned to UKTV, uncut and affixed with a brief warning about the script’s use of racial slurs that would be unquotable on this page. Predictably, the noise around the story prevented the discussion of the much more urgent and subtle question upon which it turned — how should broadcasters manage the consequences of our new and perhaps perverse expectation that the popular culture of five decades ago should be instantly and eternally accessible?

In the 1920s, movies that were more than six years old were customarily dumped in a bath of hydrogen peroxide, melted down with other plastic trash — gap-toothed combs, discarded Xylonite dentures — and recycled as waterproof paint. Now we confer immortality on every moving image, and expect it to be preserved, archived and streaming on our phones. Our grandparents were never made uneasy by the culture of the past: they’d already forgotten it. We, however, have abolished cultural amnesia. Puzzling out that paradox, however, takes more journalistic effort than cutting and pasting one of John Cleese’s angry tweets.

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This week, though, British comedy provided the field for a much more interesting and enjoyable battle — one that might even suggest a way of resolving these skirmishes. On Monday, Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary with the Rank Charm School manners, provided a deus ex machina ending for a drama that had been rumbling since the moment, a fortnight previously, when a widely-anticipated rescue package for the arts sector failed to appear. The empty space was filled with energetic campaigning by playwrights, directors and actors, worried by the not-unreasonable suspicion that Boris Johnson was about to do to the theatres what Margaret Thatcher did to the mines.

But on Monday morning, Dowden waved his magic wand and promised the imminent arrival of £1.57 billion — some of it in actual money. Then the examination of the detail began. In his round of media interviews, Dowden was asked if the Christmas pantomime season might yet be saved. His answer was a rueful one. It looked difficult, thanks to the epidemiological challenge posed by a noisy inter-generational entertainment involving shouting, singing, and the violent agitation of soap bubbles and wallpaper paste.

It was a realistic answer and it made me sad. It also made the European arts correspondent of the New York Times sad. But not for the same reason. Matt Anderson was disgusted. He tweeted his disgust in block capitals, which made him seem even angrier than John Cleese. And when others pointed out to him that the financial stability of many British theatres was guaranteed by a successful pantomime season, he went the full Abanazar. “If that’s the most important art form for the health of the sector,” he declared, “there’s something wrong with the system.” He might as well have said it under a green light and then flounced off with a peal of diabolical laughter. Theatrical Twitter raised its handbag to its chest and told him that his snobbery was showing.

I may have hissed a little myself. Pantomime produces no disgust in me. It gives me a delicious form of historical vertigo. When I watch a pair of comics perform the wallpaper routine, or the plate-smashing sketch, or some business in a dark forest with a luminous ghost, I know I am in touch with the deep history of British culture; that I’m watching choreography and gags that were first worked out over a century ago. It also makes me part of an audience that is being sounded out on the length of its cultural memory. At the Manchester Opera House in 1992 I saw the celebrated dame Gordon Peters manoeuvre 2,000 people into hooting out the second line of You Made Me Love You — a song from 1913. (“I didn’t want to do it!” they chorused, as if Pavlov had conditioned them.) I’ve also seen those echoes fail: at the Catford Broadway in 2008, I was the only person in the stalls who knew that “Hi-de-Hi” should always be followed by “Ho-de-ho!”

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Pantomime emerged from the Harlequinade, an Anglicised 18th-century version of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Thanks to the 1737 Licensing Act, which permitted only the two Royal Theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, to feature plays with dialogue, the Harlequinade concentrated on song and wordless slapstick — executed most effectively by its Clown character, a figure of misrule who sat on babies, prodded people with red hot pokers, and sometimes abseiled up the set on a rope of sausages.

In 1843, the Theatre Regulation Act changed the rules on stage dialogue, triggering the mutation of the form. The silent clowns of the Harlequinade remained silent, but their show underwent a fusion with another popular theatrical genre — the “extravaganza”, in which myths and fairy tales were used as a frame for satirical, pun-filled comedy. Even if the story was set in Ancient Greece or medieval England, a steam train or an omnibus might move anachronistically over the stage — which explains why Widow Twankey’s laundry in Old Peking is always equipped with coin-operated washing machines. The airlock between these two styles was provided by an event that also remains a feature of modern pantomime — the transformation scene, in which, for instance, the pumpkin becomes a coach, or a magic lamp is spotted in a cave full of jewels.

These developments have produced a theatrical form of impressive sophistication and complexity. Pantomime smashes the fourth wall, bends time, space and gender, combines acrobatics, physical comedy and satire on local and national subjects. In 1993, the film director Lindsay Anderson went to the Bath Theatre Royal to see his old friend Robin Askwith, who had played one of those Maoist schoolboy revolutionaries in If…. (1968). The show was Dick Whittington. Askwith’s co-stars were June Brown from EastEnders, Ian Botham and a pair of magicians called Richard and Lara Jarmain. Anderson’s verdict: “Very Brechtian.”

And if you scoff at the idea of the British intellectual in the panto audience, this too is part of the tradition. In 1874, John Ruskin went five times to see Cinderella at Hengler’s Circus, and then to Drury Lane to catch Jack in a Box; or Harlequin Little Tom Tucker and the Three Men of Gotham who went to Sea in a Bowl. In this production, a princess disguised as Bo Peep led a flock of mechanical sheep across the stage and then caused a forest of magic mushrooms to rise up:

You see at present everywhere among us,
A mushroom, popularly called a fungus.
I do but strike my crutch and with this plunge, I
Reveal the funny figures of the Fungi.

Ruskin went straight from the theatre to write an essay contrasting the child actors who skipped through the fairyland of the Drury Lane stage and their hungry equivalents on the streets of Covent Garden. He imagined England itself subject to a transformation scene, in which its street children occupied their own Drury Lane pastoral, instead of “rolling on the heaps of black and slimy ground, mixed with brickbats and broken plates and bottles”.

The man from New York Times endured this week’s boos and hisses with grace. I hope, however, he paid no heed to the little knot of culture warriors who imagined that a political motive explained his lack of enthusiasm for watching veteran comics and X-Factor runners-up throw custard pies at each other. “People like him don’t want to be deeply connected to our history,” one insisted. “They prefer to rewrite it.”

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It’s an odd charge. Rewriting history is what historians do for a living. It’s also why pantomime is still here, using 16th-century Italian performance style and stories from the Brothers Grimm and the Arabian Nights to produce topical entertainment that has always enjoyed the freedom to jettison any elements that fall from favour. (Blackface and yellowface vanished along with gags about Mafeking and ration books; the dame and the ghosts remain.) Its history usually defies those who accuse it of abandoning its traditions. Critics who complained that Julian Clary was too rude for Snow White at the Palladium probably didn’t know about all the cock puns in the Drury Lane panto seen by Ruskin in 1873. Those who grumbled about Frank Bruno’s presence at the top of 1990s panto bills had, I suspect, never heard of Daniel Mendoza, the celebrity bare-knuckle boxer who appeared in Aladdin at Covent Garden in 1778.

But why would they? Unlike sit-coms set in the aspic of UKTV, pantomime is mutable, agile, and always renegotiating its relationship with the present day. At the 2019 panto at the Palladium, Nigel Havers got the biggest laugh of the night by climbing out of a bear suit and declaring: “If Prince Andrew is in tonight … THIS is sweat.” At the 2016 Sleeping Beauty at the Hackney Empire, Gavin Spokes’s Dame Nanny Nora trolled on stage in a frock divided between the EU flag and the Union Jack and declared: “I like a bit of both.” In the 2018 Aladdin at the Catford Broadway, as Theresa May suffered another Brexit deal defeat in Parliament, Wayne Rollins’ Abanazar declared: “I will rub this magic lamp and plunge the country into chaos!” Then he paused. “On second thoughts…”

Everyone got it. And the audience, in that moment, seemed a lot less divided than the country.

Morty tries to wriggle free, but the stranger’s grip tightens. Growling into his ear to “let this happen”, the stranger thrusts Morty against the bathroom sink and then into a bathroom cubicle. Morty’s cries for help go unheard — it is only when he throws a lucky punch that the stranger is caught off-guard, and ends up head-first in the toilet, unconscious.

If this scene makes for difficult reading, viewing it is not much easier. But it is also extremely funny — principally because the assailant is an oversized, anthropomorphic jellybean. Still, this is quite heavy stuff for a cartoon show — a far cry from the light-heartedness of The Simpsons— and yet it is becoming the new norm in animated comedy. Edgy content including substance abuse, sexual impropriety and depression have all come to define the latest wave of adult cartoons, which are flourishing in an industry that, ironically, can no longer take a joke.

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Save for a few small but ultimately inconsequential acts of insurrection, a culture of conformity has quietly swept through comedy. The fear of losing one’s career to a bad joke or a past transgression has left comedians afraid to take on risky material, and forced directors to leave the genre altogether. Just look at Will Ferrell’s career, an actor who went from Blades of Glory and Anchorman to films like Daddy’s Home and Holmes & Watson, to track comedy’s precipitous decline. With a few exceptions, Hollywood hasn’t made a genuinely funny film in the last 10 years.

Adult cartoons are filling this comedic vacuum, thanks to shows such as F is For Family, which centres on a dysfunctional 1970s Irish-American suburban family; Bojack Horseman, a talking horse dealing from the fallout of his TV career; and Rick and Morty (which returns to screens on Thursday), whose eponymous characters travel to different galaxies for a series of zany adventures. By refusing to subscribe to the narrowing confines of ‘acceptable’ comedy, they are fronting a counterculture that is providing a safe haven for disaffected comedy fans around the world.

To some degree, cartoons have always played this role. Shows such as South Park and Family Guy revel in causing as much outrage as possible while also airing on mainstream networks. That is largely due to the form: cartoon characters are detached from reality in a way that actors are not, allowing them to push harder against the boundaries of acceptable discourse. It would take a brave actor to sing ‘I need a Jew’ or play the Queen killing herself, particularly in today’s hyper-politicised, knee-jerk climate.

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Shock is a common currency in adult cartoons. But when overused, it becomes redundant and ineffectual. So in its singular pursuit of controversy, South Park regularly strays into this territory: jokes can come across as crass and boorish, and viewers grow numb. But as we follow the lives of Frank Murphy and Bojack in F is For Family and Bojack Horseman, this shock is deployed for pathos, not humour, which gives these two-dimensional characters a more 3-D feel.

Both protagonists, haunted (and taunted) by memories of poor life decisions decades earlier, are deeply unhappy: this manifests through depression in Bojack and rage in Frank. The latter even strikes his children. In one confrontation with his son, this anger unravels to reveal a deep self-loathing. On confronting his son about failing school, Kevin retorts that he hates school, and Frank responds: “Well I hate my life but I keep on doing it; I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got dependents and I’ve got to go downtown every damn day to run that airport.” Dismissively, Kevin replies: “Please, you’re just a baggage handler”, before Frank squares up to him and says: “What the fuck did you just call me?”

Taken out of context, there is not much humour in this scene. If anything, it is an all-too-real display of what goes on behind the closed doors of a family home — so much so that we might forget that we are watching a cartoon. And yet, it is this visceral sense of the real in the unreal — this cartoon realism — that makes the show so funny.

Similarly in Bojack Horseman, never mind that the character is a talking horse, he still suffers from human vices — narcissism, substance abuse, and sexual infidelity. Over entire seasons, we watch the side effects of this destructive behaviour play out. So, for instance, when an old friend dying of terminal cancer refuses to accept Bojack’s apology for abandoning him many years ago, our hero is left without closure. Throughout the remaining seasons of the show, the shadow of incidents like these hang over nearly all of his interactions with other characters. And in refusing to exculpate Bojack, the writers ask us the same questions of its protagonist as they do of our own culture: will we forgive Bojack and more importantly, should we?

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Neither Bojack Horseman nor F is For Family provide any kind of moral guidance. Part of their appeal is that they are non-didactic, which is rare today. In recent years, late night comedy shows like the BBC’s The Mash Report and SNL have sounded more like political rallies than satirical programmes. Since 2016, opening monologues have descended into virtue-signalling rants attacking Brexit, Trump and pretty much anything mildly Right-wing. Even figures inside the BBC have expressed their displeasure at pastiche shows like The Mash Report, describing it as “self satisfied, self adulatory, unchallenged Left-wing propaganda”.

Of course, there are clear commercial incentives at play — audiences are typically urban, liberal and middle-class and networks will cater to that — but it is a troubling indictment on the health of our comedic culture when clapping during these shows is more common than laughter.

That is not to suggest that Trump and Brexit aren’t fair game. It might be low-hanging fruit, but those sides won and comedy’s golden rule is to never punch down. Yet while there is a tacit acknowledgement of the political ascendancy of the populist Right, it is a different story when it comes to the cultural power of the progressive Left.

Some comedians, like Dave Chappelle, have tried to address this. In his  ‘Stick and Stones’ special on Netflix, Chapelle went after some of the Left’s shibboleths: the LGBTQ community, the #MeToo movement and cancel culture. His reward was a vicious backlash calling him “cruel”, “transphobic”, “misogynistic”, saying that he had “lost his comic touch” (in spite of winning a Grammy for the performance). The chasm between critics and audience could not have been more stark on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes: the former giving the show a 0% rating while fans gave it 99%. Chapelle survived the criticism, but as he wryly noted in the special, “this is the worst time ever to be a celebrity”.

Adult cartoons are an igloo of shelter in this blizzard of hysteria. Even so, cracks do appear. Most notably when Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian-American character from The Simpsons in the character was removed from the show because of its negative perpetuation of South Asian stereotypes. The cancellation of Apu marked a new step in the culture wars: that cartoons, like words and people, could be removed from the public sphere as easily as they entered.

With 2.5 million people expected to tune in to the mid-season return of Rick and Morty next week, the show’s success could serve as an example for others to follow. The health and vigour of the adult cartoon industry shows that the appetite for comedy remains as strong — if not stronger — than ever. For now, the comedy industry is on life support. It is cartoons that are keeping it alive.

Too soon?

First rule of comedy: it’s never funny unless it risks something, unless there exists the possibility of disapproval, of offence. And the greater the possibility of offence, the funnier it is. To be clear: it’s not the offence itself that makes something funny. Many would-be ‘brave’ comedians make this mistake. But the presence of the possibility of causing offence is certainly a multiplier when something is funny. The greater the repression, the more explosive the release.

We laugh in the presence of Covid-19 death charts because, well, what else can we do? The darkness of the present situation is not an argument against the possibility of laughter, but exactly why it is so necessary. We laugh to transform what we fear into something that cannot psychologically overwhelm us. It is a strategy of resistance.

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You may remember from Harry Potter that a boggart is a shape-shifting creature that assumes the form of the worst fears of the person who encounters it. The spell that banishes a boggart is the riddikulus spell, which converts the terrifying apparition into something that can be laughed at. And once laughed at, all power is drained from the boggart and it disappears. A scary teacher is dressed up in the clothes of a fusty old woman, a giant spider is given roller-skates and cannot stand up. What would be the point of using the riddikulus spell on something that isn’t terrifying? In other words, comedy was designed for things like Covid-19.

This is why it makes no sense to say that some things are too serious to be joked about. On the contrary, only serious things can properly be joked about. And if it’s not serious, it’s not funny.

The funniest people I know, as a profession — apart from professional comedians — are undertakers, closely followed by nurses and those who work in the emergency services. Surrounded every day by pain and death, humour becomes a way of asserting that most specifically human of all reactions to the tragedy of life: laughter. On the one hand it creates a kind of solidarity in the face of fear and danger. But it also puts the danger in its place.

In this regard it’s hard to beat Spike Milligan’s famous epitaph, written on his gravestone: “I told you I was ill”. If I am right about the purpose of humour, this is about as perfect a joke as one could imagine. For to carve a joke on your own gravestone is to poke fun at our greatest fear within its own castle, and to do so in such a way that the darkness can never have the last laugh. You can just imagine Milligan’s words driving the grim reaper mad with frustration and fury. To have someone take the piss out of him rather than quake in terror is the ultimate riddikulus spell.

Freud put it rather more seriously in his 1927 essay On Humour:

“The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”

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Something similar is going on with Ricky Gervais’s comedy series After Life — season two of which has just been released on Netflix. Gervais’s character, Tony, is depressed and nihilistic, his wife having just died of cancer. He says things like: “A good day is when I don’t go around wanting to shoot random strangers in the face and then turn the gun on myself?”

It’s not a laugh a minute show. Sometimes you even question if it’s really a comedy at all. But because it’s Gervais, and perhaps because we know there will be moments of great humour — there really are — we allow him to take us into some pretty bleak situations. “That’s what humour is for,” Gervais told Holly Willoughby on the This Morning show last Monday, “to get us through bad stuff.”

Perhaps Gervais won’t like this way of putting it — given he’s such a passionate atheist — but this sort of comedy feels like it has a fundamentally redemptive purpose. It allows us to exist within the darkest of situations without being overwhelmed by them. To misquote Nietzsche: “We have comedy so we don’t perish of the truth”. Humour is a readily available coping mechanism. It’s a strategy of resilience.

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But there is a potential fly in the ointment of this argument. My wife — who is from Israel — is of the opinion that the humour I am talking about here is very specifically British humour. They wouldn’t get Covid-19 humour in Tel Aviv, she explains.

Now while I don’t altogether believe this, the argument still slightly bothers me because if I’m right about the fundamental connection between death and comedy, surely it would be a universally identifiable phenomenon.

Or maybe it’s just that the sort of comedy I am talking about is particularly acute in cultures with high degrees of emotional repression. And given that sex, death and status are hang-ups that us Brits have in considerable measure, perhaps there is something to this. Freud understood humour as a kind of release, a way for pent up, forbidden thoughts to come tumbling out. That’s why there is no such thing as ‘safe’ humour. Humour is no respecter of either political or emotional repression.

That’s why those people who think that coronavirus humour is just “a little too much” won’t ever understand those of us who find something funny not just in spite of it being a little bit inappropriate but precisely because it is. Safe, appropriate humour is never terribly funny. Which is kind of the point.

Inevitably, the woke press have been quick to condemn the new series. Just as these commentators have mastered the ability to divine the secret motives of their political opponents, they have also developed a form of clairvoyance which enables them to pronounce judgement on creative endeavours in advance of their existence. The Guardian has produced two hit pieces in quick succession to bewail the return of this ‘problematic’ show. An article for Glamour claims that Little Britain’s brand of humour is ‘dangerous’ and that we should be “leaving behind an era we should all be ashamed of”. In a further twist, a source at the BBC has apparently said that a new series has been ‘ruled out’ because the show is too ‘offensive’. The claim has since been denied by friends of Lucas and Walliams but, if it turns out to be true, that means that the new series of Little Britain will have been announced, denounced and cancelled in the space of five days.

This tells us a great deal about the cultural climate we now occupy, one in which social media can catalyse a flurry of competing storms. Offence is a contemporary form of currency, and declarations of virtue are deemed an adequate substitute for virtuous acts. Little Britain was never to my taste, but there has never been a greater need for mainstream comedy that teases the limits of our tolerance. When the new series was mooted, the headline in The Sun posed the question: “Will it fall foul of PC killjoys?” The answer was never really in doubt.

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One of the many problems with the identitarian Left is an apparent inability to assess art or comedy by anything other than ideological standards. A film is judged successful if it is sufficiently diverse and sends a positive message about social justice. This is why Avengers: Endgame was lambasted for its ‘fat shaming’ by The Guardian, in spite of Marvel’s desperate efforts at woke posturing. Ideologues demand purity, and mistakes are not to be brooked.

It is difficult, therefore, to see how a Little Britain that even remotely resembles the original series could possibly be forgiven were it to be broadcast today. Perhaps the solution will be to modify the targets according to the prevailing intersectional creeds. For all their censuring of ‘bullying’ comedy that ‘punches down’, the woke are happy to indulge in the most vicious forms of bullying so long as the targets are approved. Ageism is fine, for example, because elderly people voted for Brexit and tend to subscribe to outlandish and outdated belief systems. Many, for instance, insist that there are only two genders, or that obesity can lead to health problems. Whatever you say, boomers.

Attacks on working class people are also acceptable, of course. This is a consequence of the social justice movement’s poisonous influence on the left. Not only has it rehabilitated racial thinking and abused the principle of diversity in a way guaranteed to foster division, it has failed to prioritise its traditional mission of redressing economic inequality. In the early days of Little Britain, commentators for The Guardian and The Independent would often cite the character of Vicky Pollard — the tracksuit-clad teenage mother who swapped her baby for a Westlife CD — as an example of how Lucas and Walliams were ‘punching down’ at the oppressed. Owen Jones devoted a substantial part of his book Chavs to criticising what he perceived to be Little Britain’s damaging stereotypes.

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Yet many of the leftists who took umbrage at such characterisations at the time are the same who now routinely demonise the working class in the name of progress. In today’s context, Vicky Pollard could work well as a satire of the kind of attitudes held by prominent left-wing columnists who dismiss working class people as ‘gammons’. For all their pretence that the slur was aimed at affluent Little Englanders, in practice it was mostly reserved for white Brexit voters on the very lowest incomes.  In trendy metropolitan circles, it is now de rigueur to deride the working class as stupid and suggestible creatures, fuelled by race hatred, who can’t stop themselves from voting the wrong way.  If Vicky Pollard does return, we might well expect to see her gloating about Brexit to her gammony friends, or spending her dole money on a tattoo of Boris Johnson.

And what of the other characters? How might they be sanitised to avoid the ire of a new generation of intersectional Mary Whitehouses? The padded bodysuits of Bubbles and Desiree would be considered fat-shaming; the masculine ‘ladies’ Emily and Florence would be deemed transphobic; the mail order bride Ting Tong would be dismissed as legitimising racist stereotypes. Caricatures are always offensive to somebody.

But a new series of Little Britain also has the potential to take aim at the intolerance of the identitarian Left and ‘cancel culture’, should the creators be inclined to take the risk. The character of Daffyd, the “only gay in the village”, was based on the type of gay man who is obsessed with victimhood, determined to detect prejudice even where it doesn’t exist. In the intervening years, overt homophobia has become far less common, while sensitivity to homophobia has increased. This means that the joke actually works better in today’s context, because the victim-centred social justice movement has spawned innumerable Daffyds, all desperate to denounce the homophobes of their imagination. But this is also why in a 2020 reimagining of Little Britain, Daffyd would probably be the first for the chop.

“Humour normalises thoughts and behaviours,” writes the author of Glamour magazine’s pre-emptive critique, “and we definitely don’t need bigotry any more normalised then [sic] it already is.” No evidence for this assertion is forthcoming. Like so many woke mantras, the idea that there is a causal link between entertainment and public behaviour is simply taken on faith. Comedy can flourish in this kind of puritanical atmosphere if comedians are willing to subvert the new dogmas. It will be interesting to see whether or not Little Britain makes it back to our screens and, if so, whether it will resist or embrace the new oligarchy of social justice.

Andrew Doyle will be touring the UK with Douglas Murray later this year for a live political discussion show “Resisting Wokeness”. Details available at resistingwokeness.com.