I think comedians, and the people who write their lines, believe that their art has become consistently more elevated since it passed into their hands. This brings us back to what appears to be the incontestable fact that almost every comedian of whom one has now heard (and many thousands more, I am sure, of whom we have not heard and of whom we never will hear) exhibits what can only be called leftist sympathies. That in itself is neither original nor problematical. Class has always been a staple of our humour, and since long before the arrival of the music hall. But in the first wave of uninhibited humour (which started not with the satire boom, but with Max Miller) numerous other taboos were suddenly disregarded and became the subject of jokes. From the 1960s to the 1980s it was quite in order to tell jokes in public not just about sex — and that still seems to be all right — but about ethnic minorities (especially in relation to their alleged proclivity towards criminality or their sexual prowess), foreigners, homosexuals and disabled people. Anyone trying any of those on Radio 4 today would never work again, and I would say rightly so. Predictably, jokes about white, middle-class men with no disability or affliction other than their comfortable lifestyles and healthy incomes are absolutely fine. The leftists who populate the world of "comedy" are smug about this sanitisation of their art and seem to think they have delivered a public service. It is a pity that they haven't replaced what they removed with something funny. And, imported from America, they have a new and pompous adjective to describe the nature of their art: "comedic".

But then before the 1960s — as scores of black-and-white British comedy films attest — it was also possible to be funny without telling jokes about sex, black people, homosexuals or the disabled. Will Hay, possibly the funniest man ever to be committed to celluloid, made a dozen and a half films between 1934 and 1943 whose humour consisted of him sending himself up for being corrupt and incompetent: a form of comedy we could rather do with today, given the state of our government and officialdom. As he faded from the scene, Alastair Sim did a similar job for the next 15 years or so. It is a pity that what they did is so often described as "gentle" humour, as if to suggest that it could be consumed by the most maiden of maiden aunts with her tea and langues de chat. In fact, it is pointed without being vicious and subtle rather than sledgehammer. But then Hay had been an engineer before he went on the stage, spoke several languages to interpreter standard and became one of the country's leading amateur astronomers; and Sim was a lecturer in drama at Edinburgh University. Perhaps that is the real problem with our alleged comedians today: none of them is very bright, and the bleeding obvious really isn't very funny.