Cancel culture: when laughter is evil and evil virtuous
When did tolerating the intolerable become a woke virtue-signal, while everything else become hateful and bigoted?
Humour can diffuse anger, laughter lighten moods, reduce tension. So why did ‘we’ suddenly need to cancel culture to protect the easily offended?
Beyond doubt, humour is a very complex phenomenon involving cognitive, emotional, physiological, and social aspects.
(Martin, 2000, 2004 in The Handbook of Communication Skills, 3e, (ed) Owen Hargia
Humour is an ubiquitous human activity that occurs in all types of social interaction. Most of us laugh at something funny many times during the course of a typical day. Although it is a form of play, humour serves a number of serious cognitive, emotional, and social functions.
(The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach, 2e, By Rod A. Martin, Thomas Ford)
Humour skills programmes are believed to assist in improving emotional well-being by increasing self-efficacy, positive thinking, optimism and perceptions of control, while decreasing negative thinking, perceptions of stress, depression, anxiety and stress
(Crawford, S. A. and Caltabiano, N. J. (2011) ‘Promoting emotional well-being through the use of humour’, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 6(3), pp. 237–252.)
In the beginning was the word… but was it funny? Research suggests that the capacity for human laughter preceded the capacity for speech during evolution.
… However, it is the discovery of ‘laughing rats‘ that could offer a workable model with which to systematically analyse the neurological antecent of human joy.
… rat humor, if it exists, it is likely to be heavily laced with slapstick.
(Panksepp, J., 2005. Beyond a joke: from animal laughter to human joy? Science, 308(5718), pp.62-63.)
Laughter, humour, is natural, hard-wired, primal, inate; Even rats laugh!
So, if you are like me, you must wonder why – in parallel with other changes in societies core – does it feel like the technocrats want to suppress and control laughter and humour?
Something to think about, eh!
Obviously there is a HUGE difference between finding something that’s funny ‘funny’ and something that’s hateful ‘funny’.
The difference is whether they are laughing with you or at you.
Whether “It’s funny ‘cos it’s true” and you can laugh about it – or laugh at it (i.e. it’s a cruel laugh)
Consider this, a ‘joke’ from the 70s:
The disc jockey turns down the musics and announces, “The prize of a bottle of whiskey for the most original dance goes to the bloke in the tan sports jacket”
The spastic looked up, surprised and muttered to himself, “I was only trying to cross the dance floor to get to the bar”
Even in the day in was considered in bad taste. I laughed anyway. I thought it was funny. I still think it’s funny!
That makes me a hateful, ignorant bigot? A vile excuse for a human, right?
Here’s the thing. Mobility issues, like autism, are common in my family. One was in a wheelchair from a twice-broken neck, another had occult spinabifida, another…
I have my own spastic problems, and they are degenerative. I can still picture the butt of that ‘sick joke’ lurching across the dance floor. It’s funny (to me) ‘cos it’s true. It’s how I walk, when I can walk. As the saying goes, ‘if you can’t laugh at yourself, then how can you laugh at anybody else?’
I can also remember a bad fall, fractured or broken ribs. Every movement hurt. And my friends – and siblings – taking the piss out of me. Breathing hurt. Laughing hurt more. They’d say something, I’d laugh, cry, and say, “Stop it, it’s not funny. And laugh more…
You can laugh, or you can cry. Laughing hurts less! Bottling it up inside is worst of all!
I bottle it up, and it seeps out, like sludge. I have a very dark, deeply warped sense of humour, very much a gallows humour…
My dad was a big bloke, hard, prone to excessive violence and cruelty. I’ve only ever saw him scared 3 or 4 times. Once when he was ‘approached’ in a public toilet, once when he was in the passenger seat and I was driving, and once when he took me to see ‘Scanners‘ at the cinema. I laughed, hard. My outburst scared the bejebus out of him. A lot of people in the audience stared. I laughed harder!
It’s funny, really… but not, really!
You read the news, you maybe read academic papers – about how we (older folk) are all vile, hateful people, racist, bigoted, xenophobic gammon.
But really, are we so bad?
You NEVER used to hear sentences like that one above.
Almost nobody – not even academics – talked about the UK’s ‘xenophobia problem’.
Back in the 90’s the closest you’d get would be Xena, not xeno!
Not really until The Guardian and others used it as a slur, a smear in the run up to the Brexit referendum.
Until the Guardian and other left-leaning groups politicised the colour of our skin and sanitized our sense of humour.
Until the likes of Polly Toynby screamed it out (along with the wish that all old people should just D1E, which is ironic as the hag was in her 80s herself at the time, I believe).
Similarly, the Guardian’s Matthew d’Ancona suggesting that anyone that votes OUT is a xenophobic “idiot” only trotting along by the racist calls of a dog whistle!
“With a symphony of dog whistles as our soundtrack, we are trudging dangerously close to the idiot option.”
At what point did we cross over? I’d say it was about then!
Even aunty Beeb noticed!
There was a documentary around the same time. I cannot remember the comedian’s name but he was a northerner and he was discussing the changes he was experiencing. He did a show in front of a university audience – something that was common 70s, 80s 90s. They didn’t laugh, they sat, horrified. Absolutely mortified. Shocked to their core.
How can anyone think that’s funny? It’s so politically incorrect!
They couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d announced that the real reason he was there was – tada – he was the father to several of them in the audience! 🎉
His act was tame, inocuous even, more Mike Harding than Bernard Manning. If it had been Chubby Brown…
They had had the life, the sense of humour sucked out of them!
They didn’t listen to the show, they filtered it, processed it, line by line. Held it up to some imaginary light and found it dirty. Unclean. I’m pretty sure I commented about this at the time in a psychology paper. How unnatural their reaction was.
I actually did something like this for my English A-level, dissected a Jasper Carrott sketch, word by word, line by line. The sketch is a classic. Hilarious, the analysis though…
Here’s my comment for it: ‘This post may well bore you stupid! Don’t say I didn’t warn you… Typing it up, it is rather a dry, stuffy read.’
My own sense of humour was dark long before the likes of Monty Python, Love they Neighbour, Rigsby and Rising Damp, and Alf Garnet and Till Death Us Do Part found their way onto our screens. The ever irreverent Dave Allen was gold to us.
I’m pretty sure more than person said they’d “pray for my soul”. More than a few have said, “you’re going straight to hell”.
I’m damned sure it’s not going to change now because we have two generations that are easily offended by just about everything.
When standing for ‘something’ is standing for nothing!
There’s a saying, widely attributed to Alexander Hamilton: “Those who stand for nothing fall for anything“.
The woke will nod, agree, virtuously – and not understand a word of it!
Look at Sir flip flop himself, a man with the backbone of a jellyfish and all the honour of an egg fart in a crowded elevator. Like a beached fish, he flops around, championing whatever he thinks voters want to hear. Delivering none of it because they are just words. You can equally apply this to his motley circus of ‘right honourable’ ministers; compulsive liars the lot of them!
It’s about morals, firm convictions. Honour.
Wokery, self-praise, is not that. It’s vainglorious attention seeking! It’s being ‘offended’ on behalf of others because if it was you, you’d be offended.
But they never stop to ask the people they are offended on behalf of.
They never consider for one second if their self-righteous moral crusade is just stirring shit into the pot and making everything worse!
The point is if it’s a bandwagon – like BLM, Queers for Palestine, Just Stop Oil – then it’s not a true conviction, it’s not honourable at all. It’s a fad, as changeable as your t-shirt or your drawers. Cast aside on a whim, or when another circus comes to town!
Joining a passing movement, jumping on a fleeting bandwagon, it lacks conviction. It makes you susceptible to being swayed by any idea, or ideal, regardless of its validity. It allows those snared to be manipulated, fooled, scammed. They are useless fools…
Racism, intolerance, and that was the year that was
I can remember telling my grandmother how awesome Jasper Carrot was. We (me, my aunt, my nanna) gathered around the TV and smiled, laughed, right up the point Carrot did the Magic roundabout and got to, “Oh piss off said Dillan.”
“That’s enough of that”, said grandma. And my aunt and I spent several months in the doghouse.
Different time, different generations.
If you made a list of all the classic, best-loved comedies and comedians of the 60s through 80s and showed them to modern university students and graduates they’d be horrified. They have been conditioned – indoctrinated – to see anything risky as vile, hateful, bigoted.
You see older comedians – who made their fortunes on this – infected by woke and trotted out by the likes of the BBC to “apologise for their past” – when they had nothing to apologise for.
Not saying lines weren’t crossed, but we just weren’t ‘offended’ by everything. We didn’t confuse comedy with reality and conflate the two.
Here’s a joke I once told my grandmother, one she literally howled laughing at. (The grandmother that put us in the doghouse ‘cos Dillan said ‘piss off’):
The state of Alabama introduced new rules for voting. Segregation had ended, everyone had the vote. Everything was finally equal in the deep south.
To be eligible you had to answer one question.
The line slowly moved forward, the voters kept 6′ apart.
Ahead of Jeremiah was a work associate, Charles Montigue. Jeremiah learned forward, listening.
Voting offical: Roughly how many jews were murdered by Nazis in WWII?”
Charles: “I heard it was about 6 million, sir.”
Voting offical: Very good. Place your vote and move on.”
Jeremiah leant back and nodded at his cousin, whispering, “We got this!”. Then he moved forward.
Voting offical: “As you just heard, an estimated 6 million jews were murdered by Nazis. Can you name them?”
For clarification, I’d read that in a university ‘rag mag’. That was acceptable humour of the day – the intelligensia of the day weren’t offended by everything!
My favourite ‘teddy’ as a kid was a golliwog. I collected golliwog badges from Robinsons jam, did my damnest to get the set. Because I liked them. It didn’t – couldn’t – occur to me or my generation that they were racist or offensive. Many homes didn’t even have a TV and if they did it was small, black and white and only had two channels. I was about ten before I even saw a black man.
My generation grew up with Yorkshire comedian Charlies Williams (MBE), who more than one person has commented ‘did more for race relations in Britain than anybody else I can think of’.
This is Charlie Williams:
Fast forward 50 years
American had it’s first black president.
You also have BLM, a movement with a valid premise – that was founded on the shakiest of ground. A movement that, in fact, was a scam, targetting the gullible and the very people they professed to support, their own people.
Yet white people – the woke ones, the ‘educated’ one – will be outraged if you so much as suggest BLM is anything other than virtuous.
And even black comedians – the woke ones – are apologising. Ashamed of their past.
Wokery, cross-dressing and trans ideology
Even in the 80s ‘ladymen’ were a thing; nobody really cared. For the most part, they had their own community and stayed out of politics – and schools – bothering no-one.
I was at Donington with – like most of the other blokes there – my long hair. And out came Twisted Sister. ‘What the ***!?’
There were “booos”. More than a few, “I’m going for a drink.” If I recall they said something exceptionally rude and ‘fight me’ but got no takers, just laughs. Then they started playing and the audience as one pretty much said, “OK, they’re one of us! Cool.”
Back then, in TV comedy especially, cross dressers were widely accepted. Just Google Kenny Everett, Paul O’Grady (Lilly Savage), Stanley Baxter (Oh, you are awful). It was ‘all in the best possible taste‘.
As a general rule, nobody was offensive, nobody was offended. We didn’t need “hate speech” laws because, before New Labour, before Blair, Starmer and the rest, people still had a sense of humour!
So, when you tell boomers that we’re all transphobic, don’t be surprised when we laugh in your face!
I studied psychology at university. I’m fine with paraphilia. Even wrote a paper on it. Whatever is legal and lights your fire in the privacy of your home is fine with me.
Just don’t push your bearded mush in my face, slap your balls on the dining table and scream – in your deep, manly voice – “It’s ma’am” and expect me to support your delusion. Your belief that you are a sexy woman and all men desire you is bordering on insanity.
There are trans that are stunning, that you wouldn’t know were unless they told you… but they tend to be far-eastern, with a naturally slighter build.
But a bulky, fat, balding, otherwise hairy bloke in a wig, with thick lipstick and a short dress (with your tackle hanging out) is not it. You are not desireable, rather – many would argue – horrifying! Not ‘stunning, not ‘brave’, not ‘gorgeous, just a panto bloke in drag.
If it makes you feel good, good luck to you, but stay out of the fucking schools and stop expecting everyone to offer a grovelling apologee when they (don’t) misgender you!
(Funny how many ‘celebrities’ fall into that category, eh! Attention whores, the lot of ’em!)
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, telling me it identifies as a pheasant so I MUST believe it’s a pheasant or else it will be offended… that just isn’t gonna wash with me!
There are obvious lines here, which I acknowledge. For instance:
🥦 “I’m deathly allergic to brocolli and I forgot my epipen.”
“Yikes! We’ll go elsewhere!”
🥦 “I don’t agree with brocolli being on the menu”.
“Well, that’s just, like your opinion, man, I happen to like brocolli. Sprouts too!”
🥦 “I hate brocolli! I’d be happy if brocolli died out!”
“Bit extreme. If you don’t want brocolli, tell the waiter! Order something without it.”
🥦 “I’m going to burn this restaurant down to the ground because they have brocolli on the menu!”
See… That. 👆 That is deranged!
You get the idea. Replace brocolli with something else and the examples hold up.
On the street and campuses around the world trans activist call for the death penalty for ‘terfs’. That is to say fake women – born blokes, and ALWAYS* partially or wholly male – demanding they be allowed in women only spaces, be allowed in girl’s locker rooms. Demanding…
Yes, very demanding, aren’t they!
*(Men have bigger body mass, a different build and bone structure, an adam’s apple, a prostrate. They do not have a cervis or a birthing canal. No amount of drugs, surgery or implants, or pieces of paper can change all of that. No man will every get pregnant.)
I really don’t hold with all the ‘politically correct’ wokery, nor twisted, wilfully misinterpretted ‘hate speech’ bullshit, especially when it’s a shifting line – as it is under Labour – or when it embraces made up words like ‘transphobic’.
Equally, while I have no problem at all with LBQs, when their activists start extending the alphabet, going after kids, even embracing the full a to z, well I do have a problem with that. Leave the kids, the animals and the dead(!) alone!
A fully ‘equipped’ bloke in a dress trying to get into the girls changing room is not a ‘trans’ anything, they are deviant predators and need locking up.
Fortunately, the supreme court now supports this view. That women are women; that being born with meat ‘n’ two veg disqualifies you. Not perfect, but it’s a start.
That it even has to be stated in law is up there with needing to add, “Do not drink” to Domestos!
I am too old for this shit!
I had long hair from being a teenager to well into my 50s. I have a long list of mental health problems too. Yet, at no point ever was I confused about my gender, at no point did I feel the urge to wear high heels, suspendies and a bra. To put on women’s clothing and hang around in bars!
Offended or offensive?
I rarely laugh any more, not out loud anyway, but when I do…
This made me laugh. It’s a shame I can’t find it on youtube to embed here, but it’s Facebook (111k likes) and Instagram (920k likes).
I like the song, the vocals more than anything, but when you pay attention to the lyrics…
I don’t know – or care if the girl in the picture is a girl, or what, though obviously embraces a ‘look’. I also don’t know if she was offended or – as is more likely (I think) embraced suddenly becoming a viral sensation and boosted the traffic to her own channel.
It’s not like there’s any shortage of videos of people getting pounded in the nethers. Even before the Internet, TV shows popped up that paid you for embarrassing moments. So many involved getting a golf ball, snooker ball, or even baseball bat to the nuts that some of them must have been staged:
“Uncle Tom, it’s £250 if it’s accepted. £250! Just take one for the team! We could buy a new tele!”
(They were easy to spot, the unfortunate victim would tense up in advance. The TV companies paid out anyway ‘cos the poor saps were just not prepared for an overzealous swing from someone more focused on their aim and that 250 quid than the damage they were about to inflict on someones genitals. (£250 adjusted for inflation is about £1,370))
Who’s to blame for this?
More than a little blame falls squarely on the Internet.
Back in the day, in the 90’s, before broadband, when 56kb/s was as good as it got, a study was done into online ‘adult’ material.
For perspective, 56kb/s is 0.05Mb/s, 0.00005Gb/s, so 20,000x times slower that now.
Dial-up was telephone rates, so added up quickly. I was had an Internet cafe of sorts (one of the first in the world, actually!) and was looking at expanding. I was quoted £36,000 to install an ISDN30 (T2) 2Mb/s line, with ball-breaking monthly charges on top. (Fortunately I was at a trade show and heard about ADSL being deployed in Canada and stopped).
Anyway, unrelated to this research, I think, we had the BBC round the office, filming. They put a kid on a computer, dialup on and let him search for a picture. It was still horrendously slow back then. Line by interlaced line. Hair, eyes, nose, lips, neck… “Oh my god! CUT! CUT CUT!”
True story!
Anyway, back to the study. It was shut down within about 3 months because the researchers became “obsessed with the material” – perverted’
Now, imagine if those 90’s scientists – instead of dial-up – had access to 1Gb/s internet and the material that today’s children can readily access…
Imagine if show’s like Naked attraction were seen as ‘light entertainment’.
The Simpsons obviously saw this coming a mile off!
The Simpsons (1989, Series 11, epsode 11): ‘I invented a program that downloads porn off the Internet one million times faster’.
It goes deeper though
You have the (manipulated) moral outrage of modern running is tandem with unfathomable depths of depravity.
You have Cambridge pensioners and Oxbridge undergraduate destroying artwork they are ‘offended’ by – while, right in front of their face – governments and covering up their association with and involvement with Epstein and his ring of billiionaire and A-list paedophiles, Diddy and his ring of participants, Labour and their grooming rape gang coverup.
But sure, get enraged about some 300-year-old painting because you read it was maybe associated with something you think represented some past transgression and you must purge the shame of your white privilege by righting this wrong. (Before driving back to the shire, or maybe flying to your beach house in the Hamptons.)
Do you have any idea how delusional that is!?
The young people of this country – and I would say this encompasses everyone under the age of about 35 – have, since Blair, been drip-fed emasculation by the state and the establishment.
Just as I have never entertained the desire to become a cross-dressing lumberjack, until recently, I had heard of a single ‘tomboy’ that had an overwhelming desire to become a ‘tomgirl’ and invent new pronouns to capture the mood of their gender fluidity!
We have a government that – by their own words – do not know what a women is!
That won’t accept that supreme courts ruling the women are women, not men.
I still staggers me that I have to comment on this!
My first real job was a lab tech – a chemist if you will. You see a symbol like this – [🕱] – you know it’s not good for you.
EVERYBODY knew that!
Now? You need a warning on pizza boxes saying, ‘Do not eat’; you need a warning on bleach, tide pods and battery acid saying ‘do not drink’
We have an ever growing number of draconian laws, rigidly enforced by a woke police state – to suppress ‘transphobic’ remarks.
At the same time trans activists scream for the death penalty for anyone that doesn’t fully endorse their twisted reality!
We have reached the absurd point were you cannot be sure whether a video clip is an AI, fake, a staged parody – or if teenagers today are truly that ignorant, that stupid that they believe in halal cabbages!
Society is becoming to lost, so depraved, so decadent that the only path is civil war and madness. It’s MAD!
But sure, get your knickers in a twist, get howling mad because someone told a joke or a song or a meme that you – just you – found so offensive that you want to burn the whole fucking world to the ground.
And the police, instead of telling you to calm the fuck down, get out their pickforks and torches and march beside you. 
Because they have swallowed the idiot pills too!
Links and in the press
Drain the swamp: Do we REALLY have Freedom of Speech in the UK?
Spectator (2023): Woke culture is strangling comedy
Telegraph (2024): Woke comedy is nothing to laugh at. Cancel culture is being wielded as a weapon by newcomers hungry for fame
Andrews, H. and Frame, G. (2025) ‘Cancel culture: the decline of political comedy on British television in the early 2020s’, Comedy Studies, pp. 1–17.
(academic)
Dame Maureen Lipman has said comedy is in danger of being “wiped out” due to fears over being cancelled.
She told the BBC she believes comedians are now so worried about offending, “a revolution” is taking place.
“It’s in the balance whether we will ever be funny again,” she said.
…more than half of Britons say they have stopped themselves from expressing political and social views for fear of being judged.
… they censor themselves on issues including immigration and trans rights, particularly if their views are deemed at the less politically correct end of the spectrum.
The less politically correct the views held, the more likely people were to say they feel shouted down.
Cancel culture, this cancelling, this punishment, it’s everywhere. Punishment. An eye for an eye. ‘You said that, therefore you must never work again.’ Sooner or later the cancellers will win.(It’s spiteful, hateful!)
…comedians fear audiences will take offence so they tone down their material.
“Something has to be forbidden to make you laugh, really belly laugh. It’s when you shouldn’t be laughing,” she said.
“All the things that have been cancelled out by being correct are, I’m afraid, all the things that make people laugh.”
Comedian Ricky Gervais recently said: “I want to live long enough to see the younger generation not be woke enough for the next generation. It’s going to happen. Don’t they realise that, it’s like, they’re next. That’s what’s funny.”
BBC (2021): Maureen Lipman: Cancel culture could wipe out comedy
Feature image from pixabay, by Robin Higgins
