How a lie becomes truth

Teachers were told to exclude children who made ‘inappropriate’ jokes about Covid when they returned to school this week. These days every joke is inappropriate in one way or another: someone, somewhere will find it transgressive. I cannot imagine being a schoolchild and not making a joke about Covid, and a sense of humour is about the only thing these kids have got left. But for the officials who dreamed up these edicts, humour is the last refuge of the bourgeois, as Herbert Marcuse or one of those Frankfurt School monkeys put it. (I forget exactly which one. Maybe it was Jürgen Habermas. What a fun night you’d have out on the town with those boys.)

But the poor children: masked up in the corridors, separated from their mates, held in ‘bubbles’, at school one week, at home the next, denied the human right to make jokes about their predicament — all to preserve them from an illness which, if they caught it, they would not even notice.