How I Met Your Father and the never-ending sitcom

If you’re the type of person who pays attention to these things, you might have noticed Keir Starmer’s new attack line. ‘The joke isn’t funny anymore, prime minister,’ the Labour leader now tells Boris Johnson on a semi-regular basis – attempting to turn his opponent’s clownish entertainer shtick from electoral strength to weakness.

Leaving aside the merits of the jibe, this line has one major flaw in its central premise. Namely that the leader of the opposition is evidently still under the impression that comedy has a shelf-life – whereas all evidence from our streaming habits points to that not being the case. And then some. If anything, most of us are still laughing at the same things that tickled us ten years ago.

You only need to look at the nine-figure sum – half a billion dollars apparently – that Netflix paid for the Seinfeld back catalogue to realise that, in the streaming world, expired comedies are seriously big business.