Is there anything left worth joking about?

Here are a couple of books that seek to tackle the difficult issue of comedy on the front line. One deals with an increasingly toxic global cultural war; the other plunges into the battle to take on jihadists by laughing at them. In their different ways both ask the same questions: what’s funny and what’s not? And both examine the consequences of challenging those who police what is and what is not considered acceptable. Find yourself on the wrong side of cancel culture and you lose your career. Take on the jihadists and you lose your head.

Andrew Hankinson, a journalist and writer from Newcastle, is the author of the cult study You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat], a modern take on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. In Don’t Applaud: Either Laugh or Don’t he tells the turbulent story of New York’s Comedy Cellar, a bijou basement club founded in 1982 by the onetime Israeli taxi driver Manny Dworman, a man for whom free speech was sacrosanct and total. Small in size, the club has been big in national comedy. Its tiny stage has hosted, among others, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Amy Schumer and, much more problematically in recent times, Louis CK. Since Manny’s death in 2003, the club has been run by his son Noam.

As recently as 2017, Rolling Stone magazine ranked CK, as he is widely known, fourth on its list of the 50 best stand-ups of all time. Later that year came the ‘penisgate’ revelation that CK had been guilty of sexual misconduct, masturbating in front of female comics and writers. He was dropped like a hot potato and later claimed he had lost $35 million in income. Then came the comeback and a controversial appearance at the Comedy Cellar.