It’s too late to save comedy from ‘cancel culture’

Will comedy become the latest victim of ‘cancel culture’? Dame Maureen Lipman fears as much. 

‘Cancel culture, this cancelling, this punishment, it’s everywhere,’ she told the BBC yesterday. She says that the world of comedy is in danger of being ‘wiped out’ because comedians are scared that audiences will take offence, and that they self-censor their material as a precaution. ‘It’s in the balance, whether we’re ever going to be funny again,’ she said.

It would be an ironic tragedy if this were true, because in no other field of entertainment as comedy has ‘cancel culture’ been at its most insidious, relentless and blatant. Lipman’s warning is therefore unfounded, superficially at least. Most comedy – especially on BBC television and radio – is so painfully politically correct and conformist that it is far from imperilled.

Anyone who has subjected themselves to the likes of The Now Show, Have I Got News for You or Mock The Week in the past ten years, with their remorseless stream of gags about Brexit or one-liners ending with the punchline ‘it would be like a headline in the Daily Mail‘ knows exactly what I’m talking about.