A vet has accused me of a ‘hate crime’ for making a joke about vets. On the basis that everything is a hate crime, I am not getting too upset.
But it does seem to be the case that jokes are becoming a liability. The sort of complaints I used to get were from lefty bloggers calling me subversive for daring to mock an organic café in Balham that purported to serve locally foraged ingredients. There were also some poor souls on Twitter who said I had worsened their gluten intolerance by making jokes about wheat.
By and large, though, people have been wonderful and responded to my jokes by saying, ‘Oh ha ha, yes, very funny. Some of this is in bad taste, but let’s all suspend the capacity to fake hurt that we are being told to cultivate in the age of outrage and treat ourselves to a damn good laugh.
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