I’m glad David Cameron’s jokes are violent

„The fact is that David Cameron has always enjoyed fairly robust humour. In the 1990s, when he was working for Norman, now Lord, Lamont, a friend took him to the opera to hear Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. Afterwards, he thanked his host in a letter for introducing me to National Socialism, with the last two words thinly crossed out and replaced by the operas of Richard Strauss. Who would complain about that? Richard Strauss fans? National Socialists? It may well be true that Mr Cameron’s idea of wit matured at school, which happened to be Eton. That’s where Wellington went to school. He it was who, on seeing the first reformed Parliament, exclaimed: I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life. In those days, that was very wounding. In our day, it would be the social attitude to which exception was taken.

The real question, though, is how we can return to a happier land of more robust laughter. The funny things about humanity, after all, are its weak points. That is why sexual intercourse is always funny. And the irremediable is often funniest. When not much could be done about toothache, it was a wildly popular subject for jokes. Now that it can be dealt with, we would not dream of laughing at it. Yesterday, someone on Today, talking about cartoons, predicted that in future we would not be able to laugh at drunkenness, because it will be seen as misfortune attracting sympathy.

In the meantime, we love reliable stock figures of fun. Eric Pickles is funny because he is fat, not because of any supposed fault in refusing to remedy his fatness. Boris Johnson is funny because he gets into scrapes. John Bercow is funny because he does not appreciate his own absurdity. Churchill, who said everything that Oscar Wilde did not, once remarked on Stanley Baldwin in his decline: The candle in that great turnip has gone out That was not kind, but it was witty. Heaven preserve us from the criminalisation of mockery.”