‘Cancel culture’

Dear Editor,

I wanted to endorse Karen Soole’s article ‘Beware of gospel-ending conversations’ in the April issue of en, but from a slightly different angle.

I am unable to confirm it (downsizing has meant disposing of large numbers of books) but about 20 years ago Civitas produced a booklet on political correctness, PC, gagging truth. They gave examples of how people used humour to express truth that would otherwise be gagged (punitively) by political correctness. And this is where Karen’s observations of Jimmy Carr’s ‘offending’ might be explained by the Civitas article – the authors of that article, citing Sasha Baron Cohen’s use of hunour to expose, said that humour can also ‘normalise’ the very issues we seek to expose.