A funeral director friend — a woman whose job depends on not becoming too emotional — was livid at the omission. Clap for Our Carers celebrated “all those who are out there making an unbelievable difference to our lives in these challenging times”. Meanwhile, those making an unbelievable difference to our deaths were ignored, even though their times were just as challenging, if not more so.

It was not so much the case numbers — one of Amanda’s biggest grumbles was constantly tripping over the coffins she panic-bought in March, didn’t use, and had to store in the staff kitchen — but the ludicrous Covid theatre she had to choreograph. Instead of meeting families for tea and sympathy, she was giving advice over Zoom on strategies for deciding which ten people would make the cut, and whether these ten were allowed to place a rose on the coffin individually so long as they were socially distanced. And then, after she gave the correct answer — “No, but do it anyway” — there was the tedium of fighting with crematorium staff threatening to blacklist her.

Funeral directors weren’t even on the Government’s list of Key Workers when it was first introduced. Those who deal with the dead were forgotten, even when the shadow of death was over the whole country. It was not deliberate suppression of the facts, like the mobile crematoria rumoured to be following the Russian front line to keep reality at a distance from people back home; it simply never occurred to the authorities to think about who and what comes after death.

Someone who does think about the who and what is Hayley Campbell. Her new book, All the Living and the Dead, is a series of profiles of “death workers” — not just funeral directors, but embalmers, grave diggers, anatomists and, in one haunting chapter, an executioner. There is a huge emphasis on the physical: her chapter on the work of funeral directors is about the act of changing the clothes on a body, not the counselling or event organising (“all the work of a wedding planner but done in a week”) or the constant state of war with crematorium staff — the work that takes up most of a funeral director’s time. Funeral celebrants are not mentioned at all.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a range of people from the funeral industry; and one of my standard questions was “What is a funeral for?” (The other one was “Who is a funeral for?”) It wasn’t until the very last interview that someone said, “to dispose of the body”, and I realised that everyone had been skipping over the one thing that defines a funeral, like those restaurant reviewers who never mention the food. The whole point of a funeral is that it gets the body where it needs to be — a physical presence that we can cope with, buried or processed into ash.

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Campbell doesn’t make that mistake. She has a whole chapter about what happens in crematoria. The part that will stay with me longest — possibly because both my parents died of cancer — is that a tumour takes longer to turn to ash than the rest of the body, unyielding while everything else is burnt away, like St Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz. The operator has to fire jets directly at the lump — “almost like black coral” — until it too is dust.

Still, the book doesn’t talk about what happens to the ashes after they’ve gone through the cremulator and become powder. It is as if Campbell loses interest in human remains at the moment most of us can face up to them: when they are no longer recognisable as a body. She interviews a specialist in the niche and rather creepy art of death masks — “Nick thought that the popularity of death masks was on the rise… But it never really took off” — but doesn’t examine the growing industry surrounding ashes that have been safely unbodied.

There is no mention of the companies that will send them into the heavens in fireworks; or turn them into diamonds, pencils, vinyl records or tattoos; or pour them into hourglasses (“They cannot be exactly timed, due to the consistency of the cremains”); or mix them with concrete to create habitats for fish in coral reefs; or of the company in Alabama which will place them “with care and reverence into almost any caliber or gauge of ammunition”. Or, if you want niche and rather creepy, vibrators.

There is money in achieving the impossible — giving you a physical reminder of someone that isn’t a physical reminder of them. Perhaps the reason death masks never took off was that they are too good a reminder. Although it is worth noting that one high-profile British politician did commission one of his late father: Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It was different when ours was a Christian society, but we now find it difficult to admit that our bodies are what we are. The most popular reading at funerals is now the dreadful “Do not stand at my grave and weep”, which suggests that the deceased is wind or sunlight or glints in snow — anything but the body being buried. It’s a bit of doggerel so mawkish and vacuous that Ricky Gervais used it as the emotional climax to his telly show about death. The first time I laughed after my mother’s death was when a priest, to whom I had sarcastically suggested it as a reading, read it all the way to “I am not here / I did not die,” the final lines, before handing it back and saying, “Well, the crematorium’s going to be a hell of a shock, isn’t it?”

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Campbell, though, doesn’t shy away from the physicality of dead bodies — the smell of putrefaction, and why it smells like a gas leak; the sound of rigor snapping — and how they are physically handled. In many ways, emphasising the physicality is healthier than ignoring it: in a disaster, Campbell points out, those who actively do something are at much lower risk of becoming traumatised, as they are using their stress hormones for their proper purpose, than those who stand by. (On a smaller scale, it was felt deeply by my cousins that they were not allowed to carry my uncle’s coffin at his funeral, because of the social distancing rules, which everyone knew would be totally ignored at the subsequent wake.)

But, in a post-Christian society, it’s just as easy to ignore the fact we are not just our bodies. Most of the death workers Campbell interviews do this to a certain extent because they need to separate these bodies from their identities — technicians in the autopsy room who can weigh organs so long as they know nothing about the person whose body it is; crematorium workers who can pitch someone into a fire but find dressing them too personal.

The executioner is the only death worker in the book who knew the bodies in his charge equally well when they were alive — execution was among his duties as a prison guard. He is also the only one who believes in God. This is not a coincidence. Campbell dismisses this as wishful thinking: “God is the soft focus everyone [involved in an execution] puts on the scene… to me, it says they’re choosing not to think too deeply on whatever it is they’re doing because it doesn’t matter.” To me, it says something very different. He believes because he knows that death does matter. It is the rest of us who are looking in soft focus.

Within 24 hours, Ukrainian soldiers were reporting bullets missing them and a housewife in Kyiv brought down a drone with a tin of tomatoes (not, as some sensationalist early accounts reported, a jar of pickles). Coincidence?

Michael Hughes has form: five years ago, he was behind the binding ritual against Donald Trump, which involved the burning of an unflattering photograph of the President (a visually appealing photograph, it was made clear, would not be suitable materium). This ceremony had the option, as the President turned to ash, to chant either “So mote it be” — a ritual phrase in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism or Wicca — or, if preferred, “You’re fired”.

And even this hocus-POTUS was not unprecedented: magic regularly plays a part in resistance. The English occultist Aleister Crowley, for example, claimed to have invented Churchill’s V-sign as a magical foil to the Nazis — in his Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram, V represents Apophis, the destroyer, whose slaying of Osiris is symbolised by the swastika — although the general consensus among historians is that the V stands for Victory.

Crowley repeatedly tried to offer his esoteric services for King and Country, but each time was told that “the Director of Naval Intelligence presents his compliments to Mr Aleister Crowley and regrets he is unable to avail himself of his offer”. It seems that the only person, apart from Crowley himself, who suggested that he should play an official role in the war effort was Lord Haw-Haw, who said that his celebrating a Black Mass in Westminster Abbey would be as effective as Britain’s National Day of Prayer. Crowley, of course, took this as a compliment.

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Francis Young’s new book, Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, sees Crowley as the last person to make a serious attempt to fill a role which has been a surprising constant in British history — magical advisor to the rulers of Britain. Merlin may have been a myth, but figures like John Dee, Elizabeth I’s astronomer, self-consciously placed themselves in his tradition. And even when belief in magic has disappeared from the body politic, the role has not: Dominic Cummings, that “wizard” known for practising the “dark arts”, is accused of bending people to his will through powers that no one really understands, or even can prove exist.

Cummings himself said he wanted to fill government with “weirdos” — “wyrd” means, of course, having the power to control the fates — and super-forecasters, albeit ones with a background in statistics rather than traditional methods of seeing the future. An adept told me that he knew Cummings had no interest in astrology when he didn’t capitalise on the fact that, when we left the European Union, Saturn and Pluto were conjoined in the sign of Capricorn. This was happening for the first time since Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, making Brexit not just an echo of the Reformation but a rerun ordained by fate.

I’m not, of course, saying that Dominic Cummings is Merlin, only that people talk about him as if he were. To be fair, as Arthur C Clarke used to observe, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — which goes for the manipulation of big data as much as it does for “experiments” in previous reigns. Gunpowder, for example, was developed by alchemists, who had experience of sulphur and saltpetre; and the word for poisoning (veneficium) also meant witchcraft until the seventeenth century, when the ability of plants to kill was no longer believed to be an occult power.

And there has always been a political dimension to magic — especially in Scotland, where witch-hunting was one of the few ways in which the Scottish government could impose its authority on local magnates. Nicola Sturgeon’s apology for the witch trials last week omitted to mention their political role in legitimising the Scottish state. In England, it was much easier to prosecute someone for “compassing and imagining” the death of the king under the Statute of Treason than for actually committing treason.

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But political magic was never just propaganda. Even in the twentieth century, the Anglican exorcist Gilbert Shaw was convinced that the General Strike was the result of Russian adepts projecting psychic forces at Britain to foment unrest and lead to Socialist revolution. Luckily, he was conveniently close to the ley line along which this psychic pressure travelled, and, by exorcising an ancient tumulus next to his church, was able to cut off this occult communication. A week later, the General Strike was over.

Father Shaw — like most Anglicans with an interest in the Occult, he was an Anglo-Catholic — quickly became the Church of England’s leading expert on combating black magic, and claimed, like Crowley and many others, that his preternatural assistance played its part in defeating Hitler. There was no officially approved magic resistance during the Second World War — and there hardly could be, the argument runs, since the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was not repealed until 1951 — but many modern Wiccans believe that there were unofficial rituals.

Gerald Gardner, the grandfather of modern Wicca, reports that he was initiated into a coven in the New Forest who performed a ritual on 1 August 1940 — Lammas Day — to prevent the Nazi high command invading. Or, rather, to prevent them wanting to invade: as he wrote, “The witches met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler’s brain: ‘You cannot come across the sea, You cannot cross the sea, Not able to come, Not Able To Come’…  I am not saying that they stopped Hitler. All I say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea in his mind, and this was repeated several times afterwards; and the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come”.

The account is corroborated by the occultist Louis Wilkinson, who claimed that some of the more elderly participants died as a result of the psychic energy they expended — while conducting the ritual naked, in the middle of the night, in England. Whatever the truth of the story, the New Forest coven is an important part of the founding myth of modern Wicca, and I have heard contemporary Wiccans vigorously maintain that it was this ceremony that foiled Operation Sealion.

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The hex against Putin, then, like the binding of Trump, is part of a long but hidden tradition. But there are differences. The Cone of Power has, according to Gardner’s account, been raised on three occasions: to prevent the Armada invading in 1588, Bonaparte in 1800 and Hitler in 1940. These rituals, as recounted by Gardner, concentrated on changing Hitler’s mind, or telling Bonaparte to think again. Even the spell against the Armada was about persuading the Spanish (“Go On, Go On, Not Able to Land”), although, since they had already embarked by the time the ritual was carried out (by Sir Francis Drake himself, according to Devonian folklore), it appeared to take effect by creating the storm that scattered the fleet.

Modern magic has given up on the idea of changing anyone’s mind. Like modern politics, the aim is not to persuade your opponent, not to influence his thoughts, but to bring ruin and destruction upon him, breaking his bones and casting him down into dust and ashes.

Some magical practitioners question the wisdom of this, and not just because of the Law of Threefold Return, the Wiccan principle that the energy you put out into the world will be thrice returned to you. More worrisome is the idea that Putin has his own protections in place. Aleksandr Dugin, the nationalist philosopher known as “Putin’s Brain”, is known to have an interest in the occult, dating back to his days editing Elementy. On its second issue, the magazine’s cover star was the goat-god Baphomet, who has an important role in Aleister Crowley’s cosmology. The fact that Russian troops entered Donetsk and Luhansk on 22.02.2022 does suggest that Putin is receiving a certain kind of advice.

Perhaps the most profitable line of attack is not against Putin himself, but against his soldiers. When young Russian soldiers entered Konotop — known from stories as a place where old women have occult powers — they were told by an elderly Ukrainian woman: “Here every second woman is a witch. Tomorrow you’ll no longer be able to get your dick to stand”. As Nicola Sturgeon did point out, a fear of witches is often a fear of women; and their words were enough to terrify any Russian man.

Yet within a few months I realised they were right: I had a favourite garden centre, I had joined the National Trust and, most terrifying of all, I had found myself listening to Steve Wright in the afternoon on Radio 2. That’s not even the end of the story. I loved the show, until Wright played Pulp’s “Common People” and, at the end, mentioned that it was one of the afternoon’s “Oldies”. I switched the radio off and sat in silence for the rest of my journey. Within a year or two, I had given up comedy, moved to Cornwall and taken up wild swimming.

Today, I am tempted to buy that tweet as a non-fungible token — if that wasn’t an extremely silly thing to do — as it changed my life. Perhaps the tweeter would throw in the rest of their thread, in which they expanded on my problematic cisheteronormativity and other middle-aged attitudes. It is striking that the same person who believes that gender can be totally separated from biology will assume without thinking that being middle-aged is biologically predetermined; social constructionists like Margaret Morganroth Gullette thought that we are aged not primarily by biology but by culture.

The opposite was believed by William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, who insisted on the “comparative uselessness” of men over 40: “the effective, moving, vitalising work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty — these fifteen golden years of plenty, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and credit is still good”. After 40, you are only frittering away the capital; you could look on the midlife crisis, then, as the last attempt to get something in the bank for a rainy day.

Mark Jackson’s “intimate history of the Midlife Crisis”, Broken Dreams, is an attempt to synthesise these two viewpoints. Just as it would be foolish to deny that the drop in hormone levels on hitting middle age has any effect, it would be wrong to suggest that there are no cultural factors in the midlife crisis.

Before the twentieth century, the concept was unknown, partly because there was no middle age to speak of: those born in 1891 could expect to inherit from their parents at the age of 37, but baby boomers had to wait, on average, until they were 56. With people having children younger — or, at least, drawing a line under having children younger — this created a new demographic, sandwiched between the elderly and the youth.

At first, this age seemed full of promise: the best-selling book of 1933 was Life Begins at Forty, in which Walter Pitkin argued that while men “wore out at 40” in previous ages, with modern medicines and mechanisation increasing the active lifespan, “men and women alike turn from the ancient task of making a living to the strange new task of living”.

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But it is just as true to say that “death begins at 40”. As one of the books cited by Professor Jackson, the Ladybird Book of the Midlife Crisis, puts it: “When we are young, we all dream of doing something wonderful and exciting with our lives. What will we be? A cosmonaut? An underwater detective? A tommy gunner? A groin surgeon? Anything is possible. And then, one day, it isn’t.”

Change is — to quote Brideshead Revisited, the best novel about middle age — “the only evidence of life”; and the moment you realise that promise will not be fulfilled is the day that you die. As Jane Pearce and Saul Newton of the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis wrote, “many people die during middle age, although they may wander through the world like zombies waiting to be buried decently for thirty years or more”.  It is no accident that Reginald Iolanthe Perrin carried a briefcase with the initials “RIP”.

The midlife crisis, then, is a choice between Death and Life; it is no wonder it is stressful. The phrase comes from a 1959 lecture by Elliott Jaques, who defined its parameters: “entering the prime of life, the stage of fulfilment, but at the same time the prime and fulfilment are dated. Death lies beyond…” Efforts to remain young — “the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life, and the frequency of religious concern” — are all “attempts at a race against time”.

Although Jaques was a psychoanalyst, this diagnosis was not based on his practice; he only had one case study, a middle-aged man named “Mr N”. In an interview some years afterwards, he admitted that he was Mr N. (Professor Jackson fails to mention this; perhaps it would give rise to the outrageous suggestion that there is an element of narcissism in the midlife crisis.)

This book starts, quite rightly, with the Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Reggie Perrin is stuck in a rut; his children have left home, and he is bored with a pointless job that will take up his time until he retires. So he runs naked into the sea on the beach in Broadchurch, supposedly to commit suicide. The first series ends happily, however, when he returns in disguise as Martin Wellborn, and gets back together with the wife he abandoned. A happy ending, if you are willing to accept Elizabeth Perrin as someone who only exists in relation to her husband. (Where’s her midlife crisis?)

Professor Jackson uses the story of Reggie Perrin to illustrate the factors in the midlife crisis, with one curious omission. This is clearly a spiritual crisis — and I have seen Christian readings of the series as a self-emptying or kenosis as part of a spiritual journey; and other, less convincing readings, which point out that CJ, Perrin’s boss at Sunshine Desserts, is JC (or Jesus Christ) backwards or that Perrin dies and is reborn through water, and so forth.

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David Nobbs, the writer of the novel and the TV series, was a fervent humanist, but even he accepted that there might be something in a Christian reading: “[Reggie] was a man trying to find an individual way through a corporate world. It was implicit that he was without religious faith. He was searching for value, for moral certainty.”

This is puzzling since even Jaques’s original diagnosis of the Midlife Crisis took as its starting point Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Certainly a spiritual solution would have been of more use to Reggie Perrin than to have his crisis ascribed to his age, class and other demographic factors; it is clear that medical intervention was not going to work. I fully accept that the company doctor at Perrin’s office was not at the cutting edge of medical science, but this is as far as that will take you:

Doc Morrissey: Do you find you can’t finish the crossword like you used to, nasty taste in the mouth in the mornings, can’t stop thinking about sex, can’t start doing anything about sex, wake up with a sweat in the mornings, keep falling asleep during ‘”Play For Today”?

Reginald Perrin: That’s extraordinary, Doc! That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling.

Doc Morrissey: So have I. I wonder what it is?

We are not going to see a repeat of the Spanish Flu, where even the wood for the coffins ran out, and Italian-Americans buried their dead in the wooden boxes macaroni came in. Coffins are no longer made to order by tradesmen who split their time between undertaking and joinery, and the supply chains are robust.

But it is reasonable to ask whether their modern equivalents are ready for the predicted increase in deaths. There are concerns about shortages of masks and other protective equipment, both for the undertakers and the deceased — it is possible for a coronavirus victim to infect others, even in death, by expelling air when they are moved, and one coroner has advised crafting masks for them from towels or sanitary pads. It is hard to argue that living sufferers should not take priority over the dead; but that still leaves the undertakers vulnerable.

Funeral directors had been given no specific guidance from the government before a meeting with the Cabinet Office last week; even after that, it was unclear whether they would be classed as “key workers”, until the government was pushed by Carolyn Harris, a Labour MP who, having lost her son at a young age, is probably the most clear-headed person in Westminster on the provision of funerals.

When I started researching the death management process — to use the phrase favoured by the government’s pandemic planning documents — a few months ago, there were complaints about overcapacity. New private crematoria, for example, far from bringing down prices, reduced the number of cremations over which local authority facilities could spread their fixed costs, and in some parts of the country actually increased prices. The one advantage to this was that crematoria competed for market share not by price but with additional facilities — so the technology for live-streaming crematorium services is already widely available.

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In other areas, overcapacity kept prices down: one of the reasons that funerals in Ulster are cheaper than the rest of the UK — you will notice that adverts for funeral plans generally have a footnote saying “based on prices in Northern Ireland” — is that many towns have a Catholic undertaker and a Protestant undertaker competing for the nonsectarian trade. Overcapacity was not so good for funeral directors, who complained about having to lay staff off, or give them zero-hours contracts, in order to cope with demand that could never be predicted. All of them were, of course, on call 24 hours a day, whether or not there was any work to do — and there often wasn’t.

The funeral directors I have spoken to do not expect a repetition of the scenes in Italy, where coffins are lined up in churches ready for burial, not least because the vast majority of people in the UK choose to be cremated. Italy has one of the lowest cremation rates in Europe — only Latvia and Lithuania are lower — for historical and religious reasons; even Venice, where burying the dead has been forbidden since Bonaparte’s occupation, only legalised the scattering of ashes nine years ago, and even then at least 700 metres into the Lagoon.

It is true that the crematorium in Bergamo has been overwhelmed, with bodies being sent to Modena and Bologna in army vehicles; but Bergamo has only one crematorium, which can only accommodate 25 bodies a day. There are many more facilities in this country, most of which start their final cremation of the day at 3 o’clock or so, so that it’s done by close of business; if they operated non-stop 24 hours a day they could scale up very quickly.

At first the Coronavirus Bill seemed to suggest that local authorities could, in a worst-case scenario, order compulsory cremations, even for Jews and Muslims, whose religion mandates burial. Following a brief and amicable campaign led by the Labour MP Naz Shah, the government agreed that local authorities should have regard to — which is not quite the same as “must follow” — the deceased’s wishes, religion or beliefs.

The one possible pinch-point is the coroner’s mortuaries, and here the government’s planning is well-advanced, and surprisingly sensitive. Westminster Coroner’s Court doubled its capacity in a couple of days through a refrigerated tent on Horseferry Road; this was not the makeshift panic measure reported in a number of newspapers, but came from a commendable desire to avoid “stigma” to buildings which will one day return to other uses, and the “emotional impact” to later users. Only as an absolute last resort will local authorities commandeer refrigerated lorries to hold the dead until they can be disposed of respectfully.

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But the death management process is not just a question of logistics. Most of the time, the logistics is almost an afterthought. I spoke to a number of people in the industry a few months ago — undertakers, funeral celebrants, party planners and priests — and asked all of them: What is a funeral for? My very last interviewee — the spokeswoman for a funeral educational charity — said it was, first, to dispose of the body… And it suddenly occurred to me that not one person had said that before. Everyone else had spoken about the commemoration of the deceased, the comfort to the family and friends, the emotional work of “closure”; but really, the disposal of the body is the whole purpose of a funeral.

Or at least, one aspect of a single purpose. By getting the dead where they need to be, we mourners get where we need to be. For virtually the whole of human existence — it is almost a definition of being human — the two have been synonymous. But in recent years a distinction has been drawn between the disposal of the dead body and the commemoration of the life — the former is done in a private ceremony at the crematorium or a burial ground, the latter in what may be called a funeral but is in fact a memorial service.

Sometimes the final disposition of the body is not ritualised at all — many funeral directors offer direct cremation services, where they pick up a body and return the cremated remains, a sort of money laundering for dead bodies. This has previously been rare, an eccentric option for the self-consciously progressive — David Bowie, for example, who numbered among his favourite books, The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford’s polemic on the wastefulness of funerals — but that was true of cremation a century ago.

Last week, direct cremations (and burials) became the official policy of the Irish Association of Funeral Directors.  (That policy has since been relaxed, but only for small-scale funerals within the immediate family.) This is natural, while the pandemic lasts — funerals are places where people, many of them elderly, gather in close proximity and almost inevitably hug; at the time of writing, almost all the Covid-19 cases in the American state of Georgia can be traced back to just two funerals — but there is no certainty that we will return to the traditional way of death afterwards.

Of course, people with faith will feel its loss — last week the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, when he announced the suspension of synagogue services, was obviously distressed that he would not have a minyan to say kaddish for his father — but will the same be true for those for whom there is no theological imperative? Could it be that the lasting legacy of coronavirus is that we separate the disposal of the body from the commemoration of the life completely?

After all, it was the Spanish Flu that finally destroyed the elaborate rituals of Victorian mourning. In that pandemic, so many funeral processions left the mortuaries that it was described as “like a Lord Mayor’s Show”; corteges followed one after another to the cemeteries, often (like that of the poet Apollinaire, on its way to Père Lachaise) bumping into the crowds celebrating Armistice Day. Within 10 years, these horse-drawn parades of death had disappeared everywhere outside the East End of London.

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I hope not. I do not care for the modern funeral, a party “to which everyone is invited but the dead guy”, as the American poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch calls it. It is never clear whether he objects primarily as a poet or as an undertaker — or as a Christian, for whom our bodies are not our possessions, our bodies are who we are.  (I recognise that view is unpopular, and almost certainly problematic.)

And in the meantime, the better compromise to circumstances are live-streamed funerals. These are definitely a temporary option. I attended (watched?) my first live-streamed Eucharist on Sunday, and missed, of all things, the hymns; it seems natural to join in a prayer remotely, but singing hymns on your own in the house is just weird. (My parish is not as advanced — in any way — as Giles Fraser’s, which had services by video-conference; and anyway the high potential for comedy Giles mentioned means that video-conference funerals would probably not work.)

And I can’t imagine a funeral without communal singing: it was the most moving part of my father’s funeral.

One of the good things about the Victorian obsession with death is that many Victorian hymns — for all I know, most Victorian hymns — have a verse about death which is tactfully cut by the compilers of hymnals, and you only discover when you’re drawing up the order of service for a funeral. There’s a good one in the middle of Praise My Soul the King of Heaven; the one from Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer is an absolute banger. Being surrounded by my father’s old rugby club cronies, singing “Thou didst conquer, Thou didst conquer / Sin and Satan and the grave” (tenors only: “And the grave!”) was the moment when, I think, I began to feel closure.

I’ve often thought about this throwaway metaphor, as it is much better than he possibly realised: yes, good fugu chefs cut out the poison, but, tradition goes, the truly great ones leave the smallest trace of tetrodotoxin, giving their customers a rather thrilling tingle on the tongue. That little tingle on the tongue is, for some, almost a definition of comedy.

And comedians don’t always get it right. Sometimes that’s because they aren’t good enough, like the six foolhardy Japanese fishermen who die each year after preparing their own pufferfish; more often it is because they have misjudged the audience, or the audience has misjudged them.

I once did an Edinburgh show about feminism – it was a few years ago, before “male feminist comedian” had become shorthand for “sex pest” – and had a joke that always got a big laugh, from an audience largely made up of feminists. I have done exactly the same joke in a 20-minute club set and had women get so angry they’ve pelted me with popcorn. The words were the same; only the context was different. (I still have no idea what made the difference – was it the sophistication, or pseudo-sophistication, of the audience in Edinburgh? Or the fact that, at that point in the Edinburgh show, I’d already done ten minutes of feminist material? Or were they simply not drunk?)

But the great thing about live stand-up is that one can recalibrate instantly, one can read how the audience is reacting and adjust one’s set accordingly – that is the skill, and the joy. As Robin Ince puts it in his new book, I’m a Joke, “If the line between the acceptable and the offensive was straight and solid, there would be no fun in toying with it.”

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Last week, though, a comedian called Konstantin Kisin received a contract and a lot of publicity: a student gig had asked him to sign up to a policy of no-tolerance towards “Racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism”.  It went on to say that these subjects could be discussed, “But it must be done in a respectable and non-abusive way” – that is to say, with the poison removed.

Now you can quibble with the form of the agreement, the way in which it formalises politeness and tries to make it legally binding – and any lawyer would tell you it’s very poorly drafted, void for lack of consideration, and leaving the tolerability of anti-Semitism unclear under the expressio unius rule of contractual interpretation – but it was only doing what comics do automatically every time they go on stage.

Yet this Behavioural Agreement Form – that heading was particularly unwise, smug and patronising – has become a cause celebre: David Dimbleby’s career on Question Time culminated with him asking the panel what they thought of it. And it was the only thing Jo Brand, David Davis and Caroline Lucas could agree on: it was an appalling act of censorship. Jo Brand, indeed, said that she did not know any comedians who would possibly “capitulate” to those terms.

She could have just said that she did not know any comedians who don’t have a fanbase big enough for them not to do the Circuit, the network of comedy clubs up and down the country. If you can fill a theatre every night with people who want to see you, then of course you wouldn’t capitulate. (Likewise, if you’re not being paid, which is usual for the first few years of any comic’s career.) But for the rest of us, the comics in the middle, capitulation to a promoter’s boundaries is a fact of life. As a friend of mine observed, while playing by your own rules may be the definition of “making it”, a comedian who has never been given guidelines is a comedian who is not very successful.

Further reading

Can academia be saved from the mob?

By Debra Soh

And it’s not necessarily a bad thing: the only time I have had a joke censored was when a promoter gave me a gig on the condition I didn’t do my line about Myra Hindley; the show was in Saddleworth and, after hearing what happened to another comic doing that gig, I am glad for the pointer. My favourite shows at this time of year are Paul Kerensa’s Comedians and Carols, which take place in churches so, obviously, have to be clean.

Even within the parameters of “clean”, comics have to make judgements – what is clean in a church gig may not be clean to a Muslim audience (I once found that out to my cost); and even doing Comedians and Carols, you can get away with jokes in Anglican churches of sound Incarnational theology that you can’t do for the Pentecostals. In this situation a contract might even be useful – it would certainly save scanning the church noticeboard for clues as to churchmanship.

The comics who fight against these guidelines are as ridiculous as Michelangelo in the Monty Python sketch, telling the pope that his demands for a painting of the Last Supper with one Christ, 12 disciples and no kangaroos were unreasonable and stifling, if not fascistic. So it was odd that John Cleese was one of the first comics to “salute” Kisin’s refusal to sign up to the students’ contract. I don’t see why a comedian should be given the artistic freedom that it would be ridiculous for a genius like Michelangelo to demand. There is nothing wrong in giving the audience what they want.

Further reading

Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

Kisin, though, argues that “it is a good thing to have our opinions challenged from time to time by those who hold differing views” – which is undeniable. But he goes on to say that “Nothing is capable of challenging orthodoxy quite like humour”. And that is nonsense: humour reflects orthodoxy. That is how it works.

I was once watching a Carry On film with my family. One scene had Terry Scott, as a doctor, entering a consulting room where a ‘dolly bird’ was sitting. “Good news, Mrs Smith!” he says. “Miss Smith,” she replies. “Bad news, Miss Smith,” comes his reply.

Now there’s nothing wrong with that joke – you can’t argue with the efficiency of set up, feed and punchline in 10 words. But only my parents laughed; my sister looked completely blank. It wasn’t so much that she was offended or disapproved of the morality behind the joke, it was just that the idea of a woman’s feelings about pregnancy being dependent on her marital status was so far outside her worldview that it just was not funny. My parents disagreed with her views, and argued with her – but it would have been silly to have forced her to watch Carry On films against her will, to ‘challenge her worldview’.

Further reading

When eggheads are bigger idiots than meatheads

By Peter Franklin

When Jerry Seinfeld says that he refuses to play college campuses any more, because they are “too PC”, it was conflated with the moral panic about the coddling of the American mind. But it is not that students are taking offence at his jokes, but because his jokes are, like the Carry On films, based on a worldview that is not shared by a younger generation. I gave up university gigs after standing on a stage in front of an audience of students and thinking “I have absolutely nothing to say to you” – and that is because my shtick is dependent on a mindset that Millennials do not share.  This does not bother me (although it bothered my agent).

What did bother me was the time I did a show called Stand-Up Philosophy. This is a gig where comedians attempt philosophy, and philosophers attempt comedy, with varying degrees of success; this particular show was on the subject of Sexual Ethics. I made a point to the effect that, if opinion X was correct (which it isn’t), then rape would be permissible under condition Y – and spent the rest of the evening being shouted at by students who thought that I was advocating rape, and shouldn’t even have been allowed to mention the word, and so on – without ever considering the possibility that opinion X could be wrong.

There are situations where PC culture is dangerous, stifling wrongthink. But asking comics to make jokes that the audience is going to find funny is not one of them.