For a joke to fall flat may be a calamity, as in the old Bob Monkhouse quip: “They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well they’re not laughing now.” People and things falling flat, however, can be a source of high comedy. A good deal of humor is based on deflation and debunkery. A cohort of legendary British comedians (Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams) trade on sudden swoops from the sublime to the mundane — from the civilized tones of the cultivated middle classes to the blunter idiom of the populace. With their bathetic descent from posh to profane, these performers are a kind of class conflict in their own person. One thinks also of Monty Python’s “Summarise Proust” contest, a television game in which competitors were given two minutes to summarize Proust’s 3,000-odd page novel, first in evening dress and then in a bathing costume.

There’s a rich English tradition of savage debunkery, from Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift to Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis. The sudden puncturing of grandiose rhetoric, the urge to demolish and disfigure, are familiar features of English writing, as they are in the literary culture of Ireland. Flann O’Brien’s superb fiction plays off abstruse metaphysical speculation against the threadbare platitudes of pub talk, while James Joyce’s prosaic Leopold Bloom is a counterweight to his philosophically-minded Stephen Dedalus. The United States, a nation which likes to affirm and is nervous of negativity, has a less impressive history of satire.

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Speaking of Irish writers may remind us of just how little English stage comedy there would be without Irish émigrés. From Congreve, Steele, Macklin and Goldsmith to Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde and Brendan Behan, the London theatre has been dominated by Irishmen who washed up in the metropolis with little but their wits to hawk. Treading a thin line between insiders and outsiders, they could turn this hybrid status to fruitful comic use. They were insiders enough to grasp the manners and conventions of English society, yet distanced enough to have a quick eye for their absurdities. Wilde was an Irish Republican but also a parody of the English gentleman, while Richard Sheridan was a Whig Member of Parliament who secretly fellow-travelled with the revolutionary United Irishmen. Brendan Behan, who once remarked that he was a drinker with a writing problem, used to be hauled on to BBC television after the pubs had closed in order to demonstrate what lovable drunks the Paddies were. Shaw, a less inebriated exile, warned his fellow Irish writers against becoming court jesters to the British. It was, in fact, far too late: the Anglo-Irish Oliver Goldsmith performed precisely this role in 18th-century London literary circles.

Why does swooping from the sublime to the ridiculous make us laugh? The answer for Sigmund Freud in his deeply unfunny study of jokes is that we invest a high amount of unconscious energy in sustaining our noble ideals or social inhibitions. When these are suddenly deflated, we economize on that energy and release it in the form of laughter. Jokes liberate us momentarily from the reality principle, allowing us to indulge the pleasure principle instead. This is one reason why sexuality is a fertile source of humor, involving as it does both high romantic feeling and the lowly genitals. Few human activities are at once so exotic and so banal. How can the question of who copulates with whom lead to such murder and mayhem? Human beings are pitched between flesh and spirit, and humor reminds us of the double act that we are.

Most humor involves some sort of incongruity. We laugh when something seems out of place, when things go off the rails or are thrown out of kilter. Which is to say that a lot of humor springs from the baffling of expectations. Humor returns the kind of response we don’t anticipate, as with: “What do you call the useless bit at the end of the penis? The man.” We invest psychical energy in keeping the world orderly and predictable, and any sudden dissonance allows us to relax the unconscious strain which this involves. Even Charles Darwin, not a man given to giggling, thought that laughter was caused by the incongruous or unaccountable. “You’ve got to stop masturbating,” a doctor tells a patient. “Why?” asks the patient. “Because I’m trying to conduct a medical examination,” replies the doctor testily. This involves slipping from one frame of reference (masturbation in general) to another (masturbation here and now), which is a form of incongruity.

A quick slide of meaning or shift of perspective may be enough to be comic, as with Oscar Wilde’s “I live in constant fear of not being misunderstood”, or Dorothy Parker’s response to being told that people at Halloween duck for apples: “There, but for a single consonant, is the story of my life.” She also remarked that “the transatlantic crossing was so rough that the only thing I could keep on my stomach was the First Mate.” The decadent fin-de-siècle poet Ernest Dowson once declared that “absinthe makes the tart grow fonder”. With such deft changes of single words we are in the realm of wit, as with Wilde’s “The young people of today have no respect for dyed hair”. Even punctuation can make a difference. “The batsman’s Holding, the bowler’s Willey,” announced a cricket commentator, a phrase in which everything turns on a comma. Sexual jokes are funny because they allow us for a moment to lift our repressions and indulge in the unspeakable, while knowing that no real harm is likely to result from this.

“I’ve got them down to ten,” bawls Moses to his people as he descends Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, “but adultery’s still in.” A lot of humor depends on laws and prohibitions, since without them we would have nothing to transgress, and transgression is usually pleasurable. Deviating from a norm can take the form of eccentricity, especially in England. The English love what they call “a character”, like the Oxford don I once knew who used to stand in a pub with a cavalier air and a parrot on his shoulder. (His cavalier air was shaken only by his obvious fear that the bird might crap on his shoulder.) People who stick ferrets down their trousers or ride to work on a baby rhino are likely to be honored by Buckingham Palace. The upper class in particular are transgressive, since they regard themselves as superior to codes and conventions, even though they often set them themselves. Brian Howard, one of the louche Evelyn Waugh set, was once arrested by the police in an illicit drinking den in Soho. When asked for his name and address, he replied: “My name is Brian Howard, I live in Berkeley Square, and you, Inspector, I suppose, come from some dreary little suburb.”

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While the middle classes cling timorously to the rules, the upper classes proclaim their privilege by kicking over the traces, combining the glamour of rank with the effrontery of not giving a damn. In this sense they have something in common with the criminal, as we have recently witnessed. The British admire devil-may-care aristocrats, which is why they’re so fond of the second-rate poet Lord Byron; but they also champion those curmudgeonly types who thwart the government’s plans for a new airport by clinging stubbornly to their two acres of land. Individualism in the United States means the boldly enterprising spirit; in Britain it’s more a matter of idiosyncrasy.

It’s surprising that politicians don’t use humor more often, given that it’s one of the most superbly effective means of communication. Not many comedians are politicians, though Eddie Izzard has revealed ambitions in that respect. Some politicians are comedians, however — not in the sense of inspiring laughter but in being the object of it. Keir Starmer wouldn’t even make a decent straight man, let alone a comic. Harold Macmillan could throw off the odd witticism, as when he remarked that every man should go to bed with a Trollope. Those of us who remember the Labour MP Denis Healey know that he was good for a knees-up. Boris Johnson, by contrast, is that rare member of the human species, a man who is fundamentally frivolous. Most frivolity is skin-deep, but Johnson’s is a massively serious affair which goes all the way down. There’s nothing more profound about him than his superficiality.

Jokes are political in the sense that they prefigure an alternative form of life. Like art but unlike capitalism, they aren’t primarily concerned with profit and power. Instead, they represent a sharing of life purely for its own sake. It’s true that some of them can be more functional — breaking the ice, mocking an adversary, abusing an immigrant, showing what a clever guy you are — but the finest jokes have no more point than a kiss or a wave. They represent a small piece of utopia in a darkening world.

They are there to discuss how Jarrow United had, the previous night, with “an almost Proustian display of modern existentialist football” beaten Bologna, “annihilating by midfield moral argument the now surely obsolescent catenaccio defensive philosophy of Signor Alberto Fanfrino”. As Brian speaks of a performance “thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism”, Jimmy looks increasingly anxious, says “Good evening, Brian” as an answer to three questions, and tries unsuccessfully to talk about his new boutique. He eventually resorts to grunting: “I hit the ball first time and there it was in the back of the net.”

This Monty Python sketch was first broadcast in 1969; the clash between football’s supposedly neanderthal practitioners and its hyper-intellectualised theorists has been current for more than 50 years. Even then there were counter-examples, perhaps most notably Jack Charlton and Danny Blanchflower, but the Buzzard stereotype was widely accepted. The contrast to an interview given this week by the 37-year-old Burnley manager Vincent Kompany, whose team kick off the Premier League today, is striking. It’s not just that Kompany is comfortable in five languages, has an MBA and speaks eloquently and with nuance about race, but that the world he represents is so removed from Buzzard. Today, the footballers have become intellectuals too.

The idea that a player, say, lining up a volley is performing extraordinarily complex calculations at astonishing speed is not new. “I don’t deny the differences in style and substance between athletic and conventional scholarly performance,” the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, “but we surely err in regarding sports as a domain of brutish intuition… The greatest athletes cannot succeed by bodily gifts alone.” But what Kompany is talking about is less instinctive. His Burnley players spend an average of an hour a day going through video analysis and working on tactics. “In football,” he said, “we’ve allowed our players to be lazy, in a way. The culture in football was always to just focus on the football and we shouldn’t be too long in the classroom. The culture is changing — you can’t get away with this anymore.”

And you can see this shift every weekend. Almost every top side these days “presses”, a high-risk tactic that looks to recover possession high up the pitch. To work, it has to be performed at great intensity and with precision across the team. If a single player gets the timing or positioning wrong, a huge space can be left in the defensive structure for the opponent to exploit. There is a need for preparation, coordination and concentration, and, given the fluidity of football, the ability to calculate angles and anticipate possibilities almost instantaneously — and that means intelligence.

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Nonetheless, the Monty Python sketch is startlingly prescient. Are footballers’ names really so predictable that it should have been possible to pre-empt the existence of the former Wigan midfield cognoscento Jimmy Bullard? And how did they anticipate the existence of a Stadium of Light in the North-East — albeit six miles from Jarrow in Monkwearmouth, once its sister monastery?

It’s the heart of the joke, though, that stretches beyond unnerving coincidence. Monty Python caught very early the incongruity of an intellectual class seizing upon a game whose culture at the time was resolutely unintellectual. This was broadcast two years after Celtic, with wave after wave of thrusting positivity, had defeated the catenaccio defensive philosophy of Inter in the European Cup final, rendering it obsolescent and paving the way for the coming of the Dutch Total Football. For the first time, certainly within a British context, pundits and columnists began to employ words like “philosophy” to describe a manager’s outlook. That intellectualisation reached off the pitch as well, to the literary celebration of fandom in Fever Pitch but also the examination — at times arguably romanticisation — of the hooligan lifestyle by Bill Buford and Martin Amis.

From the early Sixties it had been apparent that English football was moving into a new age, as managers such as Don Revie at Leeds and Bill Shankly at Liverpool adopted increasingly methodical — and to their critics, boring — approaches to winning football matches. The discussion around football slowly became more sophisticated, prompting a backlash at the 1966 World Cup, largely from non-specialist columnists appalled at the apparently foreign idea that the working-class game might be about more than just running and kicking.

“They talk down to us as if football was a new television panel game which the natives are seeing for the first time,” wrote J.L. Manning in the Mail. “You know the clever-clever fellows I refer to. There are those who say, arrogantly of course, some people thought it was dull, but we in the game were fascinated by the tactics. It’s a great pity football crowds are not better educated. They would enjoy it so much more… Educated? About football? To understand football requires the intellectuality of the gnat… I am willing to bet that a team which plays this rubbish will not survive the quarter-finals.” Alf Ramsey’s side, of course, playing a modern innovative form of football that was almost brutalist in its disdain for frippery, not merely survived the quarter-finals but won a major trophy for the only time in England’s history.

Even at the time, Manning was a self-consciously reactionary figure, and while his successors certainly exist, they tend to be isolated these days. What the fractured media landscape has done is to allow people to discuss football as they want to discuss it, from sweary rants about the biases of referees to intricately detailed tactical analyses and all parts in between, which itself has led to a paradoxical phenomenon.

This is an age in which thinking generally is in retreat. We’ve had quite enough of experts. Tribalism and superficiality reigns supreme and performative anger is celebrated. The BBC, seemingly terrified of being perceived as exclusionary, manages to include almost nobody. See, for example, the recent documentary series Earth, in which Chris Packham wanders around a series of beautiful locations introducing repetitive CGI before, hidden away at the end, the scientists come in with a great slew of ideas and information. Or see Between the Covers, the BBC’s sole books show, so anxious about being condemned as elitist that it seems to spend half its time talking about how difficult reading is.

Football here is the unlikely exception. There’s certainly plenty of partisan nonsense and vacuous pontification about, but it’s not a sphere in which expertise is commonly mocked. Long gone is the chummy golf-club atmosphere that used to pervade studios, reaching its nadir at the 2010 World Cup when pundits admitted to never having watched the sides they were covering and Alan Hansen mocked Lee Dixon as a swot for being able to name Slovakia’s key player, Marek Hamšik.

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In part, this is to do with football’s position as a driver of satellite subscriptions. There was an early recognition by Sky that if viewers were paying significant sums each month to watch football, they were likely to be interested enough by it to want in-depth analysis. What Andy Gray began, Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher have carried on, so that Monday Night Football now offers an unapologetically high-end discussion of the weekend just gone, with argument backed up by video analysis and data. And as Neville, Carragher and their guests often don’t agree, it’s one of the very few spheres of modern British life to feature actual debate, fuelled by evidence.

A little over a decade ago, Match of the Day was defending the banality of its coverage by insisting it had to appeal to the casual Saturday-night viewer as well as the devoted fan, but it has upped its game significantly in response. And it’s not just television: from newspapers to blogs, podcasts to magazines, the best modern football coverage is self-aware, wry, allusive, inventive and founded on an assumed canon of knowledge — the great games, players and managers of the past. Perhaps, as Janan Ganesh has argued, football, seemingly so unimportant, offers a “safe space” in which people can “take their brain for a ramble”. The irony is that, as football increasingly becomes a tool of foreign policy and as its global popularity spreads to levels unprecedented for any cultural mode, it has probably never been a less safe space for aesthetic free-play.

Or perhaps it’s just that when people write about a subject they love for readers who also love it, when culture wars are merely a distant rumble, what results is a discourse that assumes a lot of knowledge and prizes fresh and recondite information. This doesn’t mean that all or even many players are reading feverishly, doing degrees or especially comfortable in front of a camera. But the unintelligent player simply no longer exists at the highest level. And while the pretensions of some football coverage are certainly worth calling out, the Python sketch simply wouldn’t work today — if only because that sort of serious in-depth programming is no longer the preserve of the arts, but of football.

Whenever there is talk of poverty and “luxury”, it’s hard not to think of that old comedy sketch, with a bunch of self-satisfied, middle-aged men in white dinner jackets, puffing cigars and bloviating about their inter-war childhoods. As the “Four Yorkshiremen” strain to trump each other’s sob stories, they become ever more ludicrous. “We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank,” insists one:

“Every morning we’d have to get up at six, clean out t’rolled-up newspaper, eat a crust of stale bread, then we’d have to work 14 hours at t’mill, day in day out, for sixpence a week. Aye, an’ then when we’d come home, Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt.”

“Luxury!”, barks his fellow plutocrat. “We used to get up at three…”

The sketch first appeared on 24 October 1967, on At Last the 1948 Show, an ITV series written and performed by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman. It drew not on the hackneyed old gaggery of the music halls, but the sophisticated wit of the Cambridge Footlights. The series is not much remembered, but the Four Yorkshiremen was revived by Monty Python in the Seventies. And it stuck, because it struck a chord.

Its main creator was Marty Feldman, who did not have as well-heeled an upbringing as some of his 1948 colleagues. Feldman was born in 1934, to a poor Jewish family in the East End of London. His biographer Robert Ross writes that Feldman’s father, Myer, was initially a “pushcart peddler” — but bettered himself and his family by turning round a dressmaking business, moving to North Finchley, and forking out for a Bentley.

Marty hated all this and rebelled, scarpering to Soho at 15 and sleeping in Waterloo Station. So the Four Yorkshiremen sketch seems, at least partly, to be Feldman taking the piss out of his dad. Once he became a successful comedian, there is some evidence that Marty, too, was given to exaggerate the poverty of his childhood — so perhaps he was also taking the piss out of himself. Nevertheless, the sketch is driven by a very Sixties exasperation with an older generation who just won’t stop maundering on about the hard times they once suffered, and how they had dragged themselves up by their bootstraps. Hence the punchline: “And you try and tell that to the young people of today, and will they believe you? No!”

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All this had a much wider political resonance. Britain’s whole post-war order was built on the promise that there was to be no going back to the mass unemployment of the Thirties. In 1967, the Prime Minister was a real-life Yorkshireman, who really had grown up in the Thirties with an out-of-work father. Harold Wilson had risen via Oxford University, but at one point, money had been so tight that he was going to have to start work in his uncle’s umbrella factory instead.

Many post-war public figures had it a lot worse. Joe Gormley, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, was one of the most powerful men in Seventies Britain. In his 1982 memoir, Battered Cherub, he recounts how, growing up in dirt poverty near Wigan, “underwear was unheard of, and would have been regarded as the height of luxury”. His headmaster thought young Joe would walk the entrance exam to grammar school, but after hearing his mother panicking about the cost of the uniform, he threw his schoolbooks in a stream and took a job down the pit at 14. He saw his first fatal injury there two years later.

But there is always a risk that such tales slip into weepy, sepia sentimentality. As a callow young cabinet minister in 1948, Wilson reportedly told an audience: “The school I went to in the North was a school where more than half the children in my class never had boots and shoes on their feet.” The press didn’t buy it, and his “barefoot speech” made Wilson a laughing-stock. Even 20 years later, when the Four Yorkshiremen first aired, people were still mocking him about it. “The only reason Harold Wilson has ever been barefoot,” suggested one Conservative MP, “is because he was too big for his boots.”

By the end of the Sixties, a new generation was coming of age who harboured no such fearful memories, embellished or otherwise, and was tired of hearing them. New political nightmares were competing for attention: strikes and the cost of living. Yet still the memory of mass unemployment trumped everything. By September 1974, the Conservative frontbencher Sir Keith Joseph declared that it was time to call out the Left for incessantly “play-acting the Thirties”. The pressing nightmare now was not dole queues, but inflation. He talked about the necessity of fighting ideas with ideas, noting the way dictators always banned jokes. But now he had a joke on his side. That summer, Monty Python’s album Live at Drury Lane featured a new rendition of the Four Yorkshiremen. Marty Feldman was no monetarist, but that derisive cry of “Luxury!” was now readily to hand, sounding a sarcastic raspberry against the ghosts of the Thirties. 

By the end of the Seventies, the generational shift signalled by the Four Yorkshiremen had spread into the Labour cabinet. Roy Hattersley, born in 1932, sensed that “the fears of the Thirties had very generally passed”. Even Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, born in 1920, told the Cabinet: “I was brought up in a poor home where unemployment was bad, but it is different now.” A rise in joblessness was no longer taboo.

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In September 1980, the Pythons performed the Four Yorkshiremen to an enormous audience in Hollywood. Two weeks later, the new prime minister, Keith Joseph’s ally Margaret Thatcher, famously declared that she was “not for turning” in her battle with inflation, regardless of the cost in jobs. By the time Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl reached US cinemas in June 1982, UK unemployment had passed three million. It was the first time this had happened since the Thirties; such long-gone miseries had lost their political power.

Since then, the sketch has been revived again and again. And why not? There is still plenty of hypocrisy and performative garment-rending for it to puncture, from politicians hitching a free ride on the suffering of their grandparents to celebrities monetising their miseries. And yet. Scepticism can harden into cynicism, to the point where stories of real, unfunny poverty can be wafted away as exaggerated or exceptional, with a sarcastic cry of “Luxury!”

The Conservative MP David Davis grew up poor in Battersea and York. His grandfather, a disabled, blacklisted communist from North Shields, raised him in a single-storey prefab: a “steel, plywood and asbestos box”. As a child in the Fifties, his weekly treat was a slice of malt loaf slathered in Stork margarine. In his memoir-in-progress, he notes that it’s impossible to write about stuff like this without the Four Yorkshiremen sketch springing instantly to mind.

Nevertheless, for Davis, as for some MPs across politics, the memory of poverty has been foundational. Last September, in a debate on Universal Credit and Working Tax Credits, Labour’s Bridget Phillipson told the Commons that she knew the difference a bit of extra money can make. As a child on Tyneside in the Eighties, her single mum couldn’t afford to buy her a winter coat. “I was kept warm,” she said, “by the generosity of a neighbour, who himself did not have much, who saw me and put some money through our door in an envelope marked ‘For Bridget’s coat’.” As we head into the hardest winter many of us have ever faced, it may be useful to hear politicians talk like this now and then, without Marty Feldman’s old pop at his dad getting in the way.

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Will Sunak’s new government achieve this? The Four Yorkshiremen is a relic of a time when reminiscences about past privations had become tedious, because they had dominated politics for a generation. A resistance to over-worrying about poverty has circumscribed our politics ever since. As our new Yorkshire-based Prime Minister takes office, however, that era may be drawing to a close. Witness the collapse of Liz Truss’s political project, and the resistance of Conservative MPs, from Iain Duncan Smith to Sajid Javid, to breaking Boris Johnson’s promise to increase benefits in line with inflation.

Sunak takes office as an alumnus of Goldman Sachs, and an instinctive tax cutter. But he is also the ex-Chancellor who planned to raise National Insurance to repair the social care system, and who championed the furlough scheme. On the one hand, public services are already under terrible strain; on the other, there is intense new pressure for cuts to public spending.

If, as seems almost certain, we are headed for renewed austerity, it will be much harder for any politician to make the case for it than in 2010 — but all the more so for a man as rich as Rishi. For many of those he will need to win over, fearful of the cost of keeping warm, his lifestyle is something from another world: from the £180 temperature-controlled coffee cup to the heated swimming pool (£13,000 a year).

A politician’s economic backstory now matters far more now than it did a few years ago, when we were told politics was all about culture, and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was the tribune of the masses. Perhaps Sunak can follow Margaret Thatcher, the wealthy barrister who reinvented herself as the grocer’s daughter. Witness those videos about his youth working in his parents’ pharmacy.

The risk is he ends up looking more like David Cameron — the stockbroker’s Etonian son, protesting that “we’re all in this together”. The Four Yorkshiremen is a warning against overplaying rather mild childhood struggles. But it is also poses another trap, and not only for the new Prime Minister: of refusing to look poverty in the face.

Two spring immediately to mind. First, and most obviously, we should fear the power that this sort of thing would place in human hands. We couldn’t be certain whether it would be used for good or ill – or rather, knowing what human beings are like, we would rightly fear its destructive potential.

But also, and less obviously, I think it would threaten to undermine the way in which human beings make sense of their lives and come to find meaning within it. If I can make myself immediately slimmer, say, with a quick bit of hocus pocus, then it would make no sense to think of my getting slimmer as the story of overcoming my inner demons, of struggle and achievement. There would be no inner drama in front of the fridge or the toaster. In such a world, diets would lead to two different types of weight loss: physical and existential, as in what Kundera calls “the unbearable lightness of being”. That is the deeper problem with magic. It robs life of its meaning, of its weight.

I was thinking of magic when I pondered my reaction to Tom Chivers’s piece for UnHerd about diet pills. He was writing about technology not magic, of course. His concern was to defend “fixes” to various social ills and specifically to defend technology against the charge of “solutionism” defined as the “foolhardy belief that technology can sidestep thorny social or political problems”.

Those, like me, who have a problem with “solutions”, think there is something wrong about – for example – a quick pharmacological fix to obesity. Pop a pill and you will be thin. That simple. What’s wrong with getting what you want like this, Chivers asks? Nothing at all, he concludes. But I don’t think he gave the solutionist argument a proper run for its money. So here goes.

The one area where there is widespread anxiety about the use of technological – especially pharmaceutical – fixes is within the field of elite sport. Here we call it doping. And why do we worry about doping? Because, ultimately, it drains sport of its meaning. If we allow any and every chemical fix to enter sport, then the difference between success and failure would be achieved in the lab and not on the pitch or piste. And that would rob sport of the very reason we find it compelling – that it is a battle of wills, of skill and of human courage. To replace all this with chemistry, where the winners are the ones with better lab teams, would fatally undermine the very existence of sport.

“Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal” wrote Yuval Noah Harari. “The entire contract can be summarized in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” It is a brilliant aphorism, and it sums up what is at stake between me and Chivers. He welcomes the (technological) power to change the world for the better; I worry that this process has an unexpected effect on the way human beings construct meaning in their lives.

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“The simple technological fix” impacts meaning because, in my view, meaning is overwhelmingly a question of narrative. Meaning is held by the stories we tell about ourselves and who we are. Human meaning is narrated. Not just through the so-called seven ages of man, but through thousands of little mini narratives all overlapping and interweaving. What Salman Rushdie calls the “Oceans of the Streams of Story”.

And “technological fixes” represent a jump or a glitch in the narrative — a going from one place to another that does not respect or, even acknowledge, the inner logic of the story.

This is all a bit abstract – meaning generally is – so let me offer a small example. At the end of the Monty Python film The Life of Brian, as Brian is about to die on the cross, a spaceship of little green aliens comes down from the sky and rescues him from his predicament. Everything in the story so far has been about the life of a first century Jew. And yet here, right at the end, the ridiculous intervention of little green men becomes a kind of absurd parody of human redemption.

Set aside for a moment the idea that for some the resurrection is also a kind of absurd skip in the story – and I can see the argument even though I disagree with it. What is going on here is a knowing reference to the kind of thing people have been complaining about since Euripedes. Sometimes also known as the deus ex machina, it is the sudden arrival of something that has no connection with what came before, and which solves the problem that has built up within the story in such a way that renders all that came before irrelevant and unimportant. Monty Python do this as a deliberate joke. But when it happens in most stories it is experienced as a kind of cheat, robbing the whole story of its meaning. This was precisely Nieztsche’s beef with Euripedes whom he held responsible for the death of tragedy, the meaning making matrix of the ancient Greeks.

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Consider all this in relationship to the diet pill fix for human obesity. Chivers concentrates on the simple fact that being thin, however achieved, would bring happiness to the formerly obese. It is instructive that those who argue this way tend to reach for the word “happiness” to express the benefit of what they describe. But in the meaning-creating world, happiness is often considered a rather thin idea, superficial even.

Some of us – most of us perhaps – seek a life that has a meaning that is a great deal more than happiness. We want a life that has a meaning and purpose that is deeper than mere personal happiness. And the technological fix — the deus ex machina of modernity — can threaten to undermine all of that. It can make our life absurd. All that struggle with overeating. All those hours on the therapist’s couch. All that human-all-too-human effort. And in the end the “answer” is a small pill. Suddenly, the story of my struggle with food looks absurd. It’s the “little green aliens” answer to my weight problems.

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The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once formulated three laws that grew out of his writing. The third, and most famous, is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Technology is not the same as magic, of course. Magic is fantasy, technology is reality. But in meaning terms they can be “indistinguishable” and have similar effects.

This is why religion as a meaning-generating activity holds magic in such low esteem, why the Bible has such harsh things to say about it. Magic is not so much about the supernatural — that was the world view of the whole ancient world, indeed of the world before, say, the 17th century. No, magic is problematic because of the power it wields, and also because it is the “get rich quick” approach to human salvation. Magic is to human meaning as winning the lottery is to prosperity. Both disrespect the process by which we can tell a noble and compelling story about who we are. Technological fixes — fixes that represent a radical discontinuity in the story of human endeavor — can do precisely the same. “Go the bloody hard way” Wittgenstein advised his students. And I completely agree. Those who offer shortcuts to human flourishing should be routinely distrusted.

“Deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman,” responded Cleese, apparently facetiously (although how anyone could be sure he was facetious when we’re all supposed to be the expert on our own identity is beyond me), at which point numerous people started saying he was transphobic and lots of news sites started writing stories about how people were saying he was transphobic.

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Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

None of this is interesting, exactly. What’s interesting is the tone of wounded possessiveness that animated the reaction to Cleese. Not John Cleese, of all people! seemed to be the widespread implication, as though he had previously given everyone to believe that he was team “trans women are women and burn anyone who says otherwise”.

Presumably anyone experiencing this as a particular injury would be a fan of Cleese, but not enough of a fan that they’d seen his most famous work. Anyone who’s watched half an episode of Monty Python knows that it’s full of the kind of cross-dressing lols that would raise a stern eyebrow in a doctrinaire student union today. Python drag is funny, which is precisely why it cannot stand: it relies on the audience recognising a man in a dress as a man in a dress, rather than taking the dress as ultimate evidence the person wearing it is a woman.

And anyone who’s watched more than half an episode of Monty Python has probably seen Life of Brian, which means they’ve seen the “Loretta” scene, in which Eric Idle’s character Stan announces: “From now on, I want you all to call me Loretta. It’s my right as a man.” Cleese’s role here is to be the voice of incredulity: “I’m not oppressing you Stan, you haven’t got a womb!” Perhaps the Pythons were simply engaging in absurdity with no knowledge of the existence of trans people when they were making Brian in 1978; but given that the highly publicised Corbett v Corbett case involving April Ashley (a trans woman) took place in 1969, and Jan Morris published her transition memoir Conundrum in 1974, perhaps not.

This doesn’t make Cleese guilty of historical transphobia any more than supporting Rowling makes him guilty of it now, but it does put him at odds with the kind of respectful solemnity around gender identity that his disappointed admirers were expecting him to show. And this is really because they weren’t thinking of Cleese in terms of his actual work, but instead constructing the kind of figure they want him to be based on his place in the culture. Comedians are supposed to be liberals, whatever liberal means.

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How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

If there’s an “us” and a “them”, Cleese’s anarchic, authority-tweaking kind of comedy is supposed to belong to the “us” rather than the censorious, rule-enforcing “them”. If his opinions are experienced as betrayals, it’s because there’s an assumption that humour takes a position regarding power (and then, subsidiary to that, an assumption that the trans cause is the cause of the powerless against the powerful, even when it involves telling a victim of domestic violence to choke on a girldick, but we will gloss over that for now).

Cleese came up, pre-Python, as part of the 1960s satire boom that included Private Eye and David Frost. It’s a movement that has irrevocable associations with the rise of the counterculture and the demise of deference (the 1966 “I know my place” sketch from The Frost Report, which featured Cleese along with Ronnies Barker and Corbett, couldn’t have been a more explicit jab at the complacencies of the British class system). But a refusal to take the establishment seriously doesn’t necessarily imply anything at all about your own politics.

Maybe we think of comedy — and satire particularly — as inherently liberal because it’s bound up with the liberal cause of free speech. Life of Brian was picketed and preached against on release because of its blasphemy: in some places, it was banned (a screening in Torquay needed a special dispensation in 2008), and the Pythons were set at odds with authority figures of Christian conservatism such as Mary Whitehouse.

Or maybe it’s a product of the “punching up” theory of comedy, which holds that jokes should always take aim at the powerful. In a 2013 essay, the stand-up Stewart Lee argued that Right-wing comedy was practically impossible: “You can’t be a Right-wing clown without some character caveat, some vulnerability, some obvious flaw. You’re on the right. You’ve already won.”

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How Private Eye lost its bite

By Robin Aitken

There’s a truth in this, in that what’s funny often draws on the kind of exaggerated rhetoric that outrage can licence. Think of Cleese, this time as Basil Fawlty, finally losing his temper in a limb-flailing fury at some presumptuous customer: it’s funny because, as awful as Fawlty is, there’s an acknowledged justice to his rages.

But there’s a long way from there to the idea that comedy must therefore be an agent of change, and even further to the idea that the changes it advocates must be liberal ones. Private Eye was the home of campaigning Left-wing journalist Paul Foot, and also of Christopher Booker, who saw out his later career denying climate change and defending big tobacco at the Telegraph.

Comedy’s natural state, often, is conservatism — at least in sitcom, which resets each episode to a default condition (peak-era Simpsons is the perfect sitcom, because cartoon characters don’t change in any of the inconvenient ways that human actors do). And just because satire laughs at authority doesn’t mean it’s out for revolt: the riotous days of carnival, thought the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, allowed a populace to turn the world upside down for a limited time, so they could go back to the established order afterwards. Satire can do the same.

It’s nice to think that what’s funny aligns with your political beliefs, but it’s also naïve, and anyone who imagines that they get to tell John Cleese what to think forgets that he’s been through this once before with Mary Whitehouse, and won. She didn’t end up as an enemy of comedy because she was a Right-winger fronting up to Left-wingers, but because she was someone who took her faith so seriously that it was anguish for her to see others take it lightly. The people riled by Cleese’s tweeting might think they’re her opposite, but in their horror that someone might be cleaving to an apostate position, they’re really her inheritors.