Real life | 18 January 2018

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.’

This vet, however, was so upset at me making a joke about vets in a recent column that he not only wrote in to complain, he rang the switchboard of this and several other publications looking for me, and swore at various people down the phone.

We live in a post-joke world, as a character on Family Guy observed.

I don’t suppose the equality brigade will turn their noses up at a vet who claims that his bogus right not to be insulted has been violated. They’ll leap at the chance to champion any mildly discomforted party who has gone energetically out of their way to take offence at something that was meant to be funny by interpreting it as mind-numbingly literally as possible.

‘Oh dear, sir,’ they’ll say. ‘You read a column by a woman in which she made a joke about vets being expensive and, oh crikey me, you are a vet, you say? And you’re not expensive? Oh, you are expensive.