There is a delicious irony in this.

Comedy has always been dependent upon transgression. It has to be because anything that easily fits within the socially acceptable is…normal and unfunny.

The earliest known comic, Aristophanes, peppered his plays with everything from fart jokes to ridicule of Greece’s political leaders, artists, and philosophers. One of the few descriptions of Socrates that don’t come down to us from Plato is Aristophanes’ play The Clouds, which pokes vicious fun at the philosopher whose head is in the clouds.

Jokes about homosexuality, bodily functions, and the foibles of the high and mighty were scattered across his plays, and because he was considered hilarious his are among the few plays that were preserved through the millennia from classical Greece.

Many of the joke

Court Jesters derived their power from making fun of kings; Chaucer was scandalously bawdy. Vaudeville was transgressive in the extreme, although to our modern ears, it seems tame. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy all built their careers on pushing the boundaries.

Lenny Bruce’s legacy is entirely built upon the puritanical attacks on his transgression. While most comics of the past remain unremembered, Bruce’s legacy is his fight for freedom of speech in a puritanical world. As you can see, he won that battle.

Even Bob Hope and Johnny Carson, who was considered tame and mainstream, actually buried a lot of racy jokes and barbs at political and cultural icons into their work. Most of the clips you find today of their work rely on such humor.

That’s why it is (unintentionally) hilarious to see this: a comedy club in Scotland banning the appearance of a Scottish Nationalist Party Minister of Parliament because she is not a supporter of transgenderism.

MP Joanna Cherry is a member of Scotland’s pro-transgender ideology party, the SNP. But she is a dissenter and hence must be canceled.

Originally she was going to be part of a panel at Edinburgh’s Fringe festival, but the employees of The Stand put their foot down. She is apparently a promoter of violent extremism (as a member of the most liberal party in power) and must be canceled.

I’m sure if you advertised for volunteers willing to work at the event to allow @joannaccherry to speak you would be inundated 😏 pic.twitter.com/15BB0gHfIq

— Steve Sayers 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿in🇬🇧=👍🏼 (@SteveSayersOne) May 1, 2023

MP Cherry is herself a liberal lesbian, but her views are so unacceptable that she must be silenced. Being a lesbian used to be a “get out of jail free” card, but in the new intersectional hierarchy gays, lesbians, and women fall farther down the ladder than trans. So off with her head.

The show was part of an In Conversation With series of events with interview guests including film director Ken Loach, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham.

Ms Cherry said she was planning to talk about her career in politics and the independence movement, as well as her feminist views.

She added: “Because a small number of people don’t like my feminist and lesbian activism, I’m being prevented from talking about all of those things in my home city where I’m an elected politician.

“I think it says something’s gone very wrong in Scotland’s civic space.

“Small groups of activists are now dictating who can speak and what can be discussed.”

Speaking to BBC Radio Scotland on Tuesday, Ms Cherry said that “many of my SNP colleagues agree with me, they’re just afraid to speak out.”

She added: “I’ve had a lot of private discussions with MPs and MSPs, and many party members, but MPs and MSPs have seen what has happened to me.

“I know for a fact there are others who are just going along with self-ID for a quiet life.

“One day, I hope to be in a position to tell the full story of what has gone on behind the scenes in my political party since I stood up for the rights of lesbians to be same-sex attracted and women’s rights to safety, dignity and privacy.”

Originally the club defended its decision to platform Cherry, but they bucked under the pressure.

It’s become a joke that one of the mantras of the Left is “That’s not funny!” because of course nothing that is actually funny doesn’t pop a piety’s bubble.

This is, of course, why none of the current crops of nightly show comics is funny at all, although perhaps Conan O’Brien is if he is on the air at the moment. I don’t actually know and don’t care to find out.

The constraints that come from hewing to the ideological line are too tight to allow actual humor.

Matt Walsh did a bit where he tried to find a single laugh from a feminist comic, and he genuinely came up dry. Feminists who had nightly shows, comedy specials, and acclaim couldn’t tell a joke to save their lives.

This is such a far cry from comedians of the past, for obvious reasons. It’s not that they are ideological warriors that prevents them from being funny–there have been plenty of political comedians who managed to be funny even if you disagreed with them.

But those people were allowed to transgress. No longer. In their world the powerful rule over them and determine the boundaries of what can be said.

Compare this to an SNL skit from the 70s. Imagine something like this on national TV today.

There are still a few comics out there that can generate laughs, but until this wave of ideological tyranny passes it won’t be many. And unless they bring in the truly big bucks they won’t be able to get a platform.

The only recompense for those of us who refuse to buckle to the whims of the alphabet mob is that we don’t have to pretend that any of these poseurs are actually funny.