Suzanne Harrington: Cancel culture is killing creativity. Just look at Joe Lycett's joke

Someone in the audience at a Joe Lycett stand-up in Belfast didn’t like one of his jokes, and phoned the police to complain.

I was going to write about Jerry Hall divorcing Rupert Murdoch but then I started thinking about Jerry Hall having sex with Rupert Murdoch, which I’m guessing would be like having sex with a malevolent reptile, and it was starting to make me feel a bit queasy so I stopped. We all have different tastes, and while acceptance of differing tastes is what makes us civilised, mine don’t run to gerontophilia. Especially with lizards.

Nowhere has differing tastes been more apparent than in the saga recently relayed by comedian Joe Lycett. But first, a genuine question — if you went to a restaurant and didn’t like the food, what would you do? There had been nothing wrong with the food — it was exactly as the menu described. You just didn’t like it. It was not to your taste. So would you make a mental note to not visit this restaurant again? Maybe have a moan to your dining companions? Or would you phone the police?

Because this actually happened. Not at dinner, but at a comedy gig. Someone in the audience at a Joe Lycett stand-up in Belfast didn’t like one of his jokes, and so afterwards they phoned the police to complain. This resulted in Lycett being interviewed by the police, and having to provide a transcript of his routine so that the police could assess the joke in context, to see if it needed to be removed. After careful consideration, the police deemed the joke acceptable, and said it could remain in the routine. We know all of this because Lycett, with some exasperation, tweeted about it.

I wouldn’t mind, but Joe Lycett is not one of those comedians who uses his platform to punch down; he doesn’t do trans jokes or rape jokes or disabled jokes, but instead uses his comedy to poke a sharp stick at power. He recently caused panic in Westminster when he released a spoof report into Boris Johnson’s Partygate debacle, causing chaos amongst civil servants who thought it was a genuine leak. Now that — to my taste — was funny.

But even if Lycett were the most professionally obnoxious comedian of all time — and he so isn’t — could calling the cops on him be the most 'Karen' moment in the history of popular culture? What next — Ed Sheeran’s next song offending you so badly you phone the fire brigade? Calling your lawyer because there are terrible people behaving abominably on Love Island?

We have arrived at a place where one person’s hilarity is another’s 999 call, a place where we have become so easy to offend that we literally try to police jokes instead of making jokes about police. And yes, some comedians do material which we may not find funny, just as some statuesque Texan goddesses elect to have sex with octogenarian reptiles, but do we phone the police about it? No, Karen, we do not. We phone them when there has been a murder, not a joke.