I’m not pretending he was one of the greats, but physically, him, his being, he was very funny.”Jerry Sadowitz, one of the brazen new comics, is appearing on TGI Friday and Channel Five, and starting a run at the Criterion in April “I’m childish,” he says. “If it was the norm to be politically incorrect, I’d probably be PC. But offensive comedy should be a psychological tax to pay for the jokes you don’t find offensive. I just do the humour I do.”Ian Cognito, currently appearing at the Union Chapel, boasts on his website: “A comedian must constantly ask questions in the knowledge that there is no answer. If anyone out there is offended by some of the questions I raise, fucking grow up.” (“Do female priests wear bitch collars?” is typical Cognito humour).The bottom line is the laugh, and in a post-sexist, post-racist world, there’s no longer any incitement in sexist jokes (Jo Brand’s “Never trust a man with testicles”) or in Woody Allen’s Judaic wisdom. Spike Lee comes across as overly-earnest when, unlike the actor, Samuel L. Jackson, who delivered the lines, he objects to the use of “nigger” in Jackie Brown.There’s a tradition of pejorative terms being taken up by their referents; the objects of such hatred in sinuate themselves into the insults, and remove the sting.

“Gay” and “dyke” were originally finger-pointing phrases, but are now (mostly) neutral. The derogatory has become simply descriptive, even a badge of honour.Goodness Gracious Me, the comedy series from an all-of-Asian-extraction troupe, had viewing figures this spring on BBC 2 of 3 million. Their success came from dispensing with the walking-on-eggshells approach to ethnicity, lampooning all our precious ang st about skin-colour and cultural difference.Father Ted was almost axed by RTE because of its satires on Catholicism; now – especially since Dermot Morgan’s death – it has become a politically incorrect cult.Hettie Judah, a comedy reviewer and Edinburgh Fringe veteran, says of PC self-righteousness, “It got boring. Everybody got fed up with it, and went on to observation comedy and surrealism. Any belief system, like the sniffy branches of feminism, which can’t withstand attacks has obvious weaknesse s.”Lad-Mags, with their soft-porn pictures and nudge, nudge carry-ons, are a perfect example of men behaving badly again.

The current issue of Arena Homme Plus has a sequence of Sean Ellis photographs of women in their underwear, if that, draped across cars. Ellis says “as a fashion photographer, I’m interested in things I’m not supposed to do. I’ve gone back to how we used to photograph sexy images: wearing suberb underwear and photographed with a sexy bit of metal. But there’s a futuristic, Nineties feel that’s more sophisticated: girls love sports cars as much as guys, and now they look confident and powerful.”So images and jokes come with inverted commas, a nod of acknowledgement to the stone-age world from which they’ve emerged. “It’s rife,” says Norton, “we’ve all caught on to the irony idea and run with it.

But you can sense when the irony is genuine,and when it’s just an excuse for someone to tell a joke they were going to use anyway It depends on the delivery. When you laugh, it’s like you’re buying the comic’s personality.”Natasha Walter, author of The New Feminism, agrees that “context is all” Political correctness has “too narrow a remit. We can’t get het up about old-fashioned and trashy photographs and not about wage differentials.”Doubtless under the sophisticated and ironic tag a little bigoted bile will come back to comedy. Manning would love to cast himself as a martyr, hung on the cross of political correctness “He was on the point of being rehabilitated,” says Norton. “It wa s great to see him on TV being patently unfunny, to see him and say ‘no, that is actually vile’.” But Manning apart, we are far enough from the world that created a need for political correctness that people can jetisson the chip-on-the-shoulder scowling.The new, irreverent comedy is poking fun not at blacks or Jews or gays, but at our own serious sensitivities. Racism, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, all are acknowledged as ugly scars on our national psyche.The term PC was coined as a right-wing smear on good causes; it suggested Stalinist conformity in the whingeing of the Left.