I watched the new Ali G film yesterday and thought it was hilarious. There were moments when I couldn’t quite believe Sacha Baron Cohen had gone there, which made it even funnier. What I enjoyed was his apparent lack of hesitation. He committed to the comedy without continually reassuring the audience about how it should be interpreted. It felt refreshing, and slightly thrilling, which made me realise how accustomed I’ve become to entertainment that seems nervous about causing offence.
Watching him with Jimmy Fallon gave me a similar feeling. There was an ease to it that I’ve missed: people enjoying something outrageous without immediately needing to explain themselves. It made me wonder whether our appetite is changing. Perhaps cancel culture isn’t disappearing, but the fear surrounding it may be losing some of its influence. Have we started to miss the freedom to laugh before deciding what that laughter says about us?
The intelligence behind the joke
I feel for comedians trying to work in this environment. Their job involves surprise, exaggeration and finding something funny in uncomfortable places. Yet a few seconds of a performance can now reach thousands of people who would never have chosen to watch the show, without the context that helped the original audience understand it.
What often gets overlooked is the intelligence involved in doing this well. Taking a delicate subject somewhere unexpected, keeping an audience with you and landing a joke requires considerable judgement. Part of the pleasure is watching someone find an angle you would never have considered. You’re laughing at the joke while appreciating the skill it took to make it work.
Being offensive doesn’t automatically make someone funny. Without an interesting observation or a well-constructed joke, provocation can be tedious. The best comedians can appear reckless while being extraordinarily precise about language, timing and the audience’s expectations. That is what I admire about Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais when they’re on form.
There are also brilliant comedians who never touch controversial material. But different kinds of comedy offer different experiences. Observational humour about everyday life doesn’t replace the particular pleasure of watching someone make a difficult subject funny. I’d hate to see talented performers lose confidence in that ability because the consequences of being misunderstood feel disproportionate.
Why uncomfortable things make us laugh
Psychology offers a useful explanation for some of this. Researchers Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren developed “benign violation theory”: the idea that humour can emerge when something breaks a rule or feels wrong, while also feeling safe enough to enjoy. The tension is part of the experience. Sometimes removing everything potentially uncomfortable would also remove what makes the joke work.
That helps explain why the same material produces different reactions. One person experiences an outrageous joke within the understood setting of a comedy performance. Another feels too close to the subject to enjoy it. In a separate series of five studies, McGraw and colleagues found that severe events were more humorous when psychologically distant, while smaller mishaps could be funnier close up. Our relationship to a subject affects our response.
Making a joke about something terrible doesn’t necessarily imply approval or indifference. Being English, finding humour in difficult circumstances feels familiar to me. Something goes badly wrong, and eventually someone makes a remark that allows everyone to breathe again. The situation hasn’t become less serious. You’ve briefly changed your relationship with it.
Research has explored that function too. In a study involving 57 participants viewing negative images, humorous reframing helped their emotional responses, including when they encountered the images again a week later. That is a limited experimental setting, but it supports the idea that humour can help us manage unpleasant feelings. Laughter and distress are perfectly capable of existing together.
Different audiences, different boundaries
A comedian discussing a painful subject isn’t automatically attacking everyone in the audience who has experienced it. The target of the joke, its context and what the performer is doing with the subject all matter. We lose something when those distinctions disappear.
Equally, nobody is obliged to find a joke funny. People should be able to criticise a performance or decide a comedian isn’t for them. But choosing not to watch something and arguing that nobody else should be able to watch it are different positions. An audience can enjoy dark humour without sharing identical experiences, values or political beliefs.
I think we need more confidence in that distinction. Making room for different tastes will occasionally mean accepting that other people enjoy something we find uncomfortable. That is a fairly ordinary part of living alongside people.
When the internet started speaking for everyone
Cancel culture existed before lockdown, but that was when it felt most intense to me. Public shaming and boycotts are hardly new; social media made it possible to organise them quickly and at scale. That could expose behaviour previously protected or ignored. It could also turn a careless remark into something far bigger than the original situation.
Research by King’s College London and Ipsos found that mentions of “cancel culture” in UK newspapers rose from six articles in 2018 to 3,670 in 2021. That measures attention rather than actual cancellations, but it shows how rapidly the debate expanded. When much of your life happens through a screen, what appears there can begin to feel representative of the whole country.
Often, the most visible conversation is between the loudest voices on the left and right. Each side points to the other’s most extreme examples, while people with less easily categorised views watch the argument move back and forth like a tennis match.
Personally, I’d describe myself as more left-leaning. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything said by someone on the left, and there are arguments from the right that I agree with too. My ideal party would probably sit somewhere between the two, considering sensible ideas on their merits. I have values I care about, but I don’t think political agreement needs to be absolute.
The difficulty is that visibility can resemble consensus. An opinion supported by thousands of comments can feel like a settled public judgement. Yet we rarely know how many people read it, disagreed and moved on. Silence leaves very little evidence.
The people outside the conversation
I think this helps explain why Brexit and Trump’s first election victory felt so surprising within some social circles. If your online world strongly opposed either outcome, you could mistake the feeling around you for the balance of opinion across the country. Both campaigns had substantial online support, but that support wasn’t necessarily visible in your particular feed.
Age adds another complication. Older Americans were less likely to use social media than younger adults, but considerably more likely to vote. The US Census Bureau reported that 70.9% of citizens aged 65 and over voted in November 2016, compared with 46.1% of those aged 18 to 29. That doesn’t establish that young people were posting instead of voting; their turnout actually increased slightly from 2012. It illustrates why online visibility and electoral participation shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable.
Clinton won the popular vote while Trump won the Electoral College, so geography mattered enormously too. The broader lesson, for me, is how easily our social circles shape our expectations. We’re all susceptible to that, myself included. Following an election closely doesn’t guarantee that we’re hearing from the full range of people taking part.
The same caution should apply when we assess a backlash. A highly visible reaction tells us that some people feel strongly. Establishing how widely that feeling is shared requires more than reading the most prominent comments.
Leaving room for people to change
My objection to cancel culture is largely about proportion. Serious behaviour can justify someone losing influence or professional opportunities. But deliberate cruelty, ignorance, a poorly expressed opinion and an unsuccessful joke require different responses. Treating them alike makes thoughtful judgement harder.
Some of the best people I’ve met have made significant mistakes. They’ve faced what happened, repaired what they could and behaved differently afterwards. That experience can make people more compassionate and less certain of their right to judge everyone else. None of us has a flawless personal history.
Yet an apology can be dismissed as damage control and an explanation as an excuse. Sometimes scepticism is warranted, particularly when behaviour keeps recurring. But we should be able to describe what taking responsibility would look like. Working in PR, I know that a polished statement proves very little. Changed behaviour matters, and demonstrating it takes time.
The habit of editing ourselves
I notice this atmosphere affecting my own behaviour. I’ll find an Instagram reel funny and hesitate before liking it because someone might see. Suddenly, I’m considering whether enjoying a joke could be interpreted as a statement about my values. Even outside work, I’m thinking about reputation management.
These are small decisions, but they accumulate. You soften an opinion or save a conversation for friends who understand you. Enjoying a comedian starts to feel like endorsing everything they believe. Public discussion becomes less revealing because people share only what they think will survive being misunderstood.
That is why watching Ali G felt refreshing. From what I’ve seen, the objections haven’t become the overwhelming reaction I might have expected a few years ago. That is an impression, rather than proof of a cultural turning point, but it makes me wonder whether audiences are becoming more willing to decide for themselves.
Perhaps Baron Cohen’s confidence will encourage other comedians to take creative risks too. There is an audience for comedy that surprises us, unsettles us and makes us laugh at subjects we find difficult. I’d like us to preserve space for that, alongside the freedom to dislike it. We should be able to take our values seriously without requiring every laugh to become a declaration of them.