The one with the politically incorrect characters

As the Friends’ furore shows, every generation looks back and finds fault, even if none was intended

Ihave no doubt that by 2025, many of the sitcoms we knew and loved will be illegal. If you want to see them, you’ll have to try a street dealer. “Have you got any Dad’s Army?”

“No mate, all I’ve got is two Liver Birds and a Porridge.”

We’re undergoing a puritan turn which, like all moments of cultural reaction, is laced with hypocrisy. Last night I watched BBC1’S Mcmafia, containing violence, sex and scenes of sexual violence – and I hear no chorus of opposition. And yet Netflix has uploaded all 10 seasons of the sitcom Friends, and the internet is abuzz with just how “problematic” it is.

It turns out the bland story of six friends living in Nineties New York was actually a Trojan horse for Spenglerian discourses of hate. Monica was mocked for being fat. Ross didn’t want to hire a male nanny. Joey said he was only nice to girls to get them into bed. And as for Chandler Bing, well Chandler was a monster. In one of the billion episodes of the show, Chandler takes Monica to meet his estranged father at a cabaret in Las Vegas. On to the stage walks a transsexual called Helena Handbasket. “That can’t be your father,” whispers Monica. Chandler replies: “Believe me, I’ve been saying that for years.”

Chandler wasn’t just being a big phobe, he was articulating a timeless theme in comedy: the generation war. Isn’t that what Steptoe and Son was all about? Every generation looks back on the past and finds fault, even when none was intended. Till Death Us Do Part, the Seventies show that followed the life of Alf Garnett, was meant to satirise the racism of old working-class Tories, but did so with such a raw airing of bigotry that nowadays it is broadcast as nervously as Triumph of the Will. And just as Chandler rejects his father’s glorious transformation into Kathleen Turner, so a younger audience cringes at Chandler’s disgust. But if today’s liberals are going to try to clean up comedy, they must prepare for disappointment. Why? Because comedy is inherently reactionary.

Not all of it, of course. Nine out of 10 stand-up comedians are leftwing and insist that their jokes punch up at the rich and powerful. That’s often a lie – they’ll ridicule minorities under the cover of “being ironic” – and even when it’s true, it’s not nearly as popular as, say, Michael Mcintyre, whose comedy is all but stripped of social commentary, or Mrs Brown’s Boys, which is so cheerfully offensive that it feels like some pirate signal from a different century has briefly taken control of the telly.

Comedy is rarely progressive because it asks us to laugh at ourselves, yes, but also at other people. Consider the oldest visual gag on film: gardener goes to water his plants and steps on the hose. No water comes out. Gardener looks down the hose to see what’s blocking it and removes his foot. Gardener gets a faceful of water. This is cruel, but it’s also funny – maybe because the gardener is a pompous ass who has it coming, maybe because the humiliation is recognisable, and the ability to laugh at it helps us to process our own pains. We’re all flawed. Good comedy admits it. Comedy that goes out of its way to be PC, or even just kind, isn’t very funny because it is dishonest.

Personally, I was never a big Friends fan because it deployed its own untruths. The cast were too pretty, their apartments too big. And, given that this was set in New York, where were all the black people? But it did its best in the context of its time. Take that scene at the cabaret. Are we only laughing at Miss Handbasket and her one woman show “Viva Las Gaygas”? No, we’re also laughing at Chandler, partly because he’s so uptight and partly because we can imagine how awkward the situation would be for us. Who honestly would feel 100 per cent happy about their father announcing that he’s grown tired of life and wants to start over again as a torch singer at the Bellagio?

Of course, this sort of thing does happen – and Friends deserves some appreciation for being willing to feature any non-straight characters at all, because there was an era when such shows were denounced by the moral majority. What Friends illustrates, like all successful sitcoms, is not some unrealistic acceptance of social change but, rather, characters navigating that change in the awkward way that we would too.

Mrs Brown, for instance, is a church-going Irish Catholic, but she also has a gay son and is proud of it. The fact that one survey found that nearly two-thirds of her viewers voted for Brexit shines a light on how complicated the politics of everyday life actually are. Liberals who try to tidy things up by defining social rules about what is and isn’t an acceptable subject for humour neither understand comedy nor, frankly, other people.

Conservatives who do this are just as dull, but conservatives do it less often, I suspect, because they grasp human nature a bit better. As Joe Orton, the comic playwright and libertine, said in a rare moment of theological insight: “I suppose I believe in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad but irresistibly funny.”