SINCE everything else in the deplorable modern world is perpetually in crisis, humour might as well be too.

It isn’t funny. Humour is a grim business these days, policed not by authoritarian bureaucrats but by intolerant liberal censors. This new Squeamish Inquisition is perpetually primed to take offence in its quest to codify virtue.

In this context, I’m not going to dwell on the faux pax by Alex Salmond, who rose from being First Minister of Scotland to become a comic turn on the Edinburgh Fringe. That his joke caused outrage in all the right places was its only merit.

I hesitate to reproduce it here as it was surprisingly gross and not the least bit funny, but it would help if you knew what I was talking about (reader’s voice: “There’s a first.”). He said he’d invited current First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Prime Minister Theresa May and US First Lady Melania Trump as guests on his show.

“Unfortunately,” he added, “I couldn’t make any of them come.” This was followed by a comedic drum roll, with Mr Salmond deadpanning that he was going to say “come to the show”. I see.

This isn’t funny but it isn’t “sexist” either. It’s a sex joke, not a sexist joke. You’ll hear worse from women’s lips these days, but then this is the age when German feminists march through the streets chanting “Allahu Akbar”. It’s why the next edition of Roget’s Thesaurus will have “feminist” listed under synonyms for “nutter”.

That is regrettable but it’s the way of all revolutions. The first revolutionaries are the best and brightest; the second wave gets rid of these and installs themselves in bureaucratic or cultural positions; the third wave, which we’re experiencing now, affirms with loyal vengeance the new commissars’ bastardisation of the original revolution.

But I did not invite you here today to present a broad sweep of history. No, I brought you here that we might weep together about the state of modern humour.

The lamentations began earlier this week when leading worriers complained that the Edinburgh Fringe contained few sarcastic treatments of Brexit and Donald Trump. This is hardly surprising. Both of these peculiar phenomena are pilloried so much in subjective news reports that there isn’t much more to say. And it’s hardly edgy to echo the tropes of the dominant liberal Establishment.

A further complaint concerned the paucity of sketch shows, which was attributed to their being hard work and needing to grow out of groups that had got together previously at Oxford University.

But who cares about the Edinburgh Fringe? It’s for cheesy fun-hawkers in khaki shorts who know polenta isn’t afterbirth and have little seats on the back of their bicycles so that their goggle-eyed infants can also enjoy harassing pedestrians and drivers.

However, one area of comedy I care about is the traditional sitcom and its sad decline. In their heyday, I deplored most of these because they were clearly trying to ram a way of life down our throats, with Richard Briers characters in Nigel Farage outfits tittering over teacakes in their impossibly large suburban homes purchased on the proceeds of lowly-paid clerical work.

Today, however, I miss them, considering the genre to have been gloriously innocent and a product of peace, when strife was merely industrial and not cultural. They were far from edgy and certainly not party political, whereas today’s comedy shows lampoon the Conservatives mercilessly, which is understandable and right, but boring after a while.

Old sitcoms also eschewed sex beyond the occasional nudge and wink, whereas today it’s sex with everything. Shakespeare’s Cassius said rudeness was the sauce to good wit but there’s no need to drown us in the stuff. Besides, sex is already funny, an absurd and ungainly act invented by a deity who clearly fancies himself as something of a comedian. So it’s like Trump and Brexit: how to make a joke out of something that’s already a joke?

As for politicians in general, they’re never funnier than when trying to be serious and never grimmer than when trying to be funny. You’d have thought the aforementioned Eck might have learned after a career in politics that you have to watch what you say. Laugh and the world judges if it’s permissible.

Nearly all humour has the potential to be offensive. In that sense, wit is the highest degree of sarcasm. My own preference – for wit that works with words – tends towards the inoffensive, but somebody somewhere will complain about even that.

Probably some grinning pillock cycling through the Festival crowds with his terrified infant on the wee saddle behind vomiting down his back as he waves a flyer for his seriously cutting edge one-man show about President Trump dining on raw afterbirth (having been told it was polenta).