In response to Gary Oliver: Humourless Welsh rabbit on about Rod, Peter Evans wrote:
As a Welshman, when I read Rod’s ‘offending’ column in the Sunday Times, I laughed out loud, inadvertently spraying my desktop with a sip of the Earl Grey tea I was enjoying. Miraculously, my laptop was spared. Alas, it seems that the Police and Crime Commissioner for North Wales and the various outraged MPs who have reacted with such vein-bulging fury have suffered an inoperable humour bypass, and are now doomed to behave as though they’ve been suffering rampant, unrelieved haemorrhoids for months, possibly decades.
Once upon a time, a free press meant that one scribe might say something nasty about another, and the other would respond by writing something nasty about the first. Today, the cultural Left see the free expression of non-puritanical views (especially if they’re humorous – they really, really don’t like humour directed at them) as a kind of crime. They want the culprit silenced and preferably sacked and prosecuted too. It’s difficult to avoid a little shiver of terror at what the oppression-free Utopia they keep promising would look like with attitudes like that informing it.
I was brought up by working-class tribal Labour-voting parents. But being working-class, they also had a sense of humour and would have loved Mr Liddle’s output. The cultural Left is deeply threatened by humour, which is why I wish more power to Rod’s elbow and even more colourful invective in his next column. By howling hate speech and trying to foment another witch-burning, the well-heeled, endlessly bellyaching, bitter prelates of progressivism are showing us their weakest spot. Probably not a wise move on their part.
