With an eye on the stories in the media over the weekend, it would have been difficult to miss the crisis of his own making that Comedian Jimmy Carr is now facing, as he begins talking up fear of his own ‘cancellation’ over a ‘joke’ he made involving Gypsies and The Holocaust in a show of his being streamed on Netflix.

The fact that Mr Carr has actually been here before – when he found himself on the end of public disfavor over Tax evasion in 2012 – should perhaps be raising more of a smile than it actually is.

But then again, the whole matter raises the rather valid question ‘When is comedy funny, and when is comedy not funny at all?’

Don’t get me wrong. Some of the programmes that Mr Carr is involved in, such as the Great Big Fat Quiz of the Year are very funny. As are other shows and programmes that comedians of the same genre take part in. Because put in context and without exercising an obsessive desire to make everyone guilty for being a complete cock, the more general humour that comedy shows contain is usually a lot of fun.

That general humour I refer to here is observational comedy. Humour and comedy where the jokes are made about life experience which relate to the absurdities of existence that is experience by us all. They are not being directed at individuals or in anyway being unkind.

Sadly, Mr Carr is not the only comedian who has come to either rely upon or regularly test the water when it comes to victimising others to gain popularity. They quite literally up their wages over a joke that comes at someone else’s expense.

The problem is that it isn’t just real humour that makes people laugh.

When you have a captive audience that can come in many different kinds, the sad truth that many people will laugh at a comedian because of wishing to be seen as being part of the group or because of what they relate to being like the stupidity of some of the people they meet in normal life.

Regrettably in this case, it is knowingly being brought to the stage or to a public platform where it is being used to be deliberately unkind.

Funny or not. It would be better for all if we were to encourage each other to think and see comedy and any kind of joke made in poor taste for what it is, rather than doing the ‘group thing’ when it comes to pretending to take offence. It certainly doesn’t mean that the source of it should be ‘cancelled’ out.

With an unpayable level of national debt that this Government created, our Politicians have zero understanding of the chaos that massive inflation alone is already unleashing upon real people whose lives they have never even attempted to understand.

They cannot see the harm that the companies and big money they created a deferential system for have done and are still doing through an unending greed for ever greater profits and bank account balances that they will never be able to spend.

Because they are stories that cannot and will not help them keep their seats, those same charlatans, masquerading as public representatives, blithely ignore world events and the behaviour of foreign leaders. That is, unless involvement and association with their ‘power’ can in some way enhance their own.

The funny thing is, that as we tumble into the dark depths of a cost-of-living crisis and fall in living standards that is going to affect us all, we are still allowing the same people leading us to pretend that they and their kind had nothing to do with the chain or events, the choices or the decisions that brought us here.

As the UK faces problems that are unprecedented in modern times, we must face a chilling reality; The architects of all the difficulties and challenges that we face in the months and years ahead, are the very same people who are in charge of the Country right now.

Those politicians who have gone before them or will come and replace them, may look, sound and tell us they are different. But if we stick to what we know and recognise today, they will be exactly the same.

Sooner or later, and probably a lot sooner than anyone can imagine today, the circumstances that surround us will have changed unrecognisably and we will be experiencing pain, hardship and change that affects us all.

When that time comes, as a growing number of us know and accept that they will, we must ensure that the change in the way that we do politics across this Country is no longer top-heavy and dictated by the interests of the few. But is instead, led by the views, feelings and needs from our communities and the grassroots – where real life experience can be used to create a new way of being that is as good for one as it is for all, rather than what’s works to benefit one being forced upon us all to the detriment of the many.

The lies, glory-seeking, self-interest and complete lack of awareness of this political class would be massively entertaining, if the outcome of their absence from any form of reality – other than their own – weren’t so serious for us all.

We are, after all seemingly predisposed to mock or scorn those people we meet socially who talk absolute rubbish and get tired very quickly of those who behave stupidly in the workplace. People whose inability to join up the dots in their work or life can very quickly have an impact on our own.

It’s a rather odd situation we find ourselves in, where for some reason we believe that the people we have elevated to positions of authority will always be different and could never be the same.

The problem that we have, is that they most certainly are. In fact, in terms of just how stupid and out-of-touch anyone can really be, the people we have in our Parliament and running the Country today take the somehow accepted view that stupid is only stupid, depending on who or where you are into a completely different league.

Politicians from all sides of a very broken system have created the mess that we are now in and the problems that we are only now beginning to face.

They have done so over a period of decades – and not only since the Covid Pandemic began, with self-serving-decision on top of self-serving-decision slowly creating more and more problems with a cumulative effect.

The writing is on the wall, yet they remain oblivious to it all.

Wordle is the latest online fad to capture a new audience virally, exploding into regular daily use as people we know share a screenshot of a colourful grid across our media timelines.

If you haven’t already played Wordle and you like words, you certainly should.

I don’t make such recommendations lightly. The draw of specialist gaming on purpose made platforms from purpose made TV boxes, to an entire culture built up around gaming PCs, and then the games like candy crush that one of our ever-diligent MPs was caught playing in the Commons are, after all, both addictive and habit forming.

Indeed, there is a dark and pervasive reality at work, where gaming and obsessive online activity is providing a seedbed of societal change.

It is one that is being embraced and increasingly exploited by commercial interests using this latent power of manipulation to create massive profits. Not by charging each user massive fees. But by quickly building a massive audience to make ongoing profits from.

Gaming and the opportunities to draw people online are quite literally being exploited by big tech and big money. Unregulated as they are, they are quickly becoming a societal ill which is wide open to being exploited to benefit the few. Meanwhile, the consequences of their unrestricted actions are actively helping to recreate the way that society actually works.

Open-ended gaming and obsessive use of everything online are quite literally creating a cultural shift in revolutionary form, taking us to a place where no social interaction or direct human relationships are involved in daily life.

This is the point about Wordle in its current pre–New York Times form that makes it different. And today’s form of Wordle could and should be used to set the example of how gaming of any kind can be kept in perspective.

What do I mean? Well, it’s simple. The strength of this popular game is that Wordle can only be played from your device once a day (or occasionally twice if your days are very long!).

The worst habit that can really be formed is a daily visit, for just a few minutes at a time. This really is the best example or benchmark of how any kind of online interaction and especially gaming should actually be: universally kept to a sensible and proportionate amount of time.

Right now, we are navigating a period of human history where we are being actively encouraged by technology and the people driving it to forget who we are.

We are knocking on the door of the ‘metaverse’ and visual reality living where we are being told we can leave our ‘imperfect’ human lives behind and set up a new, perfectly constructed existence online that the impractical idealism of this age tells us will be perfect for us all.

Society is being dehumanised so that a few vested interests can profit through the creation of a captive audience, and that audience is becoming ever more captive.

As a result, we are losing the social skills that we once used to enjoy life and interactions in the ‘real world’, replacing them with a false set of principles that are creating problems for us all. As users increasingly forget that the safety and do-as-you-like culture of an online parallel universe cannot be applied without potentially devastating consequences in the world offline.

The difference that the Wordle phenomenon offers us is the example of how to keep things real. To quite literally keep game playing and internet use in perspective by limiting time in a way that also keeps it fun, whilst not damaging the player, the community or anyone else.

Roll this approach out across the board by using regulation to do so and it would be good for us all.

Resistance to such changes would only come from those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. That’s either those who are already addicted, those making massive amounts of money from it, or those seeking to use the control offered for more sinister motives.

When it comes to the damage that is being done, none of these reasons are in any way good enough. And those who believe that gaming and the distraction that online virtual worlds offer are the best way to occupy the unemployed or pacify and control the masses for the future need to think again. It is a building block on the pathway to societal destruction and no more.

Right now, the Johnsonist Tories and the rancid political culture behind them are attempting to push through changes to online rules that sound suspiciously like there is a big element of making their own lives easier. Never mind the immediate benefit of diverting the public gaze away from the ‘Partygate’ chaos that has engulfed them all.

The truth is that they would be doing a service for everyone, if they were to look at the much broader impact of online tech.

Instead of cherry picking to create headlines, public representatives should be taking the tough decisions that vested interests won’t like, but will give results which will actually be very good for us all.