As the technical terminology of slapstick and punchlines admits, joking is not all light entertainment; there’s clearly a savageness to much comedy. Long before Farage made his victory speech in Brussels, the comedian Bob Monkhouse made his famous quip: ‘People used to laugh at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.’ This not only riffs brilliantly on the comic conceit of self-deprecation, but it also hints at the animating aggressiveness that can so often motivate a comedian in their vocation – the desire to make us laugh, in other words, could well be the hither side of the despot’s desire to stop us laughing.