The greatest curse of radicalism is not the cult of revolution but the fetish that goes by the name of political correctness. It is a curse because it has all but killed one of the most enjoyable aspects of life: humour. Political correctness dictates that there can be no laughing at women, ethnic minorities, and at sex. By this exacting yardstick, some of the best lines and sequences in literature, and more specifically in humorous writing, would need to be censored. Billy Bunter — that unforgettable fat boy of the Remove in Greyfriars — has to face rejection under the rubric of stoutism. Captain Haddock too would be forced to restrain his vocabulary, which is often tinged with racism. Shakespeare, if he were writing today, would have been forced to rethink the plot of Othello and The Merchant of Venice, and to put a blue pencil through some of the memorable puns and double entendres he put in the mouths of Sir Toby Belch and Falstaff. The merry wives of Windsor would be very sad indeed under a politically correct dispensation.

The more immediate victims are a bunch of Indian students in Princeton, the famous Ivy League university in the east coast of the United States. The student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, now under the editorship of an ethnic Indian, has come under attack because it published an article parodying the kind of broken English spoken by Chinese students. An undergraduate lark has become a major controversy. It is difficult to imagine that there was any kind of malice, let alone racist slur, behind the parody. The good taste behind such an article can be questioned, but why should it become a major issue on the campus from which faculty members and administrators are busy distancing themselves? Teachers and administrators should, as a matter of principle, keep a students’ magazine at arm’s length, but not because the paper has published something that is vaguely objectionable. In an era when political correctness had not stifled humour, such parodies would have only raised guffaws even among the targets. Think of the laughter that followed Peter Sellers’s imitation of an Indian accent in songs and movies. Or the enjoyment provided by the bizarre English of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh in the Billy Bunter stories. It is preposterous to think that such satire should be condemned.

Part of the problem with political correctness is that it expects people to take themselves and life in general too seriously. What has thus disappeared is the ability to laugh at oneself. Neither irony nor humour is the strong point of the radicals. Political correctness is thus a natural outgrowth of such a grim and earnest attitude. The importance of being funny and impish cannot be overestimated. To be politically correct is to be tone deaf to ways in which people cope with their own foibles.