Real humor depends upon irking the dour, the censorious and the po-faced. Lemon-sucking puritans were sadly scarce for most of the last century. And so we were living in a mirth-deprived world.

But the long prudery drought is over.

Thanks to a New Piety — ‘wokeness’ as it’s called — we have many more bluenoses, calamity howlers and vinegar-pusses to upset. Japes at Tartuffian cant can begin anew. Twenty-first-century thought-leaders have returned to a straitlaced piousness, not only in opinion but even in grammar. The woke are claiming offense at such terms as ‘mankind’ and grappling with English as if the language were a professional wrestling villain attempting to pin ‘womynkind’ to the mat. (Rematch to be announced. ‘Womyn’ is considered trans-exclusionary by gender activists.)

To be woke is to maintain a state of mind where you are constantly and acutely alert to social injustice and permanently on the lookout for more social injustice to be alert to. Or what I would call a good reason to take a nap.

Which you’d think would be acceptable since being woke doesn’t actually entail doing anything. But, thankfully for the jester, hypocrisy never sleeps. If you’re woke you must stay ‘conscious’, in order to continually ‘communicate’ how vigilant you are about toxic masculinity, how mindful you’re becoming about cultural appropriation and so forth ad infinitum.

Being woke is a parody of being Born Again: instead of your accepting Jesus, people like Jesus (‘privileged’, famously well- connected fathers) have to accept you. — from “Puritanism is back . . . and welcome to it”

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