What a golden age of euphemism we are living through. Each night brings a snowfall of fresh allegations against powerful men; each morning a flurry of exquisitely sorrowful statements that can’t bring themselves to say precisely what they are sorry about.

Is anyone collating all these in a really expensive coffee table book yet, perhaps to offset any downturn in studio profits incurred by having to axe people and projects now tainted by Unpleasantness? There should definitely be a special font for these quasi-apologies. Comic Sans Underwear. Comic Sans Career. Comic Sans a Clue How They Sound.

Venerated talkshow host Charlie Rose thought he was “pursuing shared feelings” but now has “a profound new respect for women and their lives”. That, right there, is beautiful. I mean, it’s not up to me to tell our apology book publishers how to lay out their lavish product, but I really hope they illustrate this one with a reconstruction photo of a 75-year-old man answering his dressing room door, to some underling five decades his junior, with his dick out.

Several other fallen angels have gone with the circumlocution “uncomfortable situation”, which is a place they are sorry if they’ve put any women. And all, but all, absolutely “respect women”.

And yet … there is something so screamingly absurd about chaps who appear to have spent the best part of two decades issuing orders from open bathrobes suddenly being overcome by such fits of euphemistic primness. Their apologies come with inbuilt lace hankies as standard, masterclasses in not causing even linguistic offence by doing anything so coarse as to hint even remotely at what it is they’ve done.

Standout this week comes from Toy Story creator and Pixar founder John Lasseter, who announced he was taking a six-month leave of absence from Disney in a statement whose length-to-meaningful-content ratio rivals even some of my worst columns. I’m subbing this down from a gazillion words, but according to John, he has taken this course of action after some “painful conversations” about “unwanted hugs”.

What’s a nice car like you doing in a place like this? Mater the Tow Truck makes friends with Lightning McQueen in Cars. Photograph: Allstar/Disney/Pixar

Well now. I think we need a little more detail on John’s “hugs” before we classify them along with the sort of family movie embraces you might see between Lightning McQueen and one of his service vehicles. Even if she’s got a great little spoiler on the back of her. (Need to watch Cars again – in light of new information it could be more covertly warped than even David Cronenberg’s Crash.)

Then again, according to John’s statement, it is not just “hugs” that have forced the leave of absence – it is also “missteps”. What are “missteps”? Given the current climate, we have to ask: are they accidentally sexual pratfalls? They sound like something out of a Ray Cooney farce, where the lead character – Roy Looney, a film producer – has to juggle a suspicious wife and his tendency to trip over and land face down in the cleavages of junior animators. Mind My Missteps! Now booking till June.

So on it all goes, with no sense of where or when it will end. Still, we must be thankful for perspectives such as that of one CNN reporter, whose later-deleted hot take was to lament the “talent drain”, this unprecedented exodus of genius from the industry. I know! How will Hollywood cope? Who’s going to make Whichever Superheroes 9 now? It’s unclear, but clearly the working title has to be Avengers: Age of Consent.

Mel Gibson: a new man? Photograph: Cove/Silverhub/Rex/Shutterstock

Speaking of family movies, though, it’s a relief to know there are some good guys left, who seem to have a game plan as to how we can move past everything. Enter Mel Gibson, star of … hang on, let me get my lorgnettes … Daddy’s Home 2, a Christmas movie also featuring Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg and John Lithgow. Promoting this, recent best director nominee Mel intoned of the current state of affairs in Hollywood: “Things got shaken up a little bit, and there is a lot of light being thrown into places where there were shadows and that is kind of healthy. It’s painful, but I think pain is a precursor to change.”

Yup, you’ll have heard the expression “be the change you want to see”. Mel IS the change he wants to see. Specifically, he knows he said some bad stuff on the hard shoulder of the Pacific Coast highway to the Jewish traffic cop and the sugartitted traffic cop. But after that, he changed. Except for that one time a few years later when it was reported that a tape existed of him screaming racist abuse and threats of violence at his girlfriend and mother of his child. That, he later said, he “felt regret” about, adding that he was “betrayed”.

Anyhoo … Daddy’s Home 2. Hard to pick a favourite critical notice thus far, though I did enjoy the one-star Empire review that stated: “Gibson is even more of a one-dimensional toxic manchild than Wahlberg”. And which wondered, vaguely, why the Daddy’s Home 2 producers thought Mel Gibson was the man to make “jokes about dead hookers, non-consensual kissing or doling out a ‘big slap on the caboose’”.

Well. I think the answer to that question is: if not Mel, then who? Who else is left to make these jokes? That he should be styling himself as some kind of elder statesman really brings home the scale of this: so many powerful guys have had to be shuffled down to the bottom of the deck that MEL GIBSON is back on top. That’s right: Mel Gibson is dispensing Hollywood’s moral lessons. He’s the noble Morgan Freeman voiceover to the post-Weinstein era, and the sooner we all make our peace with that, the better. It’s just like the title says: Daddy’s home.