It's nonsense to applaud acts such as Borat and Little Britain for being 'non-PC', says Stewart Lee. It's the fact that the writers are truly aware of what's offensive - and what life was like before political correctness made things better - that makes them so funny

The following correction was made on Monday January 8 2007

The article below incorrectly quotes 'Michael Byrne of Time Out Dubai'. This should in fact be Michelle Byrne.

With Borat the highest-grossing adult-rated film in the US for 2006, the writing team of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant booming with a second series of Extras, and Little Britain still riding high, it's clear that the comedy of shock, bad taste and outrage shows no sign of disappearing. But reading about these shows in print and online, they are often described in a way that makes me, for one, feel as if I have been watching different material from everyone else.

For many viewers and critics, Borat, Little Britain and The Office and Extras represent blows against the monstrous, and perhaps largely imagined, regiment of politically correct thinkers, who impinge upon our basic freedoms on a daily basis. "Little Britain makes no apologies for being highly offensive and preying on the sensitivities of even the slightest politically correct sensibilities, which in an ever more sanitised society should be applauded," writes Michelle Byrne, of Time Out Dubai, where society is considerably more sanitised than it is here. "Borat raises an index finger to political correctness and all its exponents," claims Mail on Sunday reader Colin Veitch online, who obviously feels that were Borat to raise his middle finger, the finger traditionally used for giving offence, he may have been overstating his case. Meanwhile, an Extras fan site lauds "Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's mockery of political correctness".

I'm 38, and old enough to remember comedy, and life in general, before political correctness. At secondary school in the Midlands in the early 80s, our maths teacher, who was a genuinely nice man, would routinely refer to the one Asian boy in our class as "the Black Spot", fondly imagining that this was in some way inclusive, like some pocket calculator-wielding version of David Brent™. And the idea of a comic performer like Little Britain's Matt Lucas being openly gay - let alone having photographs of his civil ceremony splashed across the tabloids - would have been unimaginable, however camp his on-stage persona.

There's a vast difference between the casual, inadvertent offence prevalent in my childhood and the choices made today by performers and writers of my generation, operating in a post-PC world, where they are aware of the power and meaning of the taboos they choose to break. Linguistic theorists who define the terminology of political correctness suggest that grammatical choices made in language influence both the speaker's and the listener's ideas and actions. This would seem to be common sense, so it would be churlish to argue against the idea of attempting to ensure basic levels of politeness and consideration in official, public discourse.

I am a great fan of political correctness, even though, as one of the writers of Jerry Springer the Opera, I was routinely praised for apparently attacking it, and feel that any indignities we suffer from PC's overzealous policing are a small price to pay for all that it has achieved. Is anyone apart from Robertson's jam really inconvenienced by the extinction of the golliwog?

So why, then, do some sections of the viewing public insist on seeing attacks on PC where there perhaps are none?

Stephen Merchant, co-writer of The Office and Extras with Ricky Gervais, says: "We're endlessly cited as being non-PC, and yet we sit and agonise for ages over what we put into the scripts, and over whether our choices can be defended, both morally and intellectually," he says. "We may push things, but we're always motivated by satirical imperatives." But the duo's scripts do use non-PC language? "Yes," explains Merchant, clearly slotting back into a tramline he has had to follow many times before. "But we deal in taboos and hot areas by appearing to approach them from a non-PC standpoint, but as soon as you even introduce topics that PC has declared off limits, people assume you are trying to be dangerous and politically incorrect. Often we're all unsure of what to say, for example, in the company of someone who is disabled. These are areas ripe for comedy because of social anxiety, not because the subject itself is intrinsically funny. A joke about race, and about how we react to race, is not necessarily a racist joke. That is fundamental. Political correctness has made the world better for those who might otherwise have been unfairly marginalised, but there is the problem of the idea that you cannot discuss different areas for fear of being politically incorrect."

Peter Baynham is one of the unsung heroes of British comedy over the past two decades - he wrote the famous "Michael Heseltine Is Dead" bit for Chris Morris's radio show, and helped sculpt Patrick Marber's Alan Partridge character from its chatshow incarnation into its fully realised sitcom version. But it is as one of the co-writers of Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat movie that he has finally won a British Comedy Award, the industry's least valuable honour, and earned enough money to buy David Hasselhoff's hair from him and wear it as if it were his own. So what does he think of the attacks on the Borat film? According to Simon Dillon, of the Christian film review website The Greatest Trick, "Borat is a monstrous creation designed to fly in the face of every politically correct notion you can possibly think of, yet despite being misogynistic, homophobic, anti-semitic, and worse, Borat has proved hugely popular, possibly because people are sick and tired of politically correct comedy (surely a contradiction in terms in any case)."

Baynham is philosophical about the way Borat has occasionally been received. "It's weird to see the film seized upon by people who hate political correctness, and think it's a bad thing, when PC was clearly just an understandable reaction to 70s racist awfulness," he says, on a rare trip home from Los Angeles to the native land he now scorns. "In my own pretentious, terrible opinion, which may not be shared by the other writers, the Borat movie is not anti-PC at all. When Borat says a black politician has a 'genuine chocolate face' he is a) clearly an idiot and b) from a naive, fictionalised foreign culture. But it's also a good thing to do because that bit absolutely wouldn't have been funny 25 years ago, precisely because that sort of thing was more openly said by people. It's a little kick, a little reminder, of why we don't say those things, and it's weird when you read people saying it was deliberately offensive. The laugh is a laugh of 'Oh my God, you can't say that!' People are laughing with shock, because we've reminded them of why it's wrong to say that black people have chocolate faces." At this point, Baynham seems to be approaching something profound and timeless about comedy, that stretches beyond petty concerns about political correctness.

At the end of September last year, I was lucky enough to attend the St Geronimo feast-day celebrations at Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, while helping out on a Radio 4 documentary about clowns. For a long time I had fondly imagined that the clowns of the Pueblo Indians, who take over the village for the afternoon on the second day of the festival, might be a key to understanding, on some essential level, what comedy is, and what comedy is for. I had seen a re-creation of the medieval fools' day five years ago near Béziers in Languedoc, when the bouffonnades, a clown troupe which was traditionally assembled from the village's mentally and physically handicapped outcasts, were given free rein to mock the citizenry, but research suggested the Pueblo clowns seemed to have a more pronounced philosophical dimension.

Just after lunch, 10 figures appeared, silhouetted against the blue sky on the roof of a stack of brown adobe buildings. They were naked but for loincloths, their bodies painted in rings of concentric black and white stripes, their hair decorated with jagged stalks of corn. After a while, the clowns made their way down into the plaza, where they ran between the houses, intimidating and entertaining, overturning every social norm at hand, and reshaping the rules of Pueblo life. Food was stolen from stallholders and redistributed. We were shouted at, shoved and shocked. Our drinks were flung on the floor. We followed the clowns into the chief's house, where an absurd Indian dance was performed at the dinner table for the benefit of his white guests. Back outside, Pueblo women were made to wear different-sized shoes, so they struggled and stumbled as they walked; young men were clad in dresses and forced to skip. And when confronted with someone in a wheelchair, or a mentally handicapped onlooker, the clowns would fall before them on their knees in worship.

Despite our BBC credentials, Native American commentators were reluctant to explain the theory behind any of this practice in detail, partly because, when the white settlers moved into the American south-west, one of the first things their delicate sensibilities required them to suppress were the Pueblo clown ceremonials, but gentle pressure revealed the suggestion of a social, maybe even moral, purpose at work. By reversing the norms and breaking the taboos, the clowns show us what we have to lose, and what we might also stand to gain, if we step outside the restrictions of social convention and polite everyday discourse.

This core idea holds whether it is played out up close in the plaza of a New Mexican pueblo, or miles away by the tiny dots of television stars on the stage of a vast arena. Comedy is about funny faces, and funny noises, and silly words and stupid fun, but it's also about this more profound idea. To say that the taboo-busting antics of current favourites like Borat or Extras are somehow bound up explicitly in contemporary cultural negotiations with the ephemeral, late-20th-century notion of political correctness is to miss the point on a massive scale. This stuff is justified, ancient and righteous. It is not there to be appropriated by Daily Mail editorials as evidence of mass disillusionment with the soft left, nor by disgusted liberals as examples of society's collapsing values. It's comedy, the noblest of all the arts, and it goes way back.