Given how studiedly manscaped he is these days, it wouldn't be the most enormous stretch if trash-talking dandy Shane Warne simply swept into the Ashes commentary box on the first day of the series, adjusted his monocle, and declared that to be tired of sledging is to be tired of cricket.

But is it? The veneration of the practice continues unabated in some quarters, yet with each Ashes series I find the easily amused glee in this aspect of proceedings slightly more tedious than I did the last time around. A ball of the series has yet to be bowled, but already the keepers of the annals are celebrating new entries, with Warne's digs at Alastair Cook grabbing a wearingly predictable number of headlines, before being parried by no less Wildean a figure than Will Carling. "Bloody hell even their sledging is now shite!!!" he sledged.

Once the action proper starts, and snippets of the on-pitch repartee filter out, many will celebrate whatever the latest variants are concerning a player's BMI and the sexual appetite of his spouse. Lest we forget, this is an art form that, with very few exceptions, can be boiled down to the endless rehashing of part or all of the following: You're shit, you're fat, and I've shagged your wife. Who's a shit.

Naturally, there are rare occasions when only calling someone a fat expletive will do, and a cheap laugh can be a genuine hoot, if it is deployed rarely enough to be a surprise – the retaliatory equivalent of Indiana Jones being confronted by the master swordsman and simply pulling out his pistol and shooting him. Used anything other than very sparingly indeed, however, it's a bore. Or, as the nursery disciplinary code used to run: first time funny, second time silly, third time smack.

Strip away the befuddling nostalgia around the celebrated examples of sledging down the years, and they have mostly dated terribly. The moments of genuine wit are so few and far between as to almost conform to the infinite-monkeys-on-infinite-typewriters principle. The moments of insight are arguably even fewer, which is perhaps why other sports have failed to adopt what is so often fabled as a match-winning form of verbal combat. Tennis stars, for instance, have yet to serve up their aces with a chaser of what they imagine to be the equivalent of a cheeky Bruce Willis one-liner.

Yet apparently on the basis that WG Grace was a bit lippy – albeit in a considerably more mannerly fashion – sledging continues to be referred to as "a noble tradition". Traditions are always unthinkingly noble, aren't they? In fact, "noble traditions" are a bit like "billionaire philanthropists" – you can't seem to have one half of the epithet without the other. Except, of course, you can.

Unfortunately, no one tells the self-styled grand masters, which is possibly why some articles on the noble tradition still feel able to speak admiringly of an ancient exchange between Beefy Botham and Rod Marsh. "How's your wife and my kids?" inquired Marsh, as you may recall. "The wife's fine," retorted Botham, "the kids are retarded." (Hey – he does a lot for charity, innit.)

Perhaps the only other place where the bar of wit is set so low is Westminster. There, Dennis Skinner can deliver some dead-on-arrival non-zinger, only for at least half the House to threaten to do themselves a mischief, so hysterical is their mirth. A few months ago the prime minister could not suppress his self-admiring laughter as he honked the following at the Labour front benches: "I know I've been the one on holiday in Ibiza – but they've been the ones taking policy-altering substances!" What can you say? Anywhere normal, this clunkfest would have been met with either withering silence or a pitying groan. In Westminster, it was received so rapturously it practically broke the laughter track.

This tends to be the way in all hermetically sealed worlds, particularly those whose defining characteristic is impregnable self-regard. Outside of the Premier League, for instance, what is always glorified as "mind games" could be simply classified as bad manners or being babyish. But within the bubble, where all critical faculties are apparently suspended, it is routinely regarded as game theorising on a par with the stratagems deployed by either side in the most mutually paranoid days of the cold war. And so with cricket sledging, where – within the Center Parcs of on-pitch idiocy – someone offering a variant on someone's wife's post-coital generosity with the biscuits is regarded as having out-Twained Twain.

Study the collected works of sledging, and it becomes clear that the bread and butter of the 21st century form is largely artless, low-level abuse delivered by people who think swearing is always funny. Which isn't to say swearing can't be hilarious – if it is done well. Done badly, though, it is not a substitute for wit, but another lame gag whose reliance on a naughty word merely foregrounds its failure in all other aspects.

As for whether it could be done better, one can but dream. Given this is the era of technical innovations and scripted so-called reality shows, I implore the International Cricket Council to embrace modernity and consider hiring The Thick of It's brilliant swearing consultant, Ian Martin. In an ideal world, he'd write the sledging for an entire Ashes series – but under this sort of time pressure, I'd settle for him being flown out to Australia without delay, to deliver a crash course to both sides in raising their game.