Today I took my four-year-old to London zoo, where I am currently appearing as the pre-recorded voice of a spider, Morgan Freeman having proved unavailable. A handler had a snowy owl on his wrist. The bird appeared comfortable with its “as seen in Harry Potter” tag, and was yet to do anything as drastic as appearing naked in Peter Shaffer’s Equus to shake it.

A man kept pushing a massive black camera into the owl’s distressed face, as it spun its head away 180 degrees, an ability I wish I had when members of the public on the tube say they don’t really like my act but their weird lonely uncle loves it and can they have a selfie for Twitter and what is my name anyway?

Hadn’t the snowy owl suffered enough, its numbers in worldwide decline, its cousins kept in cupboards by confused Daniel Radcliffe fans? But I didn’t have the stomach for direct confrontation, so I filtered my annoyance through my daughter. “Do you think the owl likes having his photo taken?” “No. He really hates it,” she replied, loudly and pointedly, realising instantly what I was trying to achieve. But the man clicked on as the owl shrank away. “Here’s the back of an owl’s head again, and here is one of its frightened face. They’re part of a study in human stupidity.”

I wish the owl had lunged at the photographer and torn out his eyes, and then vomited them up a week later as an owl pellet, taunting him with the hope his half-eaten orbs might be reintroduced to his vacant sockets, meaning he ended up with balls of dried owl vomit for eyes, chased for ever by children calling him “Captain Bird Sick Eye”. Seriously though, what has happened to you people?

On the last day of May, a dancing dog won a televised talent competition. But Britain was furious when it turned out that the dog was in fact two dogs, a TV-friendly front-dog, and an anonymous dog who had been doing all the difficult acrobatics. It was ever thus. Derren Brown has a hideous genius sibling, Darran Brown, whom the handsome TV illusionist keeps locked in a recycling bin, painstakingly planning the pranks that his photogenic brother then performs on the public. We have the culture we deserve. Anything more nuanced than a dancing dishonest dog appears wasted on us.

Craig Raine this month had a bewilderingly controversial poem published in the London Review of Books, a periodical so brilliantly removed from this fallen world that even its personal ads read like the last cris de coeur of ageing and despairing romantics, their lifelong immersion in profoundly meaningful literature having done little to prepare them for the gradual realisation that life itself is utterly meaningless, and that their long-awaited transformative moment of epiphany appears to have been lost permanently in the post.

Somehow Raine’s, to me at least, self-aware stanzas on growing old and irrelevant and impotent crossed passport control from Literary Island into the modern milieu of social media where, due to it not being either a photo of a celebrity’s buttocks or a film of an old woman falling down some steps, the work was quickly stamped to death like a defenceless duckling.

Imagine the brilliant but misanthropic jazz-racist Philip Larkin under similar contemporary scrutiny. Or even John Donne, whose belated religious fervour saw him picture the almighty as a lustful lover in Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God. “Poet perv Donne wants God to bum him. Sick!” Thus would ye Twitter hath spaeke.

The veteran slow-core singer songwriter Mark Kozelek, similarly Twitter-traduced this month, may have enjoyed his temporary notoriety. Kozelek, it seems to me, has been dealing with critical deification since 1992 by creating an arsehole stage persona that works in dramatic opposition to accepted notions of the sensitive poet-musician.

Nonetheless, Twitter took him down for off-colour onstage comments about a female interviewer at a London show, without its army of armchair commentators having been there to know how these words played out contextually in a two-and-a-half-hour performance, or a two-and-a-half decade career. Or perhaps Kozelek is just an arsehole.

I know how it feels to be singled out for criticism by someone you admire. In 2005, Take That’s Robbie Williams walked out of my show at the Soho theatre, telling the usher he thought my voice was so boring I should do relaxation tapes. I still listen to Angels, but only while home-waxing my perineum or bleaching my anus.

It’s easy to blame Twitter, where ignorance is no barrier to an opinion, for these sudden flash-floods of uninformed judgment, but I also blame Simon Cowell and, by association, David Walliams, who knows better, for corroding the culture. In recent years Britain’s Got Talent has begun to feature the odd brilliant offbeat comedian – Latvia’s Gatis Kandis, Brighton’s Lorraine Bowen – who knowingly inhabit deliberately absurd personas, but are treated by all the judges as if they are mad, an embarrassment. Walliams here is a traitor, a double agent, who, unlike the human filth that makes up the rest of the panel, understands that these people are artists, having once been one himself, but doesn’t want to let on, in case it makes him look dangerously clever.

How would the great working-class surrealists of the music hall era fare against Cowell’s ignorant crew? Mr Pastry, who tangled himself in a tuba for 10 minutes, would be dismissed as a musician with no idea of how to hold his instrument. And Little Tich’s trademark failure to keep track of his hat, that so impressed JB Priestley, would be seen as evidence only of a lack of rehearsal.

Admitting his failure where the double dogs were concerned, Cowell said, “I didn’t really know what I was judging until afterwards so I felt like a bit of an idiot.” But this is true of everything he judges. He hasn’t begun to grasp even the beginnings of his inadequacy.

The idea that culture has “dumbed-down” is a cliche. So let’s rebrand the idea as the Failure of Nuance. And the failure of our entertainment and information brokers to float the idea of dualities of meaning, of context, has wider political and social consequences. Liam Byrne’s letter, his outgoing joke about the Treasury, was waved around repeatedly by David Cameron, and may have cost Labour an election. It’s the perfect example of the kind of contextually specific playfulness that is as unlikely to survive our current stupidity as the snowy owl.

Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre from 21 September