Whatever happened to the wilderness? People used to stay there for ages. Did it turn out to be a really inhospitable place or something?

I think we all have to ask as the huge caravan of men returning from #MeToo exile threatens to overwhelm us. Over the past week, it has been difficult to turn on the internet without seeing reports detailing this alleged crimewave’s progress. “My life is over,” declaimed comedian Louis CK to … hang on, where are my reading glasses? … a sold-out audience in Long Island. He owns a multi-million dollar estate on nearby Shelter Island, so I guess it feels as wastelandy a spot as any to unleash a set shitting all over school shooting survivors and people asking to be referred to by pronouns of their choice. But we’ll come to the courage of this material shortly.

For now, join the huddled masses, Mr CK! I’m afraid the marketplace of men returning from the wilderness is now so crowded that you have to do something really quite special to get people’s undivided attention.

Leave it to acting’s Kevin Spacey, then, who dropped a Christmas video that is a work of quite eye-popping WTF-ery. Even by Kevin’s own standards of scenery-chewing, this one’s a real masticator. Top line? He still seems to be in the dark as to how his plot has resolved. What can one say? Other than: I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, mate, but it turns out it was you all along.

As it goes, that isn’t the particular role in his canon on which Kevin overtly draws for this video. Instead, he gets himself up as House of Cards villain Frank Underwood, albeit a Frank Underwood standing behind a kitchen counter in a Father Christmas apron.

Other details? You can see why Kevin opted to stand next to a massive turkey – a massive ham would have been too self-parodic – but it does all fade into the background once he starts speaking. “I know what you want,” he begins boldly. “Oh sure, they may have tried to separate us, but what we have is too strong, too powerful … I shocked you with my honesty … but mostly I challenged you and made you think … So we’re not done, no matter what anyone says. I know what you want. You want me back …” On and on he rambles. “Soon enough, you will know the whole truth … Now that I think of it, you never actually saw me die, did you?”

I’m watching it right now, Kevin.

As for as the secondary import of Spacey’s message, I would say it is the most perfect representation I have ever seen of the space beyond CAA representation. Ditched by the agency last year, Kevin is now operating in a place so far from talent management that the Chinese are decades off being able to land a probe on it.

Yet he is still given to reticence when it suits. Spacey is due to appear in court in Massachusetts next week, charged with sexually assaulting an 18-year-old man in a bar in 2016. But a few days after the video dropped, his lawyer argued that Spacey appearing in person would only “amplify the negative publicity already generated in connection with this case”. Though the judge didn’t actually use the words “I think your client’s kitchen psycho video already did that”, he did throw the request out, so perhaps the Santa apron will get a more formal outing next Tuesday.

However he plays it, then, Spacey’s performance is already a real credit to his most recent alma mater, the Meadows clinic in Arizona, where you may recall his fellow patients included Harvey Weinstein. The Meadows offers a $2,000-a-night wilderness-type experience, being in the actual wilderness, but without requiring the sacrifice of comforts such as a kale menu or steam room.

Both Harvey and Kevin are now back home, so both are … cured, is it? … of the illness they were being treated for. Well done, the Meadows! I hope this clinical success has spurred the creation of a dedicated programme for guys wrongly accused of multiple sexual assaults. I know the very last thing you care about is money, but it doesn’t hurt that this is easily the fastest-growing entertainer demographic. Furthermore, I hope all your other paying patients who had to sit in group-therapy sessions with these two realise how lucky they were to share a treatment journey with some of the earliest identified sufferers of this illness – so new it has yet to be given a name. Does it even have a working title, or are you still listing it as Untitled Sexual Abuse Addiction Project?

And so to Louis CK, whose bootlegged set suggested he is so angry at what he did to his life that he can only express it as anger toward people who wish to be known by different pronouns. I expect the next stage of his journey will be sophisticatedly demanding why something is transgressive when he says it, but not when it is said by, say, one of the women he forced to watch him masturbate in a locked room.

I’m sure we hate to disappoint this self-styled groundbreaker, but this is all very old hat. Jim Davidson was crusading against comic injustice way back in the 1980s. “‘Well, Billy Connolly swears,’” he recently recalled saying to his BBC bosses. “The producers at the BBC said: ‘A Billy Connolly swear word is different to a Jim Davidson swear word,’ so there you go. Maybe it’s the Scottish accent.” Yes. Well, I’m sure if it was going to be the fault of anything, it would be that Billy came from a different country from Jim. Still, they gave him a very good living for a couple of decades. And Jim’s failure to accept that his time had passed gave him the next two decades of material.

Listening to Louis CK’s set, I was struck how much he reminded me of post-BBC Davidson, a man whose act strayed into such unfunny shithousery that it frequently drew complaints even from audience members who’d paid to see a Jim Davidson gig. And so with Louis CK. Not laughing is presented as an imaginative failure on the audience’s part. It reminds us that there is a special, roped-off VIP area of Woke for guys who have been accused of sexual misconduct. They can see worlds you can’t! They are here to reveal their mysteries to you! THEY ARE STILL YOUR SPIRIT ANIMAL, OK? Catch up.

As far as much of the rest of the act goes – pronouns, black guys having big dicks – this stuff really is the equivalent of mother-in-law material. It is one of the more embarrassing ironies of the age that everyone who utters the phrase “But you can’t say that any more” has, quite literally, just said the thing you can’t say.

One of my biggest and most doomed wishes for 2019 is for comedians to stop acting like it’s crusadingly dangerous to say things that are basically indistinguishable from Jim Davidson’s 1977 Seaside Special act – and then not just wondering why they don’t get campus bookings, but claiming that comedy is being “killed”.

Comedy is not being killed. You can still say the things you can’t say. It is 31 years since Allan Bloom wrote his pearl-clutching book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. It is 27 years since New York magazine ran its landmark article suggesting that the thought police were recreating 1930s Germany.

Since then, what has really changed? Students are still being mild idiots on campus, but it was ever thus. We’ve known students are idiots since way back. Shakespeare even wrote one of his top four tragedies about it. But you know, unless they homicidally avenge their fathers, sparking a chain of events that basically wipes out a generation of Denmark’s ruling family, they usually get over it.

I wish rich comedians would. Apart from students, who surely can’t believe the attention they’re paid, the only other people wetting their pants about all this bollocks are rightwingers who profit financially or electorally from making it a bogeyman. Look at the results. People who can see it works have been banging this drum for almost four decades now, and – SPOILERS – they keep winning. Four decades of seeing snowflakes everywhere has not closed the American mind. TURN ON THE TELLY. The American mind remains so yawningly, chasmically open that it has literally elected Donald Trump as its president. I don’t want to close the American mind after the horse has been made consul but CHRIST, can we try some new material, please?