If you lived through the '80s, you probably have the song about Alan Bond lodged somewhere in the murky depths of your memory, along with other embarrassing things about Australia, like the way visiting foreign celebrities were made to answer questions from Dickie Knee when they appeared on Hey Hey It’s Saturday. (For anyone under 30: Dickie Knee was a puppet.) This week Wilson and his irascible comedy peers, Austen Tayshus and Billy Birmingham (who did “The Twelfth Man” cricket satire albums) were gifted the front page of the Daily Telegraph to lament the state of Australian comedy. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video “Political Correctness killing Australian comedy, says comedic great Kevin Bloody Wilson,” read the headline, which at least succeeded in being unintentionally funny. “I can’t go on TV anymore as it’s so bloody PC ... or do the Sydney Comedy Festival. The audience is too mainstream and gets offended,” Wilson told the paper.

“Banks [and] corporate bosses don’t book us anymore for fear we might offend staff.” Austen Tayshus said that “the soft new generation of PC-wary comedians need to grow some balls and not worry about pleasing the audience”. He said he often gets physically and verbally abused at gigs but “I just find new venues”. Birmingham said that he would be “hung drawn and quartered” for his comedy nowadays, and blamed audiences for losing their sense of humour. Comedian Austen Tayshus says he gets physically and verbally abused at gigs but 'I just find new venues'. “Australia is a nation of piss-takers. We’re larrikins. It’s 99.9 times out of 100 not meant to be offensive — and it’s a shame that’s dying,” he said.

It is awe-inspiring that none of these men appear to have considered - even as a remote possibility - that they might have a role to play in their lack of contemporary success. Maybe their comedy is stale, or old, or (whisper it) lacking in currency? Likewise it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that jokes about poofters, sheilas and blackfellas may have less traction because those classes of people have a voice now, that they didn’t have in the 1980s. Perhaps what bothers Wilson and his cohort is the fact that, not only is their comedy less popular with contemporary audiences, it actually has to compete with far-superior material made by the very people who used to be the butt of their jokes. Australia’s best contemporary comedy is being produced by women, gay men and Aboriginal Australians - I’m thinking of comedians like Becky Lucas and Tom Ballard, and writers like Nakkiah Lui, Ben Law and Kate McCartney and Kate McClennan (the pair behind the comedy series Get Krack’n). Get Krack'n's Kate McCartney and Kate McClennan go places others have not.

Lui (who this week won the playwriting prize at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards) was the subject of a separate sniffy article on news.com which reported the subject of her most recent work - an Aboriginal superhero who eschews reconciliation for revenge and goes on a mission to kill the descendants of the people who killed her ancestors in frontier massacres. The article noted the arts grant she received for the work, Blackie Blackie Brown: The Traditional Owners of Death, and quoted Communications Minister Mitch Fifield assuring us the government itself had nothing to do with the grant, and saying: “I haven’t seen the work, but the description of it isn’t to my taste.” If Fifield has a problem with killing, or vengeful characters, then he should probably skip the theatre entirely. Nakkiah Lui in ABC TV's Black Comedy. Perhaps he also worries Medea glamorises infanticide and Hamlet sets a bad example for Generation Z.

When did we become this stupid? The very people who argue that comedy is no longer allowed to be transgressive, ignore the fact that comedy is more transgressive than ever - it has to be, to keep up with the outrages it mocks, particularly in the United States. Loading Tom Ballard’s Tonightly recently ran a skit in which a panel of Aboriginal people earnestly discussed whether white people were all “c---s”, a response to the Sunrise show’s treatment of the Stolen Generation by an all-white panel. You could not say that Michelle Wolf’s now-infamous routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was politically correct. She crucified everyone equally - men, women, feminists, Nazis, Democrats, Republicans, press and politicians. Her routine was, at times, so dark it grew gasps from the crowd, and she used the President’s own obscenity as a weapon, at one point calling Trump, who was a no-show at the dinner, “the one pussy you’re not allowed to grab”.

The Economist, which is not generally an outlet known for its controversial sense of humour, published a brilliant editorial praising Wolf’s blush-making routine, and arguing that in the Trump era, “calls for civility are calls for servility”. So maybe it’s not that we can no longer handle transgressive or obscene comedy. Maybe it’s just that contemporary, media-saturated audiences can easily distinguish between satire and rank prejudice, and they’ve stopped buying tickets to the latter. Twitter: @JacquelineMaley Follow Jacqueline Maley on Facebook