The Menzies Research Centre, a Liberal-affiliated thinktank dedicated to “liberty, free speech, competitive enterprise, smaller government and democracy”, is not known for its sense of humour.

It’s not known for anything, really, but it’s especially not known for that. Director Nick Cater’s idea of levity is how unpronounceable some people find race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane’s name, and its board of directors – a collection of former Coalition MPs, industry barons and investment bankers – doesn’t exactly scream “funny”.

Nonetheless, the MRC has cobbled together a panel as part of its Provocateur series to ask why Australians just don’t have a sense of humour anymore. Beyond a Joke: Why Humour is a Core Australian Value promises an evening of drinks, canapes, and the phrase “political correctness” uttered ad nauseum.

In Harbour 220, a corporate-chic bar on Macquarie Street, attendees sip bubbly and nibble on fish sliders brought around by waiters. A nine-screen TV wall plays the greatest hits of Australian political comedy: Barry Humphries doing Sir Les Patterson, Norman Gunston gatecrashing the Dismissal and, bewilderingly, Peter Costello in Question Time. The people who’ve turned out for this rightwing open mic are more formally dressed, more male and somewhat older than the typical comedy night crowd. Not many people seem to have taken up the hotly discounted ticket price for Young Liberal members.

It feels almost unfair to point out that there aren’t any comedians on the panel. Instead, the MRC has rounded up Liberal backbencher and climate sceptic extraordinaire Craig Kelly; News Corp columnist Tim Blair; and Gemma Tognini, a PR executive, columnist with The West Australian and a regular on Sky News.

Even when taken together, the trio have a fairly thin comedic CV. Blair once wrote an unintentionally hilarious two-page saga for the Daily Telegraph about an afternoon he spent in Lakemba, or “Muslim Land”, before getting scared by a “crudely Islamified” shop mannequin and fleeing back to the CBD. Kelly most recently made headlines for the ill-fated Monash Forum, a pro-coal parliamentary group derided by Sir John Monash’s descendants, and for praising the “coherent, democratic process” of Azerbaijan’s recent presidential election, which the incumbent won with 86% of the vote. Tognini has a few well-worn bits: discrimination against men, free speech under attack at universities, the danger of the Greens.

Tognini kicks things off, and turns out to have more to offer than her fellow panelists. She recounts growing up as the daughter of Italian immigrants in “a very whitebread part of Perth”, and how her family encouraged her never to buy into the myth of “migrants as victims”. On arriving in Australia by boat, the first thing her nonna did was crack a joke to her son: “Take me home”.

Halfway through her story Kelly walks in. “Sorry I’m late! Down fighting the socialists at the ABC,” he says. It gets the biggest laugh of the night so far, but Tognini brings them back with her account of how migrants used to integrate into wider Australian life.

Photograph: https://www.menziesrc.org/events

“No one got triggered, no one went to the Human Rights Commission, none of that bullshit,” Tognini says to applause. “We’re almost apologetic about the country that we have. We’re not going to get better by pandering to false offence. Whole industries have sprung up and are making a buck on stuff that’s not there.”

Then Kelly takes the mic, and regales the crowd with the schoolboy antics he and other backbenchers use to pass the time while other people write laws. Some are harmless, while others stray into deep weirdness. During the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, he would intentionally leave a scrap of paper with the betting odds on which prime minister would make it to the next election on his desk for Labor MPs to find when they crossed to the other side of the chamber. He and his mates also snuck an ad for a Canberra brothel under the door of an unnamed former union official apparently notorious for using sex workers.

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He abruptly switches gears, citing the recent controversy around the character of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Kelly believes people taking offence to jokes based on race and ethnicity “is what divides us”. The Human Rights Commission, a “despicable, Orwellian organisation”, unfairly targeted deceased Australian cartoonist Bill Leak for “pointing out a problem in Aboriginal society”. Bill’s son Johannes, who has replaced his father as the Australian’s resident cartoonist, gets a round of applause.

Tim Blair starts by telling a pretty good story about a practical joke his father-in-law played on him: telling the government he had a stash of assault rifles shortly after the 1996 gun buyback began. Citing the hilarity with which Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy was initially met, he makes a decent point about jokes being “a way of stress-testing ideas”.

Then things go the way they were always going to go. “Any concept the left comes up with” that can’t stand up to the scrutiny of jokes, like the “upper house ballot of genders” apparently available to students at the University of Sydney, gets banned. Comic Michelle Wolf’s turn at the White House correspondents’ dinner “was just nasty, it was just vitriol”. How this squares with Blair’s description of Yassmin Abdel-Magied – “ivory’s a prohibited import, and there’s 20 kilos of it in her gob” – never becomes clear.