It’s a proposition that Jon Ronson examines in his new book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Over the course of three years, Ronson spoke to people who had been demonised for posting a single tasteless joke on Twitter or Facebook. The more he investigated, he says, the more he came around to the Patton Oswalt/Jim Norton point of view. “There’s a despicable ruthlessness coming from the ‘outrage’ camp which is destroying people’s lives,” says Ronson. “For every little bit of good it does for social justice, it does a terrible amount of harm. Twitter is like the Stasi: a surveillance network which declares war on behaviour that is considered un-Stasi-like.”

PC or not PC?

Even in the real, non-Twitter world, it’s not just Seinfeld and Rock who have noticed how tetchy audiences are becoming. “There’s a tendency now for sections of crowds to boo in the middle of a joke,” says Glenn Wool, a Canadian regular on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. “They hear a word that they don’t like and they boo. It’s wrong. You can disagree with a joke, you can walk out on a joke, but you shouldn’t boo in the middle of it, because then you’re deciding if anyone else in the audience gets to hear it – and no one elected you the leader.”

Tiff Stephenson, a comic and actor who appeared on BBC2’s The Office, blames this development on smartphones. “What you get now is people in comedy clubs who keep checking their phone,” she says. “They’re not really paying attention, but when they hear a certain trigger word, like ‘abortion’ or ‘suicide’, they pop up and get offended, even though they haven’t actually been listening to the routine.”

As irritated as comedians are by these kneejerk reactions, Nish Kumar of Comedy Central’s The Alternative Comedy Experience believes that an audience’s outrage is sometimes justified. “People are conflating two separate trends,” he says. “I find the practice of tweeting things out of context to be very scary, but political correctness is something different. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for comics to consider the impact of the words they’re choosing, and I don’t think it’s killing comedy. Jerry Seinfeld is a hero of mine, so I take what he says very seriously, but I’m not sure why he would want to undo the good work that’s already been done to make comedy more responsible. I’m certain he wouldn’t like it if someone did a routine that was anti-Semitic or racist.”