''What should you be able to make jokes about?" the journalist asks, thinking about what he is going to have for his tea. "Are there any subjects that are off-limits?" he continues, looking at a dog through the window, and trying to remember what year Coventry won the FA Cup. "Oh, and do you think laughter can change people's minds?" he mutters, as the opening lyrics to "Lady Marmalade" begin to echo around his mind.
If we had a pound for every time a journalist had asked us about political comedy this Festival, we would currently have £11. That doesn't sound like much, but at this rate, by the end, we could have enough to buy a release-price DVD.
Does political comedy change people's minds? There are two answers to that - a short one, and a slightly longer one. The short one is: no, it doesn't. The slightly longer one is: no, of course it doesn't, don't be ridiculous. And let us not forget that political comedy is just a subject choice, and not a genre. It doesn't always have to be a man in a leather jacket, smoking and telling you what an idiot George W Bush is, to the seal-like honks of an appreciative crowd. You can approach it any way you want. Having said that, it probably comes with some restrictions. For instance, you wouldn't choose to comment on the crisis in Kashmir through the medium of juggling. Then again, we may be wrong: a man juggling a hot potato while trying to get a crowd to pay attention to him could be an entertainingly allegorical way to approach that vastly difficult issue. But we digress.
The beauty with live stand-up is that you really can say whatever you want. You are restricted only by your conscience and by whether or not there's a stag party in the crowd that would like you to make fun of one of their ties. The problems in terms of what you "can" say arise when you enter the disappointing circus of broadcasting. At the start of the year Jerry Springer: the opera, which had been performed live to wide acclaim, was broadcast on BBC2 and unwittingly lit the fires of some evangelical morons. The outcry surrounding it was disappointing on both an artistic and a human level. It is a beautiful piece of work, ideologically sound and - crucially - a joke.
What is offensive, and what causes offence, is a personal thing. As is the length of time that should pass after a tragic event before jokes can be made about it. Jokes about the London bombings will have been flying around in office circular e-mails within hours. These jokes will almost all have been extremely bad, probably adaptations of the kind that circulated after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, or the Challenger spaceship disaster. Indeed, this proud British tradition is likely to date all the way back to King Harold's death, when messengers were sent around villages to read out sick jokes on a special plinth.
There is clearly a need for some people to find laughter in the darker events of life. For us, it is a default mechanism that helps us cope with the world. In that sense, it is the only form of religion that we have.
On Tuesday 16 August, the final episode of The Department was supposed to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The show was about terrorism. We wrote it before the London attacks, over three weeks fuelled by coffee, sweets and panic. We were extremely proud of it, but it got pulled from the schedules. We imagine that the decision was made on a combination of grounds: taste, being too close to the bombings, and being broadcast by the BBC which, after the Hutton report, is jumpy to an extent usually reserved for the kangaroo.
On first hearing that it was to be cancelled, we had violent fantasies about causing overwhelming physical harm to the person whose decision it was. This has been replaced by a nagging concern at what it represents. It is alarming to find yourself on the edge of what it is acceptable to say. Yet, even if the episode had gone out and some people had been offended, would that really have been so bad?
