Someday, archaeologists studying our age will wonder why we were so scared of some deity called ‘2016’ that we took to social media to ask it to stop taking all our celebrities away from us. The death of the artist once and formerly and then once again known as Prince has triggered yet another of this year’s predictable rounds of conspicuous grief and social media mourning, crowding out rational thought on a tide of emotion and nostalgia. Is it any wonder that Facebook is worried that the platform may slowly but surely be going the way of all pop stars?

The problem isn’t, as the company’s executives complained recently, that people are not sharing enough of their personal feelings on the service. It is that they they are sharing entirely too much. Now to be clear, I have no particular beef against Prince, who died last week at 57. I suppose I am sad he went in a broad ‘no man is an island’ sense, but I never met the man, nor did he ‘write the soundtrack of my youth’ (let’s be honest, I was more of a Duran Duran kid). I do remember ‘1999’ (who doesn’t?), ‘Purple Rain’, and ‘When Doves Cry’. I also have a memory of being about twelve years old and very confused about the controversy around ‘Darling Nikki’, which some mid-1980s group of sensible-shoes mothers led by Al Gore’s wife Tipper tried to ban from the airwaves: Why generate attention, I wondered, around something you didn’t want people to know about or consume?

Reflecting on that era when Prince was putting out all those albums that would make his name I also have a hard time thinking we could have ever imagined the sort of earnest wailing and gnashing of teeth that would eventually accompany his demise. In the days before Twitter and political correctness and human resources departments looking to shield their ‘brand’ from the slightest hint of controversy, public grief and worries about world events were leavened by laughter. This also offered something of a psychological relief in a world still under threat of global thermonuclear warming. Gags would hit the street within hours of any event, no matter how terrible, from the disaster of the Space Shuttle Challenger (What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts) to Chernobyl (What has feathers and glows in the dark? Chicken Kiev!). Fast-forward thirty years and the death of the lyrical genius who penned ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, I made the throw-away comment, ‘Hmmph, the artist formerly known as alive’ to my 14-year-old son. Demonstrating the conflicts of his generation he fell first into a paroxysm of laughter and then collecting himself into a silent look of horror: ‘That may be funny but you can’t say that!’ It was as if I’d just cracked an Erich Honecker joke in a bugged East Berlin apartment. Or, in keeping with the spirit of the times, a Recep Erdogan joke in any Berlin apartment.

Thus we have gone from being a culture which marks events with humour to one which marks them with conspicuous emotion and censoriousness. Narcissism (it’s ‘my’ grief; these are ‘my’ feelings), mortality, and the currency of victimhood create a trifecta that’s hard to beat, let alone question. Ours is the era of ‘too soon’, with the answer to the logical follow-up question being, ‘never’. All of this is backed up by the constant policing, mostly but not entirely from the Left, which routinely sees individuals from Nobel Prize-winning scientists to average schlubs pilloried and ruined by anonymous mobs of self-proclaimed ‘activists’ for a bit of off-the-cuff humour. In a reversal of Orwell’s dictum, jokes are no longer seen as tiny revolutions but instead as reactionary signals with all the need for suppression and purging that implies.

But without sounding like the Edward Gibbon of comedy, the constant need to ‘watch what you say’ – whether about dead celebrities or anyone else – lest it be misconstrued, also is suggestive of a society that lacks trust and that is in if not actual then perceived decline. To return to the ‘80s for a moment – don’t worry, the skinny ties are optional – we are speaking of an era that had come out of the torpor of the 1970s, when. although it was not still by any means a sure thing, the West was presenting a real and bracing moral and existential challenge to Soviet communism. Today’s conspicuous competitive keening over pop stars is shot through with a declinism that tacitly admits there is no one coming to fill the shoes of Bowie or Prince to save music any more than there is another Reagan or Thatcher or John Paul II or Churchill waiting in the wings to save us all (sorry, BoJo).

To put it another way, winning societies can afford to crack jokes come what may; when you feel you are in a fall it is harder to have a confident laugh in the face of the sads. And it becomes a self-fulfilling spiral. Societies that laugh together tend to stay together. With the loss of the ability to crack wise – to laugh at death in the face, which is as much as anything the reason why people joke about tragedy (just ask the Jews) – we also lose a tool to relate to one another. The desire to seem compassionate and to not hurt feelings is an admirable one, but it makes for a brittle civil society where taking offense is a weapon. Humour can hurt feelings but it can also defuse them. Think about how waves of migrants to Australia have been incorporated into mainstream in no small part through humour, often cutting both ways, from They’re a Weird Mob to Con the Fruiterer’s Roula, Toula, Soula, Voula, Foula, and Agape. It is hard to say that our more ‘enlightened’ era, which looks at such gags with ‘such embarrassment!’ as Effie might have put it, really is a more tolerant one.

None of this will change overnight, so let me issue this challenge in an effort to be the change I wish to see in the world. Should I ever achieve some measure of fame and wind up dying in an untimely, odd, or amusing fashion, tell all the jokes you want. ‘Won’t be seeing him on the morrow’ is a good, if awful, place to start.