THE novelist Howard Jacobsen once said that comedy begins where tragedy loses its nerve. He has a point.

Any halfwit can wring tears from the plight of the world's suffering victims, but to head on from pathos into wisecracking takes a particular sort of nerve -- or maybe foolhardiness.

Comedy is becoming an increasingly dangerous game, after all.

Since Manuelgate, when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were hauled across the coals for making prank calls to an elderly actor, it's been open season in the media on comedians. Sometimes they've deserved it -- Tommy Tiernan's mad rant about the Jews springs instantly to mind. Most times they haven't.

Who really cares if Frankie Boyle said some female British athlete looked a bit ugly? Well, the BBC Trust for one, who dubbed that particular joke insensitive -- whilst, incidentally, not minding the one he told about the Queen being so old that a certain part of her anatomy was haunted, that part being named with the same word which Mrs Slocombe used in Are You Being Served? to describe her cat.

That joke surely crossed way more lines than the one about Olympian Rachel Adlington, but obviously outrage depends on whether it's a slow news day or not, rather than the intrinsic merits of any one gag. And now here we go again.

Last week's sacrificial victim was Jimmy Carr, for telling a joke about British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who have lost limbs in the fighting. His punchline being that, yes, it was tragic, but that Britain would, as a consequence, have a "f***ing brilliant Paralympics team" in the future.

Cue the obligatory howls of protest from the red tops, sensing the chance to stir up outrage, like sharks scenting a drop of blood, especially with Remembrance Day looming. So they round up a few senior military types and MPs and get the requisite quotes about insulting blameless heroes.

Personally, I thought the joke was pretty funny. I first heard Carr tell it on a podcast called The Writer's Room, in which he and a few friends have lunch and bat around a few ideas. If you haven't already, do subscribe. It's free, so there's no excuse.

At that time, he told it in relation to security preparations for the 2012 Olympics in London. Commenting that it was now considered the number one target for Islamic terrorists, Carr noted how awful it would be if al-Qaeda did bomb the athletes before remarking that, on the other hand, Britain's Paralympics team would receive a huge influx of new talent.

It's all a matter of taste, but that joke seems more organically fulfilling than the one about the soldiers, but I suppose it's hard to resist the temptation of a good line.

Jimmy Carr has apologised if anybody was offended, and insisted he has nothing against British soldiers who have suffered horrendous injuries in the line of duty. But that's the thing, isn't it? Nobody -- literally nobody -- honestly believed that he did. They knew he was simply telling a joke.

It was tasteless, but it wasn't nasty. Or at least no more nasty than any other jokes he tells, because there is definitely a coldness at the heart of his act. As he himself acknowledged last week, that's the sort of comedy he does. He's not the best standup in the world, but he's definitely one of the most fearless. If you come away from a Jimmy Carr gag without being offended at least half-a-dozen times, then you haven't really been listening. In that respect, this latest row was a controversy waiting to happen.

For his fans, that's the joy of it. Some people are simply never going to understand the appeal of those morally transgressive "my God, did he really say that?" moments, but they should just stay away from comedy because they're ruining it for the rest of us who find that aspect of joke-telling profoundly liberating. Not to be too pompous, it's using humour as a weapon to fight the meaninglessness and absurdity and contingency and darkness of life itself.

But again, everybody knows this by now. The media has raked over the dirt repeatedly in the last 12 months or so. Comedy has been dissected and dissed, defended and derided, until there's nothing left to say. The debate is officially in stalemate.

What is more interesting at this stage is why public discourse is being increasingly dominated by these single-issue fanatics.

Jimmy Carr has told jokes about child abuse, murder, natural disaster, cancer (he's even done jokes about his own mother, who died horribly of pancreatic cancer). Where was the outrage from the retired generals and politicians then? They didn't object to Jimmy Carr at those times -- because those jokes didn't touch on that area of life which affected them directly. Only when their own special patch of humanity came into the comedian's sights did they suddenly decide "hang on, this man is very offensive and insensitive, I must get on the phone at once to the Daily Mail".

Why this is seen as an admirable concern for other people's wounded feelings rather than a display of utter self-absorption is one of life's great mysteries. If you only ever protest when something which you hold dear is attacked, whilst not giving a monkey's when other people's experiences are held up to ridicule, that doesn't make you a compassionate and caring human being, it makes you a self-pitying solipsist. Which, come to think of it, probably explains the appeal of the new Twitterocracy which is taking over the media, with endless mini-protests being drummed up across cyberspace against whatever nonsense happens to have caught the imagination of the disciples of the Church of Sacred Outrage.

These single-issue fanatics are boring, that's the worst of it. It's like being trapped in a lift with people who only care about the North or immigration or the environment or reproductive ethics. They're fiercely passionate about one thing, but mentally dead to every other manifestation of the richness of humanity.

Whatever happened to the notion of the rounded individual? The same thing has happened in academic circles. Specialisation and intellectual protectionism have made disciplines contract around trainspotterish experts who know an awful lot about a small number of things, and have come to the bizarre conclusion that this makes them voices to whom it is therefore more interesting to listen.

Er . . . do you want to take a vote on that, people?

Pedantry is never an attractive trait, but it's becoming ubiquitous in public debate -- and the protesters who swamp the switchboards after some comic makes fun of something they hold dear are the ultimate nitpickers.

Writing off a performer's entire work because you object to one joke is as ridiculous as refusing to read a particular poet because he committed a grammatical error in one line of a sonnet. It doesn't mean you care more than everybody else. It simply means you can't see the wood because you've fixated on one tree.

- Eilis O'Hanlon

Sunday Independent