I’m sorry, it was only a joke...

As I sat on the conference platform, a single thought was going through my mind: there are 150 people here with smartphones just waiting to tweet any foolish utterance.

Naturally I tried to frustrate them by speaking in sentences of more than 140 characters — but have you any idea how hard it is to count characters and say something sensible at the same time? If I was that good at counting, I’d be in Vegas. In the end it was simpler to play it straight and steer clear of any attempt to be amusing.

It is tough. The temptation, especially for a natural show-off, to say something funny or offer up some jokey indiscretion is extremely powerful. And that is how it happens. One minute you are basking in the attention of that part of the audience not staring at its phone, the next you’ve cracked what you thought was a joke and suddenly no one is looking at their phones.

Then they are tapping furiously at them and you are left waiting to see what category of social media storm is about to hit you. Is it a category two — a bit of rain damage and a possible injury if you step outside during the period of maximum Twitter outrage? Or a full-blown category five, where you are left standing in the rubble of your life as the world’s disaster charities fail to launch appeals on your behalf?

I have some advantages in negotiating the elements. I do not, for example, consider women to be a lesser species, which helps. But it is the faults you do not realise you possess that trip you up. So, as what seems like the perfect witticism comes into your mind, you start running through a rapid mental safety check. Hyperbole, bad taste, inappropriate comparisons or just a stray adjective — any of these can do for you. And it is no use carping afterwards that it was “only a joke”, because those you offended do not wish to “lighten up” about the insult.

One day a sociologist will chart the death of humour in western society — the moment when it simply became too great a risk to try to crack a joke in public. It will not be because we stopped enjoying a laugh but because careers — and even lives — are being destroyed by off-hand remarks.

This is not to say that those remarks do not sometimes deserve censure, merely that the price of stepping over the line has, for the most part, become too high. To take the case of the moment: Professor Sir Tim Hunt’s foolish joke about women scientists was rightly criticised.

As someone who was not the butt of his joke, I need to be careful about underplaying the hurt but my instinct is that a public mauling and an enforced apology were sufficient punishment. Instead, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist has seen his career obliterated because, in trying to lighten the tone at a conference, he made a stupid, sexist joke.

I bet they will be rolling in the aisles at the next event. Heard the one about the scientist playing golf? I don’t expect you will now.

Let us take another example. In 2010, Liam Byrne, former Labour Treasury Minister, left a message for his successor noting, “I’m afraid there is no money.” Again, it was crass but it was also the kind of gallows humour that exists even between political opponents. The Conservatives knew this, yet hammered Byrne relentlessly. Perhaps he deserved it; he probably would have done the same to them. But I suspect the next handover will be played straight.

Barely a week passes without social media demands for someone to be sacked for a joke or comment that more properly required a stiff talking to. So great is the speed with which outrage can be stirred up that organisations feel the need to act decisively to get ahead of a storm that will usually pass if they hold their nerve.

So now, as we sit on stage or hover over our Twitter feed, we will increasingly have one image in our heads — our corporate communications chief typing up the press statement explaining that our views did not represent company policy. In fact, we were never even members of staff but merely interns who had remained 15 years beyond our end date. You have to laugh ... don’t you?

–Financial Times