FUNNY THINGS, cartoons. Or should be. It is their reason for being. Or should be.

Once upon a time, they were my reason for being, because they were the reason for being of the magazine I edited. Between 1977 and 1987, Punch published 50,000 cartoons, whose selection was down to me; for the way it works with cartoons is that for every one chosen, a score or more will have been submitted. The artists, scattered glumly in lonely attics across the queendom, send in batches of pencilled roughs, never knowing which are funny and which are not, because that is not the cartoonist’s job. His job is to wait to hear which, if any, the editor has selected, and then draw the finished gag, so that the ragged children tugging at his inky smock can eat that day. It is the democracy of Nero’s thumb.

I never permitted issues of taste, propriety or sensitivity to interfere. If a cartoon about disability or Auschwitz, Calvary or impotence, cancer or Hiroshima, made me laugh, I bought it. The famous appeared on the pages in forms and activities which, if described in words, would have kept their lawyers in Ferraris. Sure, there were complaints: how could every one of a million readers accede meekly to my arrogance? But I learnt a bit about the British from their letters.

In 1977 Punch ran a cartoon for the Silver Jubilee: among the throng lining the Mall stands a blind man. His dog is sitting on his shoulders. I had a lot of complaints about that, all from the offended sighted; and one letter from St Dunstan’s asking to buy the original. In a D-Day commemorative issue, a cartoon showed two men dwarfed by a 100ft-high concrete cake, above a caption in which one man says: “It’s a monument to the Unknown Member of the Catering Corps.” A fair few readers wrote in to tell me just how many brave cooks had died operating Normandy field kitchens, but ask me in which British Legion hall the original is hanging now. When, in 1983, Michael Foot finally chucked in the Labour leadership sponge, we ran a cover showing him stumbling from an Antarctic tent, his mouth releasing a frozen balloon: “I am just going outside, and may be some time.” Mailbags buckled our joists, because Scott’s last expedition is a hair-trigger to the national weep, but it was Sir Peter Scott who hung the artwork in his snug.

I always found the altruistic outrage as cheering as the egoistic support: it was as reassuring to find our readers sensitive to the possibility of causing hurt as it was to learn that the unhurt relished the inclusiveness the joke suggested. Quirky objections, mind, were the best: when we ran a cartoon of an SS Gruppenführer contemplating a shop window displaying rows of little black discs below a banner reading “Zeiss sun monocles, 50% off!”, I was tickled by the complaint from one of our major advertisers that that was then and this is now, and anyway, they had only been carrying out orders. They did not, however, withdraw their advertising. They could take a joke, in Jena. I could mention the war.

Because they had found it funny. And yes, I’m coming to it, you knew I would: for me, the crux, if that isn’t too inappropriate a word, of the current crisis is that the cartoons of the Prophet were so ill-conceived, so ill-drawn and so unfunny. That, we have seen, has been the curious thrust of the complaints, not from understandably outraged Muslims, but from those who have sought to slag off the Danish cartoonists and editors responsible. I say curious, because the begged question cries out to be unbegged: suppose they had been funny? Not to us infidels, we don’t matter, but to Muslims. I hardly dare ask — not because I fear the tap on the door and the scimitar to the throat, only because I recognise my own ignorance on the issue — whether, notwithstanding the sacrilege of any representation of Muhammad, there could conceivably be circumstances under which a gag about him was so terrific that even the devout couldn’t supress a grin.

It is something I don’t know, and need to. I would like to believe that taking belief seriously gives believers the strength to take it comically. Or, at least, that one day it will. And since you ask, that cartoon published yesterday in an Islamic paper and designed to outrage in revenge — it showed Hitler, in bed with Anne Frank, saying “This is one for the diary” — made me laugh.

Don’t write in, for God’s sake.