But the answer isn’t that everybody gets to have power, but that everybody gets to feel the degree to which power is a fantasy. Because in comedy you can only get away with it by virtue of the fact that everybody thinks you’re ‘only joking’. Pretty much all the positions I’ve encountered on the subject seem to me to have a great deal of validity. In my public events for the book, I’ve been talking quite a bit about envy because I consider it to be the feeling that is hardest to admit, hardest to share – it’s the most scandalous and the most morally disapproved of. What I’m really interested in is the way in which all feelings split us – and how we cope with that, what we do with that.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.DB: Feelings are contagious – you can be a winner in a society, and still be caught up in envious feelings. And for me also it’s about the shared nature of feelings – they’re not private, and they shouldn’t be bound up with an ideology of privacy and property.

DB: That’s very interesting… The notion that satire has somehow become the only plausible way of getting your news. Some of our correspondents have described this as ‘feeling European’ – because the dominant backgrounds are Ashkenazi. There was this sudden mass-hysteria, or outpouring, a kind of emotional release that was then oddly matched by the Queen and the stiff upper lip.

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Baum herself has tackled the subject before, in a different medium; together with her husband, Josh Appignanesi, she is the co-creator of two films, The New Man and Husband, documentary (mockumentary? For better or worse, for richer for poorer, till death us do part – we’ve always done it and we’re still doing it. If somebody tells you a joke well and fresh, and you get a laugh out of it, that’s a real relief – and it’s a strengthening moment, as well. I read Tribes (2010) by Nina Raine, and I thought that’s exactly the kind of thing you describe – the Jewish family as an iconic description that you also have in your book. Particularly when it becomes tyrannical, when you really can’t afford not to be witty – then we know something must be up, right?It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. I think it implies that people feel there’s a danger in humourlessness, which shows just how much savagery there can be in humour. This is not so much a cop-out as a recognition of the fact that marriage, for all its legal and social connotations, remains the ultimate subjective experience. Because you feel out of control, and dispossessed, and you don’t know what you’re about to do, what you’re about to say.