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What's the matter with the Mail – lost your sense of humour? Who are you to tell us what should or shouldn't make us laugh? If you don't find a programme funny, why not just switch channels?
When this paper chose to highlight the gross cruelty and obscenity of much of the material on Channel 4's Big Fat Quiz of 2012, we knew we were laying ourselves open to such jibes from Twittering critics.
But we make no apology for voicing concerns shared by an overwhelming but seldom-heard majority, dismayed by the way boundaries of taste and decency are being pushed ever further back in the name of mainstream 'comedy'.
The Big Fat Quiz of 2012 was far from unusual among programmes billed as 'light entertainment', in the way it revelled in smut and cruel humiliation
Indeed, a New Year seems an appropriate time to take stock of what is deemed acceptable in popular culture – and ask what effects a constant diet of filth, misogyny and casual contempt for the vulnerable may have on impressionable young minds.
For although it was an extreme example, the Big Fat Quiz of 2012 was far from unusual among programmes billed as 'light entertainment', in the way it revelled in smut and cruel humiliation.
Indeed, a familiar few millionaire comics do the rounds of each other's shows, vying with fellow members of their clique to make the most disgusting comments they think they can get away with.
Strikingly, Channel 4's quiz was pre-recorded – so editors and executives had the chance to cut offensive material.
Yet, incredibly, they thought it acceptable to air drunken attempts to humiliate a range of public figures, from the Queen and Prince Philip to Usain Bolt, with puerile filth of the most extreme and degrading kind.
At one point, James Corden picked on the middle-aged Susan Boyle, whose mental frailty is as well known as her glorious voice, leering the obscenity: 'Subo loves it in the a***.'
How can the programme's producers have seen nothing wrong with an affront that would have got Corden arrested if he'd said anything similar to a vulnerable stranger in the street?
Forget that most of this 'humour' brutally degrades women and coarsens society.
More disturbing still is that a generation is growing up with the same moral blindness that sees nothing wrong with cruel and witless obscenity.
This paper firmly believes that today's young Britons are as fundamentally good-hearted as any before them.
But what does it say about them when they lionise the likes of Jonathan Ross, who encourages them to think it funny to speculate lasciviously on air about the taste of a racehorse's semen?
After all, Ross (who still doesn't understand why the nation was sickened by his on-air goading of Andrew Sachs over fellow comic Russell Brand's boasts of having slept with the actor's granddaughter) was until recently the country's highest paid public employee.
It cannot, surely, be fanciful to draw a connection between the explicit four-letter outbursts of such TV role models and the epidemic of vile, coarse 'sexting' in our schools, with all the misery and humiliation associated with it.
Indeed, if the message is that women are 'dogs', old people are contemptible, foul language is hilarious – and sex merely a dirty joke – the Mail is quite happy to be accused of being reactionary when it wonders how many more of society's broader problems are exacerbated by such creeps as Ross.
Is it asking too much that 2013 will be the year TV and radio bosses begin to realise how such so-called comedy is corroding society?
Or will we be silenced once again by the wheedling taunt of playground bullies through the ages, after they've smeared their victims with excreta: 'What's the matter? Can't you take a joke?'
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