Jerry Seinfeld is this week’s guest star of It Was Better in the Old Days

About a month ago the commentariat was in a brief tizzy about a Daily Telegraph article from the comically named Sophia Money-Coutts headlined “Gen Z are an employer’s nightmare – my twenties put them to shame”. You know the sort of thing. The author had heard “from her peers” that Zoomers “don’t want to work long days and know that their employers can’t make them”.

Can you imagine such a thing? You can. Humans over a certain age – barely past childhood in many cases – have been whinging about the imagined collapse of society since we were worshipping turnips. “The wheel? Don’t talk to me about the wheel,” Ug the Odoriferous may have said. “In my day we could drag a sabre-toothed tiger for a whole day on just one flagon of warmed mud. Now they’re swanning around in their fancy ‘carts’. Is that the word?”

You get a bit of this with complaints about students protesting their university’s relationship to Israel. You get a lot of it about the supposed decline in popular music. Too many rock bores care too much about the number of collaborators listed as songwriters on Beyoncé albums. (Tell it to the ghosts of Elvis and Frank Sinatra.) This week’s episode of It Was Better in the Old Days – the 15,675th by my count – comes from Jerry Seinfeld.

He began with a relatively gentle evisceration of the contemporary movie business. “Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives,” he said, not crazily. Then he got stuck into comedy. Subscribers to Woke Watch will have known what to expect. “It used to be that you would go home at the end of the day ... People would go, ‘Oh, Cheers is on. Mash is on,” he said to the imagined sounds of friendly lawnmowers and suburban bluebirds. “‘Oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on.’ Where is it? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people.”

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Sure, there is a gang of new puritans – the “sex scenes are unnecessary” gang – bent on stripping the unease and discomfort from popular culture. The evidence suggests, however, that they are not getting their way

It seems unkind to point out how flimsy the central thesis is. As noted in this column just a few weeks ago, Seinfeld recently appeared in the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. And one can scarcely imagine a less “PC” series than Larry David’s satirical self-evisceration. More than a few commentators pointed to the indestructible South Park and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Rob McElhenney of that last show responded to Seinfeld’s suggestion that he wouldn’t now be allowed to broadcast the episode of his own eponymous series in which Kramer made rickshaw drivers of homeless people with a reference to Always Sunny’s robust treatment of the crack addict Rickety Cricket.

And what is with Seinfeld’s nostalgic examples, anyway? What in Mary Tyler Moore or Mash would fall foul of the PC Gestapo? Maybe some of Archie Bunker’s racially charged language in All in the Family would cause offence (though he was much more restrained than Alf Garnett, his inspiration on the BBC series Till Death Do Us Part). True, despite hangers-on like the harmless Abbott Elementary, the traditional situation comedy no longer holds a grip as it once did. Nor does the old-school cop show with self-contained episodes. Tastes change. Little of that is to do with the Woke Stasi.

To be fair to Seinfeld, he did acknowledge that stand-ups “have the freedom to do it because no one else gets the blame if it doesn’t go down well”. One can hardly ignore the Netflix specials in which the likes of Jimmy Carr, Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle smugly disobey all maxims nailed to the virtual cathedral door by whomever Seinfeld sees as the “extreme left’s” Martin Luther. Sure, there is a gang of new puritans – the “sex scenes are unnecessary” gang – bent on stripping the unease and discomfort from popular culture. The evidence suggests, however, that they are not getting their way.

Everything changes. Everything remains the same. None of the people mentioned above can be unaware that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations also felt the world was going to hell in Mick Jagger’s handbasket (or Little Richard’s or Clara Bow’s or Oscar Wilde’s). The mystery is how every successive cohort believes that they, and they alone, have finally perfected a culture that will crush the one that succeeds it. Sure, The Beatles and the Sex Pistols and hip hop all remained at the heart of discourse. But this time it’s different. This time the music is Auto-Tuned garbage, the comedy is PC dross and the (checks notes) TikToks are brain-eating viruses. This time it’s going to vanish in a whiff and we’ll all go back to watching Leonard Cohen in a field.