Little Britain is coming back. But was it ever really funny?

It would be ham-fisted to blame the creators of Little Britain, which is making a comeback after 12 years, for its stereotypes. There was Andy and Lou, the malingering, not-disabled disabled person with his carer; Emily and Florence, the ladies who do lady things; Daffyd, the only gay in the village; Vicky Pollard, the yeah-but-no-but teenager; Dudley and Ting Tong, the regular guy and his mail-order bride … Even the act of describing them, and trying to maintain neutral language around tropes dripping with contempt, I’m finding quite draining.

Nevertheless, these were all caricatures that pre-existed Little Britain, which is where the humour was located. Matt Lucas and David Walliams messed in the margins of cultural stories that were felt rather than told. Disability, homophobia, classism and prejudices of all sorts were all just scams perpetrated on muggins here, and the perps were getting away with murder.

It was deliberately opaque about who the joke was actually on. On the face of it, the laugh was always on muggins – the idiots who swallowed narratives of universal human dignity and equality, and allowed themselves to be used or bamboozled by them.

But the last laugh could have been on the opposite idiots, the ones who bought the benefit-cheat and general demonisation-of-the-other meta-narrative. Or maybe it was on all of us, the viewers, the non-viewers, everybody except Lucas and Walliams themselves. That, come to think of it, would have been quite funny, in a comedic antihero sort of way.

Now it threatens a return, it would be remiss not to point out what has happened in the intervening decade. Those fictional chancers have been reverse-engineered back into the unfunny bogeymen of popular culture: the benefits cheat, the innately dishonest working-class youth, the nefarious passport-seeking foreigner, the men who dress up as women because they’re just trying to annoy you.

First (2008-2010) these myth creatures were rehearsed into existence, then (2010) the government started to make policy on the back of their demonisation (most visibly in the case of disabled people), then (2012 to present) it would not be excessive to say people started to die of those policies. So I just have a question mark as to how funny it all was.