“Punch isn’t as funny as it used to be,” people used to remark to Malcolm Muggeridge, the editor of the famous, now forgotten, “humour” magazine. “It never was,” Muggeridge would reply. This appears to be the fate of humorous outlets everywhere. One always remember them from first contact — Python, Mad Magazine, Quadrant — as hilarious. As the jokes are internalised, their impact dies, and it looks as if the thing itself has gone off. Even though you know this, one can never quite believe that it is happening inside you, and not out in the world.

Nevertheless, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival isn’t as funny as it used to be, and that’s just a fact, I won’t brook any argument. What was once a multi-genre festival stretching to avant-garde theatre at one end, through comedy writing, to sketch and then stand-up, has become a monoculture of the last of these. Hundreds of people, well, standing up, to give their views of the world. A bare handful of sketch and movement acts among them. The cabaret festival is nabbing some of the best musical stuff. The monoculture breeds monotony. Every year it becomes a little worse this way. Every year it makes more money.

Still, a lot of performers are saying that the audiences are a little flat of response this year, and that may be one reason. There’s a lack of surprise. One used to go to the festival club, where half a dozen acts would do their shtick, not knowing what you’d get. You know now. Half a dozen people standing up, to give their view of the world. Ambrose Bierce once remarked that prayer was “a plea by someone self-confessed as unworthy for a suspension of the rules that apply to everyone else” (I’ve made it funnier). Stand-up has that quality: men and women unable to have real jobs, lives or relationships, telling you how the world works.

But what may really be flattening out the mood at the festival is the “acknowledgement of country”, which is played at the start of each show. This appears to be part of acknowledgement of country inflation. The ceremony started as something among the left, then to be observed where the settler state, or power, was also present: everything from uni conference openings to bridge blessings. It’s absolutely right to do so.

Increasingly it has begun to be used at the start of artistic events. That seems both an inflation of the process to a very large part of everyday life, and also a problem for artistic events themselves. The whole point of an event — from the cheesiest stand-up to The Ring Cycle — is that you enter a separate space, physically, psychologically, in being — one in which the mind and the self start to unmoor somewhat, float free of the real. That’s necessary to the suspension of disbelief but also to the freedom that makes laughter possible, or to believe that a German woman with a rib cage the size of a Volkswagen is a singing nymph.

The acknowledgement of country is something else entirely. It’s a call to moral reflection, a tightening of the mind’s control features, a commitment to the unfreedom of being moral. It reminds you exactly what reality you’re in: a settler society founded on genocide. That should be known, part of our history and universal understanding of the country. But does it have to be on our mind, when someone’s doing jokes about Tinder/smashed avocado/fidget spinners/toilet paper what’s that all about?

I’d suggest not, and I’d suggest that applies to art generally. Artists who don’t have a problem with this, aren’t thinking through what’s required for the art experience to happen. Especially the comic/humorous experience, which most people seem to want a lot of these days. The autonomy of art, popular art included, is necessary to the liberation of thought that made something like an acknowledgement of country possible. Art is where you think otherwise, not where a set of prescriptions, however worthy, are agreed to. If you’re wondering why your show is a little flat, that’s it. Fifteen seconds before you went on with a rubber chicken, people were given something else to think about.

Something for all artistic managements to think of. In the meantime, the comedy festival might want to extend more active support to their Indigenous performers, some of whom had a rough time, reportedly, and didn’t feel particularly welcome.