"How do they make chickens into turkeys?"

Though some of its jokes mocking Christian beliefs were so near the knuckle (and maybe even beyond the knuckle) that had they, say, been about Islam then Miss Philomena Cunk might very well be in hiding tonight with police protection and only Salman Rushdie for company, Cunk on Christmas (written by Charlie Brooker & Co.) contained a lot of funny jokes. Such as:

• Not all religious songs are quite so religious. In the 1970s groups like Slade reinvented the carol, appearing on our TV screens showcasing a new form of singing called 'shouting'. This music was loud, probably to keep Jimmy Savile away.
• It's hard to imagine now but when Christmas first began Christ wasn't even in it, just as Danny Dyer hasn't always been in 'Eastenders', even though he feels like part of the furniture - especially when he's trying to act.
• The pagans worshipped nature, just like Chris Packham, and their calendar revolved around two big annual events, also like Chris Packham.
• Just when our ancestors were getting well into Christmas indulgence history shat out someone who was allergic to Christmas fun: Oliver Cromwell, king of the puritans. Cromwell was a member of parliament who wouldn't wear smart clothed and never smiled - a bit like Jeremy Corbyn. And just like Corbyn he wanted to change the country but instead of sitting down on a train he got off his arse and did something about it, by starting a civil war.
• Santa has a list of good and bad children. The good children will get lots of presents. And so it turns out will be bad children. In fact, the only ones who won't get very much are the poor children. That's because Santa judges a child's goodness based largely on parental income. 
• Thanks to all this food-based indulgence scientists now believe that 80% of all burps occur at Christmas, threatening to put a whole in the Osman Layer at precisely the moment the sky is full of vulnerable reindeer.
• Perhaps the most reassuring Christmas programme is 'Eastenders', which for years has provided an important public service by depicting worse families having an even shitter time than yours.
• Today the true meaning of Christmas is a mystery wrapped up in sherry and Monopoly and monkey nuts. But at least at this time of togetherness and warmth we can all agree what the true spirit of Christmas is: Baileys. 

Wet wipe

Heavy sarcasm can be a debilitating affliction. The heavy sneer throws into question the meaning of what is being said. It turns a mundane observation on its head and makes the benign sound sinister. Someone once did a sketch where they forgot how to switch sarcasm off; they could never ever say anything nice. 

‘Yeah right’ means ‘No, not at all.’ We know that. Psychology Today says ‘sarcasm is actually hostility disguised as humor.’ With Charlie Brooker it’s undisguised hostility attempting to be humour. Sometimes it is funny and sometimes it ain’t . The puns were funny. 

When he started on the topic of Charlie Hebdo and ‘Je Suis Charlie’, it was hard to tell whether he intended it as sarcasm, humour, neither or both. It was a segue, nay, an hords d’oeuvre before the main course. 

I found the main course reheated, overdone and unfunny. I won’t be leaving a tip.  Fox News and The Daily Mail are the wrong ingredients for originality. Too stale and pretty tasteless. Targeting them is not funny any more, even if it once was, which I doubt. 

As ‘fuck’ was to Billy Connolly, Fox News is to BBC comedy; worn-out and not fit for purpose. No longer reliable for a laugh. It looks like Charlie Brooker’s role as the BBC’s enfant terrible is in the past. Now he’s in danger of trailing behind Marcus Brigstocke. 

There was one very funny part of the Fox news affair, which was the expression on the face of the host, Judge Jeanine Pirro. Her cross-eyed astonishment was lol, but Brooker seemed to miss it.

“Some commentators weren’t just concerned with Islamic terrorism but wanted to condemn the whole of Islam claiming that the "Islamification of Europe” had gone too far” sarked Brooker, putting “Islamification of Europe” in vocal inverted commas as if he thought that was even more laughable a concept than commentators being concerned with Islamic terrorism.

“It’s time we drew a veil over that then removed the veil and banned it” sarked Brooker, taking a dig at the French and anyone else who had ever contemplated banning the veil. 

“Birmingham is a no-go city” and “The Muslim Police” mocked Charlie. Let’s have a laugh at “the idiot-American-man-who-knew-no better,” continued Charlie, even though pressure had long ago forced ‘said idiot’ to make a very public, shamefaced, over the top climb down, which gave Charlie Brooker and all the other comedians who've done this topic to death an excuse for acting as though such allegations are so far-fetched and stupid that ridiculing them would pass for humorous entertainment. 

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I like a bit of scathing anti-orthodoxy satire as much as the next man, so it was perplexing to feel nothing but dissatisfaction after seeing Charlie Brooker whose ‘acerbic’ take on TV and stuff should have made his weekly-wipe programme a joy. 

Charlie, me old friend me old beauty, are you sure you’re cocking your snook in the right direction? Or rather why cock your considerable snook at the right, when, if you’re as smart as we know you are, the orthodoxy you should be attacking is the left, the orthodoxy that really does prevail in your world. 

By all means expose trivial low-hanging filmmakers’ deceptions, like those obviously pretend ‘spontaneous first-time meetings and greetings’ and ‘where on earth are the cameras?’ not to mention steaming microwaved tampons, but please don’t segue into another of those pro-immigration propagandas dressed up as an audacious piece of anti-orthodox Charlie Brooker insight.

Your scathing voice-over narration during assorted clips of impoverished Romanians and Bulgarians dragging comedy sacks around and riding along in rickety horse-drawn carts implied that airing such film equals deliberate manipulation by the media in a concerted conspiracy to falsify reality and scaremonger us all into a cowering mass of gibbering feartypantses, afraid of  imaginary bogeymen.   

However, there’s one problem.  It’s your reality that is false.   The falsifying is all yours. All your lampooning of alleged TV-engendered scaremongering was aimed at ridiculing those of us who are worried about yet more destabilising immigration. What you should be ridiculing is the massive drive by the authoritarian status quo, i.e. the lefty media, which is deliberately designed to manipulate us; to assure us that immigration is a good thing, and furthermore, to 'expose' anyone who disagrees as a racist bigot!

Charlie, you might think you’re using your acerbic brain to mock authority. But you aint. In this case, you ARE authority. You’re mocking me and I don’t think it’s big or clever. 

The problem is that with your conspiratorial relationship with the camera (and therefore with the audience) people will want to be on your side - who would want to be mocked - and that is where all the perplexing comes from. We want you to like 'us' and mock 'others'; not the other way round, please.

I won’t go into the issue of Doug Stanhope. His charmless mockery is what it says on the tin. Charmless and mockery. I won’t go into your clumsy unamusing backing acts either. Your programme needs pruning.

Apart from that, it’s all good.