Howard Jacobson: Russell Brand winked at me once. And when he winks at you, you stay winked

Let's get a few things straight. The Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross affair is not a storm in a tea cup. It is the tea cup – the ultimate trivial expression of an utterly trivialised medium.

Never mind the public's outrage; in matters of radio and television the public has lost all right to outrage. You cannot vote The Paul O'Grady Show the Most Popular Entertainment Programme, EastEnders the Most Popular Serial Drama, and Ant and Dec the Most Popular Entertainment Presenter and then expect your judgement to carry weight.

Related articles

• Brand target of bitterness at BBC
• Deborah Orr: Can we agree on this: you don't discuss other people's sex lives
• Search the news archive for more stories

So invariably misplaced is the moral indignation of the public that we have a duty to be offensive. "You don't like it? Tough. Your estimation is of no value. You lack discernment. You lack discretion. You even lack morality." So I would be on the side of Brand and Ross if I possibly could. Good for you, boys. Go forth in God's name and cause displeasure.

What else, when all is said and done, is comedy for? A comedian is meant to be a lord of mayhem and misrule. He is a tornado blowing through the smug commonplaces of our society, and nothing should look the same after he has done his worst. That, anyway, is the theory. But for it to be true in practice the comedy must be harsh and invigorating. And there's the problem in the instance of Brand's and Ross's hectoring of the family Sachs. It was neither funny nor purposeful. It lacked wit and invention. It challenged nothing. Unless the childish prank of knocking on a person's door and running off can be called funny, or ringing up a Mr Smellie from the phone book and saying "Hello, are you Smellie?" can be said to serve a purpose. It did, of course. It made us laugh when we were 12. And Ross and Brand certainly amused themselves.

Though here's something else that needs to be got straight: they might have chosen to be joined in puerility on this occasion, but they are not otherwise a pair. Russell Brand is a comedian, Jonathan Ross is not. Russell Brand is unusually gifted, Ross is not. Affable enough, and merry rather than amusing, Ross has made a little go a long way. Brand has made a lot go almost nowhere.

If Jonathan Ross were to go off air it is hard to say what we would lose. The chance to see someone delighted with his own substanceless success, hobnobbing it with people who feel identically about theirs? I think we could get by without that. Indeed we might be pleased to see it go the way of city banking which, for airy nothingness in an age of unmerited indulgence, it resembles.

Russell Brand, though, is a different kettle of fish. He has it in him to be that outlaw trickster figure all societies know they must tolerate at their margins. Repellent and yet fascinating, saying the unsayable, and doing the undoable as well, a shape-changer, snake-hipped and sexually omnivorous, a challenge to our fixed categories of decency and gender.

He winked at me once, from a couple of tables away, at a South Bank Show awards ceremony. You see, I remember the occasion. When Russell Brand winks at you, you stay winked. He opens up his face and invites you in to it. Everything is preposterous, the wink implies, but you should try it. It's entirely possible he was winking at a person behind me. No matter. I confess my susceptibility. I willingly registered the lewd comedy of its invitation.

He should, of course, have been a rocker like Mike Jagger, who also changed his shape at will and traded on our fascination for ambiguity. Tricksters and Kokopellis are usually pictured playing instruments. Music releases us from reason. And we know how to license mayhem in a musician. As it is, there seems nowhere for Russell Brand to go. He doesn't belong on radio or television which are both subject to the whims of a public that is simultaneously pious and gross.

I fear for him. Self-destruction is built into the role and he could easily go the way of such other misfitting comic offenders as Michael Barrymore, or be left marooned in nowhere land like Peter Cook. Which again is what we, in our incorrigible sanctimoniousness, secretly want to see happen.

A grandiose accolade, the above, I concede, given the miserably ill-judged episode which today brings Russell Brand to our notice. But that's the waste I am referring to. Broadcasting is no place for those gifted with destructive energy. Radio and television are milk and water media, mediocre, fame driven, obsessed with their own listening and viewing figures, and culturally unprincipled. Decency is not the issue.

Some newspapers have been wondering how a devout Catholic such as Mark Thompson could preside over the cesspit which is the BBC. Easily, is the answer, a) because the BBC is a pit of egalitarian trash, not filth, and b) because religion does not make a man cultured. Culture, culture is the problem, not morality.

As far as moral odiousness goes, the Ross and Brand jape registered on the graph all right, but it was hardly a peak. Comedy belongs to art, not morals, and succeeds or fails by the same standards we apply to painting or to literature. The reason no one at the BBC picked it up and asked the pair to think again is that there is no one there willing to make, or capable of making, the necessary aesthetic judgement. The BBC kicked out aesthetic judgement when it kicked out elitism.

Besides which, or as a concomitant of which, the institution is in thrall to comedians. Jokiness drowns the airwaves. On all channels cooks become comedians or comedians cooks, comedians comment on the news, comedians take you on journeys to places they know nothing about – the assumption being that we must at all times be entertained, that knowledge is the enemy of entertainment, and that we will therefore take pleasure only in the company of jokesters as ignorant as ourselves.

Even those who announce programmes must now have facetious voices. Mark Thompson no doubt means by this to be cutting edge and to woo the young, though when everything is edge there is nothing left to cut, and I have yet to see evidence that everybody under 30 speaks like Tom Baker.

As for people being sacked, we should sack none for the wrong reasons, and all for the right. It would be nice to think that lowest common denominator broadcasting has shot its bolt. But it's not more men of God we need, it's more men of taste.

More from Howard Jacobson