Walliams, Wokeness and the Wartime Wobble: Can’t a Man Just Flop an Arm Without Ending His Career?

From Tommy Cooper to TikTok Outrage: Britain Forgets Its Own Punchline

It starts, as all great British scandals do, with a still image and an inability to zoom out. There he is—David Walliams—stood in what looks suspiciously like a hotel lobby with his arm extended in that unfortunate angle: the sort that makes tabloid editors gasp, and people who still own ceramic bulldogs with Union Jacks on their backs nod gravely. “A Nazi salute!” the cry goes up. “He must be cancelled!” Never mind context. Never mind whether it was part of a joke, or mid-way through an impersonation of Basil Fawlty, or possibly just reaching for the last Percy Pig at M&S.

Cancel culture, of course, now moves faster than a cheetah with a grievance. We don’t bother with tribunals or nuance—just an online guillotine operated by people who believe the phrase “due process” refers to getting a refund from Deliveroo. And yet here we are, sharpening the pitchforks for David Walliams, while canonising the memory of Tommy Cooper—a man who, let’s not forget, spent much of his early life dressed as a fez-wearing military officer, barking like a constipated colonel, and marching with all the ironic flair of a drunk attempting ballet.

So let us ask, without fear of being ejected from polite society or the BBC Green Room: Is the Walliams Salute really worth the national cardiac arrest?

The Ghost of Satire Past: When Comedy Was Still Allowed to Be Ugly

Once upon a time, British comedy was an unapologetic cocktail of surrealism, slapstick, and the type of racial insensitivity that would now require six PR firms and an apology tour. Monty Python did goose-steps. John Cleese—still allowed out in daylight—did entire routines mocking Germans with the subtlety of a brick through a bratwurst stand. And Tommy Cooper? He didn’t just allude to the army—he embodied it, in all its chest-puffing idiocy, with a constant undertone that the British officer class was about as clever as a roast potato in a monocle.

And yet nobody thought Tommy Cooper was trying to restart the Reich. No one screamed for his removal from TV schedules or demanded he be exhumed and made to answer for war crimes. Because, crucially, everyone knew he was taking the mickey.

Fast forward to 2025 and suddenly Walliams, a man so publicly neutered by his stint on “Britain’s Got Talent” that he makes Graham Norton look like Rasputin, is now being painted as a far-right figure because his arm once got confused in a selfie.

The Arm Heard Round the Internet: What Did He Mean By It?

That’s the great modern inquisition, isn’t it? Not what someone did, but what they secretly meant. “What was he trying to say?” comes the cry from professional offence archaeologists, armed with screenshots and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. “Was this a coded message to fascist sleeper cells watching ITV3?”

It’s the same logic that gets applied to everything now: if you accidentally wave at someone the wrong way, you’re a colonialist. If you do a dodgy accent, you’re contributing to generational trauma. If you wear sandals and socks, you’re possibly invading Poland.

But satire—especially the British kind—has always relied on discomfort. It pokes, it prods, it exaggerates. It mocks the powerful by impersonating them, by taking their absurdities and parading them around like pantomime villains. The Nazi salute, used in a satirical context, is often not glorification, but derision. Mel Brooks did it. Chaplin did it. The very best of British theatre once made Hitler a figure of fun, to strip him of menace. We knew how to laugh the tyrants away. Now, we’d cancel the clown for wearing the wrong moustache.

Cancel Culture vs Common Sense: A War Britain’s Losing Faster Than It Did the Eurovision

The Walliams witch-hunt is just the latest skirmish in our culture’s war on common sense. It’s the same impulse that sees classic sitcoms slapped with warning labels and PG ratings on Carry On films because Sid James once said something that wouldn’t pass through a 2025 HR department without detonating.

Tommy Cooper, bless him, would not survive ten minutes on Twitter. He’d be hounded for making fun of military incompetence, accused of ableism for pretending to be crap at magic, and probably interrogated about cultural appropriation every time he put on the fez. But he was loved because people understood the joke. They recognised absurdity. They didn’t spend their evenings trawling through archive footage hoping to be offended.

Walliams is no Tommy Cooper, of course. He’s slicker, smugger, and slightly more prone to turning up at PR events like a sentient aftershave bottle. But if we're going to start axing careers every time a comedian strikes an awkward pose, then we may as well bulldoze the entire British comedy canon and start again with a spreadsheet and a safe space.

Final Thought: Laugh Now, Before They Ban That Too

The greatest irony here is that in the name of protecting sensibilities, we’ve created a culture where nobody’s safe—including those trying to mock the very things we all agree are ridiculous. The far-right don’t fear cancellation; they thrive on it. Every time we mistake satire for sedition, we hand them a gift-wrapped narrative of victimhood.

So before we exile Walliams to the Siberian gulag of cancelled entertainers—currently housing Chris Tarrant, three ex-Top Gear presenters, and anyone who made a joke about the French—let’s ask ourselves: do we want a culture that laughs with us or one that simply monitors us?

Because if we’re going to crucify every comedian who imitates a villain, don’t be surprised when the only ones left telling jokes are the actual villains. And they’re rarely funny.

Except, possibly, Tommy Cooper.
Just like that.