"And now for something completely different ..."

Squirrel and I recently purchased the complete Fawlty Towers collection on DVD. There are, naturally, extras to watch and they include an entertaining interview with John Cleese.
At one point in the interview, Cleese mentioned the taboo subjects they tackled in Fawlty Towers, which gives him cause to ruminate on the subject of political correctness:

[T]he P.C. lobby—the politically correct lobby—is something I don't understand. A lot of what I see on television now, both here (Britain) and in America, seems to me much riskier than we would have gotten away with, even in the Python days. And then at the same time, you hear about these politically correct movements which I think are by and large run and staffed largely by obsessions.
There's a good idea at the back of political correctness, but it gets taken ad absurdum, and I think that the danger is this: If you're in a group of people, and you find that one person is particularly touchy, they have difficulty controlling their emotions—greater difficulty than the other people in the group—then you can't have so much fun about them, because they're touchy and they're likely to explode. So when they're around, you're not as relaxed. You're not as spontaneous, you can't be more real; you have to kind of be more formal.
If you find that society is being run by the touchiest members, then, in a sense, that's a bit sick. Because you're trying to take as the general standard, the standard of the people who have the greatest problem controlling their emotions in that area.

Coming from an avowed liberal such as John Cleese, this is an incredibly truthful observation.