Shortly after I was appointed minister for justice, myself and a bunch of people from the office went to see Dermot Morgan’s one-man show in Dublin. We filled a row. As was inevitable, Morgan started to do his P. Flynn impersonation, striding around the theatre and through the crowd like a teacher firing comments in a thicker-than-lead Mayo accent.

One of our number had spent the previous few years working closely with Flynn while he was minister for justice. While the rest of us found it funny, she was borderline hysterical. She was laughing so hard she was genuinely having difficulty staying in her seat. As he strolled round demonstrating some of P’s grand gestures, he noticed this young woman.

“I think we might have someone who knows the man here,” he observed to the rest of the crowd.

At that the entire row of us broke up. He took a close look at us.

“In fact, I think we have a gang of Justice types here.”

With that he headed back to the stage and did a stream-of-consciousness routine built around the word “justice”. Off the cuff. Unscripted. Cutting, clever and observant. Through the laughter, we all marvelled at the way he took the ball on the hop and incorporated our presence into his performance.

To make people laugh for a living sounds like an ideal job until you consider exactly what it entails, standing up in front of a crowd which has paid you to make it laugh; having to be as funny each time no matter what mood you’re in; having to create new material, new jokes, on a weekly basis; being able to respond to a heckler or the presence of a public figure with no time to test the jokes in private.

There is a world of difference between the laughter Dermot Morgan forced out of us and the laughter evoked by the never-ending stream of sitcoms on TV. Sitcom laughter leaves no trace. The laughter Scrap Saturday caused was often useful, sometimes shame-faced, in that the listener (particularly the professional political listener) felt slightly guilty for giggling at caricatures of friends and colleagues.

If professional politicians among Scrap Saturday’s listeners were ambivalent about their laughter, their problem was minor compared to that of the politician who was actually satirised.

Anyone satirised on such a programme has two options: laugh along with the joke whether they find it funny or not or complain bitterly about an inaccurate characterisation or misrepresentation of their behaviour. The first option was shown in the Late Late Show encounter between Michael Noonan and Dermot Morgan.

That encounter did Michael Noonan no end of good. There’s a big man was the audience reaction. Fair dues to him. Able to laugh at himself. Doesn’t take himself too seriously.

It didn’t do other politicians much good, though, since that Late Late Show more or less blackmailed all other public representatives into following his line, lest, in criticising the programme, they would look as if they had notions about themselves and no sense of humour.

To be found out as having no sense of humour is close to the kiss of death for a politician. Voters and journalists would rather spend time with anyone other than with someone who lacks a sense of humour, particularly in reference to themselves.

The Michael Noonan model of composed amusement could be pretty hard to imitate, however, if you were female and found Scrap Saturday focusing on your weight problem with repeated jokes about cream cakes. Those jokes actually weren’t funny, but their targets couldn’t say so. And the sisterhood, sadly, kept its head down and didn’t protest, either.

Fear of criticism can turn us all into cowards, but fear of funny criticism, particularly, can turn politicians into crawling cowards, sycophantically praising the critic who’s laughing at them in the hopes of ingratiating themselves with him. It never worked. With the possible exception of Michael Noonan, Dermot Morgan did not like politicians.

That reality made me somewhat jaundiced as I listened, this week, to politician after politician coming out saying what a wonderful person Dermot Morgan was and how much they loved his work.

To top off this safe piffle came commentary to the effect Dermot Morgan would have been pleased that so many politicians really loved him. In fact, he would have been disgusted. He desired neither the admiration nor the respect of politicians because he neither admired nor respected them.

Few were permanently harmed by his ruthless wit. Indeed, with the possible exception of Madelaine Taylor-Quinn, no politician lost their job because of Scrap Saturday. Padraig Flynn made capital out of it. Not only did he and his wife make something of a party piece of their version of The Flynnstones, imitating the imitation off the radio, “sangwiches” and all, but Padraig Flynn’s wife gained the slightly bizarre bonus of receiving sympathy cards whenever “Mrs Flynnstone” fell down from the attic in the programme and was injured.

On the face of it, P.J. Mara could have been outraged over the programme’s version of him as an obsequious, toadying, unctuous, fawning lackey. It probably served as reverse marketing for him. Business people were always dying to meet him to see what he was really like, and the magisterial presence and crisp facetiousness of the real Mara could not have been a greater contrast to the radio version.

Radio makes collaborators out of listeners. A generation of listeners collaborated with Dermot Morgan and will puzzle their grandchildren by using catchphrases from the programme. True, like an earlier Ireland that banned and exported some of its best writers, our liberal and sophisticated Ireland lost him to sitcoms and to Britain, and RTÉ has taken much criticism over it.

But there’s praise due, too. Praise for the people who first opened a gateway into the national broadcasting station for the teacher who thought he could write funny stuff, among them Mike Murphy. Praise for the writers, producers and actors who worked with him and helped him get seriously funny over the airwaves.

The unwritten Law of Diminishing Replays will now come into force: in the coming months and years, we will hear, now and again, tapes from Scrap Saturday. Those of us who heard it first time around will laugh loudly all over again. Younger people will be slightly puzzled, and we will end up saying: “You’ve no idea how funny it was at the time. You had to be there …”