How can anyone with a sense of humour censor Tom and Jerry as racist?

Picture this gloriously silly scene from a Tom And Jerry cartoon. In a jungle clearing, trapped in a steaming cauldron, is Tom the cat. He’s the prisoner of Jerry the mouse, who is perched on the pot’s rim.

With a bone tied between his ears, a grass skirt, and his fur blackened with soot, Jerry is waving a little spear and pretending to be a cannibal.

‘Peel dem potatoes!’ he roars, and Tom obeys miserably. ‘Chop dem carrots,’ bellows Jerry, and the cat adds them to the hot water he’s stewing in. Then he reaches for an onion. ‘Hold de onion!’ barks Jerry.

What’s wrong with that picture? Logically, just about everything — the mouse is talking, the cat is dicing vegetables and is terrified, despite his kitchen knife being much bigger than Jerry’s spear… and anyway, a cannibal mouse would eat mice, not cats. It’s perfect nonsense.

Even if you’re a Tom And Jerry fan, you might not have seen that cannibal scene. It’s from a 1951, seven-minute cartoon called His Mouse Friday, where the duo get shipwrecked on a desert island, like Robinson Crusoe. It is never shown on TV now, for fear of causing racial offence.

The problem isn’t so much Jerry’s deep-fried accent, or that when the real cannibals show up, they’re talking hep Fifties jive, like jazz stars Duke Ellington and Sammy Davis Jr. No, the problem is the soot.

Jerry rubs his face and body with soot from the cauldron to disguise himself. He blacks up.

Blacking up, sometimes called blackface, is forbidden in the 21st century. It’s so unbearably racist that we are never allowed to see it. Not only our children but all of us, the whole of society, must be protected from the mind-polluting horror of witnessing a cartoon mouse blacked up with soot.

That’s why the next Tom And Jerry Blu-ray disc from cartoon giant Warner Bros — the Golden Collection Volume Two — will be missing two episodes originally scheduled for inclusion.

And two less controversial episodes that were pencilled in for the Blu-ray series have now been dropped. One is Casanova Cat, from 1951, where Tom blackens Jerry’s face by blowing cigar smoke at him. The other is Mouse Cleaning, a 1948 short in which Tom tries to talk his way out of trouble while his face is blacked up in coal dust.

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