UNTIL yesterday, Labour’s new leader was the man who couldn’t tell a joke.

So much so that when it was media hacks discovered that had he signed a motion welcoming “the day when an asteroid slams into the earth,” they took it seriously rather than reassess Jeremy Corbyn as one of our foremost comic trolls.

Unlike his long-standing comrade John McDonnell, Corbyn peppered his speech with humour, mostly at the expense of those who once wrote him off as humourless and their dismissal of his chances. 

One paper, he said, “tells us football’s Premier League would collapse” if he was elected PM. “Which makes sense,” he quipped, “because it’s quite difficult to see how all our top 20 teams would cope with playing after an asteroid had wiped out humanity.”

Not a bad line — but cue a stony silence from the journos sitting around me in the hall. And after a second poke, the woman next to me hastily drafted a tweet: “Attacking the media again. I feel like sliding slowly down my seat.”

The loudest tuts of all came when Corbyn said that “the commentariat don’t get it” and was determined to report every disagreement as a split.

But this is nothing but the truth.

For two decades, most journalists have ignored the machinations of Labour Party ­conference — the references back, the composite motions, the priorities ballot.

Now they’re playing catch up, because Corbyn has said that conference decisions will be binding.

As they’re still putting their tracksuits on, perhaps those filling column inches with downright inaccuracies can be forgiven.

It suits the narrative of Corbyn’s chaos and conundrums.

But why not start with the principle that humour is nothing without a spoonful of self-awareness?