I wasn’t upset when Princess Diana died. I didn’t know her, never met her, thought she seemed like a bit of a dill.
Sad for her family but that’s life isn’t it. One day it’s all going to end. Hopefully not naked in a cupboard in Bangkok like David Carradine but you just don’t know.
If I’d said this about Diana in 1997, I would’ve been screamed at. Because the world was united in grief. You’d hear people interviewed outside Buckingham Palace going, I never shed a tear when my own grandmother died but here I am crying like a baby. Because the world was united in grief. The IRA, Welsh coal miners, Camilla Parker Bowles, everyone. United in grief.
And now there’s universal condemnation of The Chaser. Universal condemnation from the church, politicians, all of us. It said so on A Current Affair last night.
Of course, Kevin Rudd didn’t actually see their Make a Realistic Wish Foundation skit but he did have it explained to him – using glove puppets, possibly – which led him to direct The Chaser to hang their head.
It wasn’t as far as Wendy went, a distraught mother who was interviewed by A Current Affair.
They should be hung, drawn and quartered, she said. In the town square.
Steve Price’s recommended treatment was for them to spend a day at a children’s cancer ward.
Every time I see pictures of a celebrity touring a children’s hospital ward I want to throw up.
Now that’s what I call child exploitation.
And how the hell does Steve Price know what The Chaser guys have been through in their personal life?
Just because they – unlike, say, Rove – haven’t been dissected by a women’s magazine doesn’t mean they haven’t been across any dry gullies.
I’m a little bit old-fashioned when it comes to comedy.
I’d prefer to make up my own mind about whether to laugh, instead of being given permission by the government, or the media, or by somebody’s mother.
I didn’t find The Castle funny, as it happens, or Kath and Kim, but I’d never say that out loud.
It’d be practically seditious. And the argument that The Chaser is a waste of taxpayers’ money doesn’t cut it either. So’s Spicks and Specks. And Peter Garrett.
There is only one question The Chaser have to ask themselves: is it funny. That’s where their responsibility begins and ends. They’re comedians.
And didn’t we think they were geniuses when they walked right through the airtight APEC security. God we laughed. Risky, sure, but that’s how it is with good comedy.
There have been jokes like this before. There’s one, it’s been around for a while, about the sick kid who’s sending a charity bankrupt with his over the top demands.
The Chaser did another gag on Wednesday night, it was about a fake film called Oscar Bait. “From the Academy Award seeking producer Harvey Weinstein.’’ Which is funny if you know Harvey Weinstein. Which I don’t. But he does come across as an overly aggressive Awards campaigner. So anyway, Andrew Hansen is pretending he’s got muscular dystrophy … “I may be a gay wheelchair-bound Jew – and simple …’’ he says during his pitch for Oscar greatness. Not that funny, Kate Winslet was better as a grasping Holocaust nun on Ricky Gervais’s Extras.
Just because a joke is in bad taste doesn’t make it not funny. It’s the opposite – bad taste is generally what makes it funny. A Muslim and a Jew walk into a bar … see?
You’re laughing already.
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