Columnist
Canberra
Jack the Insider is a highly placed, dedicated servant of the nation with close ties to leading figures in politics, business and the union movement.
- Jack The Insider
- The Australian
- December 17, 2015 1:35PM
The Bill Leak letters page cartoon which appeared on Monday.
The controversy surrounding Bill Leak’s ‘Aid à La Mode’ cartoon is a reminder that Australia is in danger of becoming a dry, humourless place.
When I was a kid, I cut my satirical teeth reading National Lampoon. The magazine was banned in New Zealand by a National Party government who feared it would corrupt young minds but in Australia it was available, not so much on the shelf but via a kindly newsagent who would put a copy aside every month provided I paid the freight.
The magazine featured some of America’s greatest cartoonists and illustrators, Sam Gross, Gahan Wilson, Bobby London and Charles Rodriguez — to name just a few and writers crackling with madness and humour such as Chris Miller, Ted Mann, John Hughes and P.J. O’Rourke.
No topic was off limits.
The magazine’s covers were works of comedic art. The most famous, featured on the ‘Death’ issue in 1973, showed a man’s hand pointing a revolver at the head of a cute black and white canine with the cover line, “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.”
The cover of the Sports edition featured a large Soviet female athlete glaring back at the camera. It was only on closer examination that it became obvious the large Soviet woman was packing something decidedly male in her athletic shorts. In Australia, we’d describe the package euphemistically as a Chiko roll and two dim sims.
If it all sounds terribly undergraduate you’d be wrong. These days, it is the undergraduates who are hell bent on defining what is and isn’t funny and setting narrow boundaries along the lines of what’s acceptable fare for humour.
So pervasive is it, I doubt ninety per cent of the content of National Lampoon could be published today, or if it was it would not be made available by retailers fearing some misguided boycott launched after a predictably vehement pile-on on social media.
Early this year, comedian Jerry Seinfeld made something of a fuss in entertainment circles when he declared he would not play the US college circuit and neither would the major headline acts in US stand up, Chris Rock and Louis C.K., because college audiences were too politically correct.
“They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist.’ ‘That’s sexist.’ ‘That’s prejudice.’ They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” Seinfeld told ESPN’s Colin Cowherd.
Sound familiar?
I saw Seinfeld sitcom co-creator, Larry David, commence a stand-up routine with, “Say what you like about Adolf Hitler but he never took any shit from magicians,” and went on to describe how Hitler would bail magicians up backstage and under threat of state sponsored torture demand to know how the trick was performed.
Years ago Australian comedian Steve Bedwell would sometimes start a set by saying, “My grandfather died in Auschwitz.” On cue the audience would lapse into a hush. “Yeah, he got drunk and fell out of a guard tower.”
Analysing gags can be a tedious and subjective process, but Bedwell’s set up and punch line do not mock victims of the Holocaust. The joke is on Bedwell himself, and more broadly his audience who fall into his trap. In David’s case, gormless conjurers, almost as bad as jugglers in the live entertainment hierarchy, are the butt of the joke.
When we look at Leak’s cartoon the butt of the joke is the developed world, represented as the United Nations for “distributing solar panels to the world’s poor because they think that provides a virtuous, if inadequate, form of electricity for which they should be grateful,” as Leak wrote yesterday.
I saw the cartoon for the first time on Sunday night and I would have thought that was blindingly obvious but perhaps I’m an old, white, racist male and haven’t been sufficiently excoriated on Twitter to realise it.
Anyway, this is the number one rule of comedic satire. The victim should never be the butt of the joke. Rule number two is there are no other rules.
That should be the way it works, yet today satirical comedy is ruthlessly scrutinised for any hint of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia or political bias by a generation disturbingly happy to regard easy, sanitised humour as cutting edge.
Published in 1976, National Lampoon’s Foreigners issue was a blistering parody of Americans’ insular and inward looking view of the world. In that edition, P.J. O’Rourke’s article “Foreigners around the World” featured crude stereotypical depictions of people from all points of the compass, including Australians who he described as “violently loud roughnecks whose idea of fun is to throw up on your car.” According to O’Rourke, our national sport was “breaking furniture” and “making a shambles” was a compulsory subject of study on the primary school curriculum.
There is no doubt that article would fail the Twitter twisted morality test. Gen X-ers would wantonly misconstrue that article as a privileged white man’s xenophobic ramblings rather than the breathtakingly brilliant parody of racism it was.
Good satire should shock. It is meant to defy cultural sensibilities. It is supposed to make you shift awkwardly in your seat. It is likely to offend. By that measure, Bill Leak’s cartoon ticked all those boxes.
Whether it was funny or not is a matter for personal judgment.
The PC-brigade or anyone else must not define what is funny and what isn’t. Otherwise, before you know it, we’ll all be on a strict diet of the prat fallings of the Australia’s Funniest Videos type, which incidentally is a form of humour most popular in Germany. But don’t get me started on the Germans.
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