two-pot screamer dot com

I was spending the day at a new office yesterday and had the dubious pleasure of hearing the “comedy” team from Fox FM express their thoughts on the latest controvesy – summed up neatly by Play School’s lesbian tale sparks outrage.

In anything but an election year, a story about a children’s television show showing a 30 second segment about a girl going to the park with her two mothers would have sunk without a trace.

Senior government ministers and family groups all decided to issue press releases about how shocked they were, and the media were happy to play along. At least the television station showed some backbone. The ABC’s head of children’s television, Claire Henderson, told them all to get fucked. “Play School aims to reflect the diversity of Australian children, embracing all manner of race, religions and family situations.”

But back to the comedy team…their take on the issue was to ask “if this is okay, what’s next? Humpty Dumpty stood by the wall…?” and so-on in that vein. Because it’s only a small step to go from lesbian parents to prostitution, right?

I knew that commercial radio set the bar pretty low, but this still led to me to do some pissed-off pacing up and down for a minute or two.

And, forgetting the issue for the moment, when have comedians stood side by side with the sort of politician who believes that women have no right to abortion?

Comedy become depoliticised with safe observational comedy, and only seems to be getting more political recently with the obviously bad Gulf War situation, but aren’t the roots of comedy in challenging the status quo?

Does the comedian make fun of the school bully or of the kid he’s beating up?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2004 at 7:37 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.