I grew up on Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. Most of my best-loved childhood TV friends were regularly shot at, beaten up, squashed under anvils or exploded in many and various ways. Many years later, I watched Basil Fawlty regularly attack Manuel, his hapless Spanish waiter, and of course the Three Stooges were little more than a relentless series of violent gags.
Violence and humour may seem strange bedfellows, but they have been sleeping together for a very long time. So what are we to make about the latest round of outrage and handwringing over an ABC joke that clearly went too far?
I haven’t found too many people who thought that threatening cartoonish violence against Gina Rinehart was funny, and nor did I. The comment was criticised at the time on the program that aired it, the film-maker responsible for the comments has now apologised for a joke that went too far, and the ABC has joined in the apology and edited the segment to remove it completely, although not from our collective memory.
Shouldn’t that be enough? Does the ABC really need to change its editorial policies to ensure that, from now on, violence and humour need to sleep in separate beds?
Well of course it doesn’t. What’s more, it’s not actually going to.
I don’t want to get too technical here, but the ABC has 13 editorial policies – how’s that for a lucky number? One of them deals with harm and offence, and the ABC is not proposing to change a word of it. All the ABC intends to do is update its non-binding guidance for program makers on how to follow those unchanged policies.
What will the updated guidance say? Well, based on recent comments by the ABC managing director, Hugh Marks, it is likely to advise that making jokes about violent acts against individuals is off the menu. Not funny. Not on our ABC. At least, that will be the ABC’s non-binding recommendation.
Superficially, that seems like reasonable advice. Anyone who remembers US comedian Kathy Griffin holding up a severed head that resembled Donald Trump, or even Alan Jones suggesting metaphorically that Julia Gillard should be put in a chaff bag and taken out to sea, knows that those remarks rarely fare well. Apologies are far more common outcomes than applause.
But at the same time, let’s take care. For every extreme example where violence, jokes and individuals don’t mix well, there are others where the humour is in the eye of the beholder. And if a piece of guidance, even if non-binding, creates a no-go zone for ABC comedy and entertainment programs, what kind of po-faced, anodyne world might we find ourselves in?
It didn’t take me long to locate a brilliant operatic parody of the dismissal of the Whitlam government that aired on the ABC’s Gillies Report back in the 1980’s. Dodgy singing aside, it also showed Gough Whitlam collapsing on the steps of the Senate with multiple knives sticking from his back. Clearly an act of comic violence against a prominent individual. Hilarious even now, but will we see the likes of it again?
From Norman Gunston and Aunty Jack to Black Comedy and Hard Quiz, the ABC has broadcast some fairly edgy things over the years, often targeting well-known Australians as the butt of their humour. Violence is a very broad and vague concept, and if the ABC gets this one wrong, it will be a pie in the face for all of us.
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Alan Sunderland is a former editorial director of the ABC and former news editor at SBS
