There is a small but growing subgenre of online content that we in the bunker — until this morning, at least — have become particularly fond of: Americans who cannot deal with the fact that there’s a news website in Australia called Crikey.
We’ve had the good folk at the Maintenance Phase referencing a decent pun headline of ours in their episode about Pete Evans (“and the website is called Crikey! Just to get as Australian as possible!”), then popular leftie Twitch streamer Hasan Piker saying, “That’s gotta be fake, right?”.
Satirical luminary Jon Stewart also earnestly gave us a shout-out on his podcast The Problem (his classification of us as an “agency” makes it funny, giving the impression that we’re Australia’s version of Reuters or something).
But today we have to add a particularly dismal example to the list. In the middle of Stephen Colbert’s hand-rubbing monologue regarding the conclusion of the Dominion-Fox News defamation case, he threw in a gag about Lachlan Murdoch’s now-abandoned lawsuit against Crikey and Private Media. There’s a lot that’s weird about it; the fact he pronounces Lachlan “lack-lan” is the least of it.
After mentioning our name, he takes the obvious joke “How Australian can you get!” by… doing some weird race stuff. The suit has big implications, Colbert says, for Crikey‘s biggest rival (sigh) “Didgerinews” — cutting to a mock-up based on our website, but with more stories about shower spiders. “Tonight’s top story”, Colbert announces, before grabbing what appears to be a yidaki and blowing ineptly through it for a second.
Colbert’s famously a very bright guy, so we’re very surprised he didn’t think this clumsy bit about the Indigenous culture of another country didn’t need a second draft.
