Comedian charged: Not funny

Sometimes you see something on a net-forum that just hits you in the guts with its ignorance. I apologise in advance for the offence Melody - I can see that your post was genuinely well-meaning - but you seem to have missed the intent of both Grant and the guy who got arrested. In fact you seem to have missed it to a degree that makes me even more concerned than I was before about the state of humanities education in Australia. You see Melody, by all appearances neither Grant nor the fellow from the Chaser (his name escapes me) disagrees with the need to prevent crowd violence. Many people argue that comedy can and should be used as a tool to satirise and hence constructively criticise aspects of human behaviour. The Chaser quite overtly falls into that category, and is unashamedly 'political' humour. The method of humour employed in this particular case is one usually referred to as 'satire' - where the comic imitates or exagerrates aspects of human behaviour as a means of critiquing that behaviour. The humour comes because it reveals an uncomfortable truth about that behaviour. In this case the comedian was criticising the violence of football fans by insinuating that they were there not so much to watch a sport as to engage in gang-like warfare. Hence setting up a stall selling fake weapons and seeing people's reaction. It is funny because it is taking something ugly but hidden and making it JUST as ugly (no MORE ugly than the real thing) and putting it in the open for everyone to see. Did you know that only 2 years ago a major study was conducted by Oxford researchers demonstrating that one of the clearest indicators of human intelligence was a person's ability to understand humour, especially satire? I'm guessing that you didn't. However, what is is far MORE obvious (I hope) is that when you have to explain satire to an idiot it kind of loses its humour value. Of course the reaction of the police was ALMOST the greatest satire of the whole event - persecuting those who are critiquing and mocking the violence, rather than those who are committing the violence. I say 'almost' because surprise is crucial to most comedy, and it surprises few people to learn that some police are much more comfortable with violence than they are with humour.