Cancelling Chris Lilley just shows you can’t laugh at yourself

THE self-promoters who call for the demise of satirical comedy like Chris Lilley’s shows have no idea how to laugh at themselves

Chris Lilley as Jonah from Tonga in Summer Heights High.

There was no better show on TV in 2005 than Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes.

Screened on the ABC it won near-universal acclaim for Lilley’s hilarious depiction of five “unique Australians” all vying to be Australian of the Year.

Today, just 15 years on, We Can Be Heroes has been cancelled. Gone too is the equally hilarious follow-up Summer Heights High.

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Both victims to the culture wars that, when it comes to comedy, now insist political correctness is more important than being funny. Lilley’s shows have been axed from Netflix — along with others including Little Britain.

And now the ABC, which commissioned the shows, is conducting a “harm and offence” audit, whatever that means. Lilley’s crime, apparently, is the dark make-up he wears on his face when depicting characters like Jonah from Tonga.

The absurdity of Lilley’s deplatforming is obvious. It marks a new low in the fracturing of our society that has been largely driven by social media.

Facebook was a relatively new phenomena when We Can Be Heroes first aired. Twitter did not exist.

It’s no co-incidence that our arrival at this Orwellian moment of censorship has co-incided with the rise of these social media platforms. Twitter, in particular, is polarising society. The views of the extremes on left and right drowning out anyone in the sensible centre.

Sadly, governments and corporations are caving in to these baying mobs, lest they be subjected to a public shaming for not conforming to approved points of view. What’s most absurd about Lilley’s censorship is that those we are told he has offended were never the targets of his intended offence.

Lilley’s characters may have included Pat Mullins, the woman with a short leg determined to roll from Perth to Uluru, Ricky Wong, the Chinese-born overachiever who plays the lead character in the indigenous-themed musical Indigeridoo, and Mr G, the flamboyant drama teacher.

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They were all being ridiculed, but not on the basis of their disability, race or sexual orientation. Rather, Lilley was taking the piss out of virtue signallers, long before the term even existed.

His shows are littered with tall poppies and he brings them down to size one hilarious episode at a time.

There was his character Phil Olivetti who dubiously claimed he had saved nine children from an unsecured jumping castle. He was so desperate to be crowned Australian of the Year he invited one of the judges to a barbecue and later tried to bribe him.

And who could forget the other Australian of the Year contender Ja’mie — a spoilt-rotten private school girl who had 40 World Vision sponsor children; not because she cared about starving kids in Africa, but because it was cool and made her look kind and compassionate in front of her friends.

(There might be a lesson here for our current honours council — that those who strive to receive these accolades are the last people who should actually receive them.)

Chris Lilley also made fun of private schoolgirls in his satirical comedies

Lilley’s shows continued the great Australian tradition of taking the piss out of anyone who gets ahead of their station.

The self-promoters, skites and attention seekers who’ve been targeted in our popular culture for more than a century.

Think right back to Banjo Paterson’s Mulga Bill, who declared he was “good all round at everything, as everybody knows”, before crashing his shiny new bicycle straight into Dead Man’s Creek.

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But Lilley may have been the last of his kind.

Today, the self-promoters are taking over the world, one tweet a time, and they’re willing to cancel anyone who stands in their way.

Their rise has deprived us of the ability to laugh at people like Chris Lilley. But worse still, we’re losing the ability to laugh at ourselves.