You’re not yourself without a snicker brought on by a bit of satire

Satire is essential for healthy, growing youngsters; it’s every bit as important as finishing your greens and mastering your reading, writing and arithmetic, not to say a spot of coding. But are there sufficient snide sniggers and subversive stuff in modern diets?

Has the march of the nanny state with its proliferation of rules, regulations and po-faced jobsworths and fun police, together with the echo-chamber of social media and the new intolerance, given rise to a place where satire is strangled? Are we losing the ability to cock a snook at authority and have a laugh at ourselves?

It’s two years since Canada’s Tyler Brule peered through his Monocle and conferred upon us “Most Stoopid Nation” status, suggesting Australians were increasingly being mollycoddled through health and safety laws, and that our cities were at risk of becoming over-sanitised, dumbed-down bastions of idiocy.

But an even bigger risk might lie in becoming under-satirised. It was a friend’s sharing on Facebook of a piece in Smithsonian.com about growing up on the subversive Cold War spoof, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, that got me wondering if our collective funny bone has been numbed.

“What we didn’t know in the 70s, when we were watching, that this was pretty subversive stuff for a children’s program made at the height of the Cold War,” Beth Daniels writes. “Watching this dumb moose and his rodent pal continually prevail against well-funded human saboteurs gave me pause to consider, even as a kid, that perhaps it is a silly idea to believe that just because we’re the good guys we should always expect to win.”

I got my earliest shots of satire from my father’s dog-eared pile of Mad magazines; they sat on a sagging shelf in his study, past the fraying macrame, the Ludlums, yoga manuals and The Joy of Sex. Dad favoured reading them on the porcelain throne, and so like father, like son. I’d grab a handful of issues from the pile and slope off to the loo, settling in to read my favourites: Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side Of’’, “Spy vs. Spy”, “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” and whichever movie was being lampooned by Madison Avenue’s most subversive talents.

This put me in the somewhat postmodern position of having read, often dozens of times, the Mad satires of many classic 70s films years before I would be allowed to watch them or be fully capable of understanding them.

From the warped minds of Mad Men like Harvey Kurtzman, Larry Siegel, Mort Drucker, Stan Hart and Dick Debartolo erupted lewd and lurid parodies, many of which remain more vivid in my mind than the movies themselves: Wild ½, Stalag 18!, The Guns of Minestrone, Flawrence of Arabia, The Sinpiper, Who in Heck is Virgina Woolfe, Fantastecch Voyage, The Agony and the Agony, Balmy and Clod, Valley of the Dollars, True Fat, Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid, A Fistful of Lasagne, The Foul and the Prissycats, Catch-All-22, Dum Dum Afternoon, A Crockwork Lemon, The Greast Gasbag, The Towering Sterno and many others, all overseen by the gap-toothed idiot grin of the magazine’s muse and mascot, Alfred E. Neuman.

Mad was a perfect primer for what became compulsive viewing during my high school years, the daily double of The Kenny Everett Video Show and The Goodies. Both were full of rather adult humour, completely manic and irreverent; both enjoyed evening slots on British television but — thank the comedy gods and Auntie — were deemed just fine for late afternoon children’s viewing in Australia.

First up would be the wild-eyed, beardy-weirdy Everett, with his crazed “It’s all in the best PAHsible taste” catchcry, creating characters like Sid Snot, Brother Lee Love, the fake-chinned Frenchman Marcelle and cartoon Captain Kremmen of the Space Corps, punctuated by the writhings of dance troupe Hot Gossip.

The Goodies — Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie — lampooned everything from chop socky films (the ancient Lancastrian martial art of Ecky Thump!) to Alex Haley’s saga of Kunta Kinte, Roots (Hoots, Toots and Froots!) and King Kong (Kitten Kong!) as a posse of groovy do-gooders out to right wrongs.

Are the yoof of today getting enough satire in between the sexting and the Snapchat? In an era when suddenly the overarching theme of Bullwinkle is back — fear of nuclear annihilation — and the makers of South Park have given up satirising Donald Trump because what’s happening is “way funnier” than anything Trey Parker and Matt Stone think they could make up, one just has to hope that the kids are all right.