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Cutting to the chase

During an election, it's political satire that keeps us sane

IT is taken as given that Australians do not like to watch political advertising. So why, in offices across the land, were people logging on to YouTube to watch an advertisement for the ALP?

Because it was funny. It had Kevin Rudd as Mao Zedong, with Julia Gillard dressed in khaki pants and shirt, holding Mao's Little Red Book.

It was a fake, obviously, created by a University of Sydney student who intends to vote Labor. When conservatives found the clip, it became the week's most emailed item.

It prompts the questions: in a six-week campaign, does politics become one big joke?

"No," says Peter Hoysted, co-author with Richard Fidler of a new book, The Insider's Guide to Power in Australia , that mocks politicians past and present. "It's drab and awful. It can be funny only when you take it to the absurd, and that's an easy step to take."

Julian Morrow of the ABC's The Chaser's War on Everything agrees but phrases it differently. "Of course (politics is a joke)," he says. "Just not for the right reasons."

Let's turn the question around: if politics is the stuff of jokes, have comedy programs become a source of serious political analysis?

"So, you're asking, are comedy programs becoming more like current affairs programs?" says Morrow. "It depends on how you look at it. Are our news programs getting closer to comedy programs? That broad trend seems true."

More seriously, Morrow says comedy "on a good day" has the ability to "crystallise an issue. But I'd hate to think we're the last word on politics. That's terrifying."

Yet true: The Chaser's five young firebrands set a gold standard for comedy stunts when they pierced the pompous farce that was security during APEC.

Their triumph was made funnier still when a po-faced NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione held a media conference to explain why the stunt wasn't funny. No news report about APEC security will be remembered as long or as fondly.

Moreover, it explained matters as well. If Australians now understand that security during APEC was supposedly tight but easily penetrated, it's because of The Chaser.

Political satire is sharpest not on TV but the web, where this year's most informed and wicked election coverage will undoubtedly be provided by Tim Blair on his website, (timblair.net). Blair's site is, by a healthy margin, the best-read political site in the nation, loathed by some, who say it's mean, but extremely funny.

You have to be clever to make his brand of political satire work. "I haven't seen too many people doing it," says Blair. "Some people - like Catherine Deveney, who writes for The Age - are unintentionally funny, but that's not what you mean, is it?"

Deveney is a humour columnist but, as Blair pointed out on his website this week, she last week wished death upon some of her fellow Australians for voting for John Howard.

"I realise that if they were stupid enough to be sucked in by him the first and the second time, there's not much hope," she wrote. "I just hope a few of them have died from xenophobia." It was funny, although surely not in the way she intended.

Blair says comedy has three roles to play in elections:

* It is therapeutic, in that "those of a comedic nature (he mentions Joe Hildebrand, of The Daily Telegraph, where Blair works as opinion editor) volunteer their abilities in a generous effort to help their fellow citizens survive six weeks of an election campaign."

* It is influential, especially when the Left tries to use it to get people to vote Labor, with wonderfully comic results.

* Finally, comedy has a subversive role, "by which comedians infiltrate the election process itself, for purposes often unclear. Former rugby league star Mal Meninga's 2001 performance - he announced his candidacy and resigned from it during the same press conference - comes to mind."

Blair's gift on his website is to let stupidity speak for itself. He can put a quote from a politician - or, more often, a climate change expert - on his website and let it sit there, unadorned, pitch-perfect and hilarious.

The trend towards fake news and satire as an alternative to proper news programs isn't new, and Queensland University political scientist Clive Bean isn't too troubled by it, saying it would be the same as "worrying about the (John) Clarke and (Brian) Dawe skits" on the ABC's The 7.30 Report.

"The truth is, some of these satirical programs do have an insight that you don't get elsewhere," he says. "The Chaser cuts to the chase, if I can use that pun. Viewers are quite capable of seeing it through a cynical lens, not taking it as gospel."

Hoysted says comedians are honour bound to tackle politics during an election because "you have the two major parties, who basically think similarly on all matters economic and vary only slightly on social policy, and there is a certain amount of fun that must be had at their expense, I think.

"If there is a difficulty, it's that you get flat days. Often there's a shortage of material. If we were in the US (last week), you'd take on the Dalai Lama meeting President Bush.

"What have we got here? There was John Fahey, the heavy smoker (perhaps not now with only the one lung), but being made head of the world anti-doping agency."

The event that kept Morrow most amused was the dramatic arrest on drug charges of footballer Ben Cousins, who, according to AAP, emerged from his car "shirtless and grinning". "When we get arrested, we keep our shirts on," he said.

Given that The Chaser occasionally rates as well as the Nine Network's A Current Affair and that young people in particular consider it a source of political analysis, it is worth asking whether more people would watch The Chaser's election night coverage than say, the serious program hosted by Kerry O'Brien of The 7.30 Report. Morrow thinks for a moment, then says: "No." Election counts are when the people are speaking.

Caroline Overington
Caroline OveringtonLiterary Editor

Caroline Overington has twice won Australia’s most prestigious award for journalism, the Walkley Award for Investigative Journalism; she has also won the Sir Keith Murdoch award for Journalistic Excellence; and the richest prize for business writing, the Blake Dawson Prize. She writes thrillers for HarperCollins, and she's the author of Last Woman Hanged, which won the Davitt Award for True Crime Writing.

Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/cutting-to-the--chase/news-story/7f32ed0fc8b44dce27b709c6195bcc3c