Victory can be bitter tweets when journos go for the jocular

SOME years ago, a teacher at the small Victorian primary school I attended asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up.

SOME years ago, a teacher at the small Victorian primary school I attended went around the class, asking the children what they wanted to be when they grew up.

A few boys wanted to be firemen and one said an astronaut, which had me thinking: "Now, that's optimistic. The fact that Australia doesn't have a space program doesn't deter you at all?" But I kept quiet until my turn came around, and when the teacher said "And what would you like to be, Caroline?", I said "A comedian", and she said "But you're not funny" and that was fair enough, and so I became a reporter instead.

Imagine my surprise, 20-odd years on, to find that reporters are the new comedians.

You don't believe me? Get yourself on to Twitter and do a search for @LeighSales. You may know her as the serious, Walkley Award-winning host of the ABC's Lateline, but her schtick on Twitter is corny gags about news.

"Blue diamond sells for record price," she tweeted last week. "I hope that cheers it up."

"Puppy eats an alphabet of fridge magnets," she said, the week before that. "His latest 'accident' read B-A-D D-O-G."

There are doubtless dreary people who think Sales shouldn't be cracking jokes on Twitter but she need not worry: one of her followers is Mark Scott (@abcmarkscott) who thinks she's great.

You know who else is funny on Twitter? Mark Colvin (@colvinius). That's right, the host of the ABC's PM program comes across all earnest on the radio but he's dry as a bone on Twitter.

One example: you know that game where you find your porn star name (take name of your first pet - Misty - and the name of the first street you lived in - Main - and that's your porn name)? Colvin's improved it.

"Hey, porn stars!" he tweeted. "Want to find out your real name? Take the first name on your birth certificate, and add it to your father's last name ..."

I like to think I'm pretty funny on Twitter, too (@overingtonc), although with me it's mostly inadvertent. For example, when this newspaper was looking for people to interview about the budget, I put up a post that said: "Looking for a person aged about 45, who has children aged 16 or 17." Others re-tweeted it and, by the end of the day, the message had become: "overingtonc is looking for somebody under four-foot-five, with 16 or 17 kids" and I was getting calls from dwarfs in Darfur.

A couple of people have said to me "Isn't it a bit lame, to use Twitter to find people to interview?" but it's more efficient than bailing people up in the street. That can be hit or miss. The Cairns Post recently asked people how they were going to spend their Rudd bucks. Three of the six - that is, fully half - saidthey were going to spend it on tattoos andhookers.

I thought, "Come on! They must have done those interviews in a brothel" but when I put that on Twitter, people from Cairns got in touch, saying "How dare you call Cairns abrothel."

You've obviously got to be careful if you're a serious insect making jokes on Twitter, because it's easy to offend people with humour, as the folk on the ABC's The Gruen Transfer discovered this week.

Each week, the program asks two advertising agencies to come up with a commercial for something that's nigh impossible to sell. This week, they choseobesity.

JWT Melbourne came up with an ad that celebrated fat people's mass consumption, saying it was good for the economy. The other agency, The Foundry, made an ad replete with jokes about blacks, Jews and homosexuals, such as: "What's the difference between Santa and a Jew? Santa goes down the chimney."

The ABC refused to put it to air but you can see it on Twitter. Quite a few people have said it's not funny, and of course it's not, but that was the point. The agency was trying to say that jokes about Jews are offensive, and so are jokes about fat people.

Proving that the world has gone completely off its axis, the host of The Gruen Transfer, Wil Anderson, who is by trade a comedian, then hosted a debate about the ad, in which The Foundry was allowed to explain itself in a serious and thoughtful way.

Not that Anderson is giving up his day job, mind. He's cracking jokes on Twitter, too (@wil-anderson). This week, he tweeted on the budget: "Old people say raising the retirement age to 67 is just not funny," he said. "They're right. If they'd raised it to 69, that would have been funny."