Karl, It’s Not Funny.
By Samuel Leighton-Dore
It’s 2016.
If you can’t make one person laugh without making another person cry, if you can’t make one person feel good about themselves without making another person feel shit about themselves, it’s time that you remove your microphone and take a seat at the back of the room. You can laugh at your own jokes there. You’re not funny enough for a public platform.
If you’re a privileged white dude and think that everyone should be treated equally in comedy, maybe get down to a rally and fight for everyone to be treated equally in society first. If you’re on television, maybe don’t isolate an entire minority group under the guise of cheap humor. Maybe don’t perpetuate a culture of Aussie apologism that only ever favours white sportsmen and media personalities; the same kind of apologism that allows one sportsman to immediately bounce back from inflicting domestic abuse on their partner or sexual assault on a stranger and be celebrated, but condemns another for being proud and fiercely defensive of his culture.
Maybe stop and think about how many people are watching you – absorbing every flippant, ill-informed word you say. Stop and think about all the children watching before they go to school, still working out who they are and how they should speak to others – still learning how to distinguish between right and wrong. When you laugh, when you use a derogatory word several times in the one segment, getting kicks out of your own cleverness, there’s every chance these kids will go to school and replicate you.
Because you’re a larrakin, right? Everyone loves you. Kids love you. They want to be like you.
And when that means using hurtful language at another person’s expense, that’s not okay and it’s definitely not fucking funny.
Members of the trans community are still getting beaten up. They’re still being assaulted. They’re still being murdered. Not just overseas, but right here in metropolitan Australia. They’re still having nasty words slung in their general direction from the open windows of passing cars – left with nothing but the fading sound of laughter as they stand alone and humiliated on the sidewalk.
They’re still fighting for respect. They’re still fighting for equality. They’re still fighting for SAFETY.
You need to know – we all need to know – how this works. Humour gives permission for language. Language gives permission for behaviour. Behaviour gives permission for abuse. And when those at the butt of your morning television jokes are already facing abuse and discrimination, it’s your job – it’s our job – to use our voices to empower them.
Otherwise we’re just contributing to a vicious cycle – and this vicious cycle really needs to end.