We need the comics who walk the edge
The Age
Saturday June 13, 2009
WHAT if the Chaser's "Make a Realistic Wish" skit had ended before that crushing final line that "they're going to die anyway"? For me, it might just have skidded over the line of what's tolerable and missed much of the resulting communal outrage.Having done the charity trip of a life-time with a child of mine, I was a bit bemused by my own, rather phlegmatic response (albeit a day after the stinging event) to this bit of the Chaser's war. Was it because my son is still alive, after four rounds with cancer and nine years of nasty drug intervention? I think not, and I hope not.Until that point, the dying children skit was just doing what comedy should do - making you cling to the edge of your chair with apprehension before (hopefully) falling off it wracked with mirth. Of course, it's OK to have the apprehension without the hilarity - the "horror/danger/where-can-they-go-from-here?" effect. Before that last line the Chaser - for me - was pushing the "wow, this is daring, ludicrous, precariously silly" button. But edgy bad taste fell over the edge with those words.However, I'm not convinced this scene wasn't so utterly improbable as to be impossible to take seriously. They probably made a mistake. They should have been given better guidance, and encouraged to think more penetratingly about what or whom they were trying to satirise. But they can hardly have dispersed any of our society's vast bank of kindness, empathy or sympathy for seriously sick kids. After all, almost everyone feels for ill children.In my experience nothing brings out the tender-heartedness of friend and stranger alike as does the children-cancer combination. In fact, I've felt guiltily aware, in the face of unstinting sympathy and kindness for my child, about all those grown ups with cancer who are expected to be brave and stoic and uncomplaining, thankful for the health-care system, grateful for the chance to be cured. They are not indulged.We were into round two with leukaemia when we got the offer from Starlight (the Make A Wish sister charity) - a stupendously generous gift consisting of a family holiday at the Dunk Island resort. For years after this I marvelled that individual men and women, and possibly children, as well as businesses and corporations and charities in our community, chose to give so that precariously ill children and their families could experience something of great joy or pleasure.It is a wonderful compensation for very grim moments of pain and powerlessness in the face of relentless disease.To be sure, some days, with a loved one constantly injected with poisonous chemicals, trapped in a hospital bed, frustrated and miserable, and with an entire family forced to operate in a bleak, cheerless holding pattern, there is nothing funny to be noticed or seized upon. Nor is it easy to see the silly side of life when the disease-terror takes over.But when I try to imagine myself viewing that ridiculously provocative Chaser skit during some of the scariest episodes of illness, I find it seems much like all of life outside the thick bubble of hospital, permanently knotted stomachs and debilitating anxiety - simply unreal and irrelevant.Everything of the outside world, the real world, appears harshly discordant when one is gripped by a death threat.Even so, I know, and I knew, that the world is way bigger than that bubble, intense and all-encompassing though it is. After all, since when did the world adapt to my particular predicament, to my sensitivities? Since when did the world stop to let any of us off?If comedy, like art, reflects our values and norms and idiosyncrasies, then this moment in comedy television has shown us, not surprisingly, that many people are offended when very ill children are used as the subject of a joke. And it has shown us, according to Shaun Carney (The Age, 6/9) that many are not - which is also hardly surprising. But in earlier times we have been spared the mental meanderings of the internet vox pop, the prejudiced, the disgruntled, the stony-hearted. It was easier just to know that we did not see eye to eye.I can live with this bit of the Chaser, even though those last few words are so confrontingly harsh, partly because we need the guys who will shove us into a new way of seeing the crazy, hypocritical and euphemistic angles on life that they mine so well; the comics who will dig deep for the unexpected and risk occasionally getting it wrong.Morag Zwartz's latest book is Apostles of Fear.
© 2009 The Age
