Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Is this funny?

A "comedy" sketch on Irish state broadcaster, RTÉ --

Nightlive presenter ‘Trevor Corcoran’ tells the cameras that his nephew died of leukaemia ten years before. “He never got a chance to see me drive Formula Ford at Mondello or caddy for me at Castleknock’s new golf course.”

Another viewer complained about a scene which shows a wheelchair-bound young boy with an oxygen mask and hooked up to a drip. The ‘weatherman’ repeatedly tells the boy to utter a catchphrase but he can only stutter and cough.

RTÉ defended Nightlive as a comedy programme which parodies a fictitious news programme and insisted that the joke was really on the shallow, self-centred presenters.


We were going to do a post about how there's a strain of modern Irish "humour" that relies on making fun of easy targets, but it didn't seem worth the trouble. But then we got to found out what RTE's standard is when a guerrilla artist manages to make fun of actual powerful people: the depictions of a naked PM Brian Cowen (a witty commentary on the public finances, if nothing else) get censored from the public record after they were first reported. See Damien for more. Clearly the artist didn't make enough fun of terminally ill kids to survive RTE's standards.

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