Hon­estly, I thought long and hard about that title… because it’s semi racist — but it actu­ally really epit­o­mises the nature of the post in question.

The feed­back to my deci­sion to make ref­er­ences to mak­ing light about the death of Michael Jack­son was not mixed. Most peo­ple don’t like the idea at laugh­ing at death. I’m of the opin­ion that “where oh death is your vic­tory, where oh death is your sting” (Corinthi­ans 15:55) is essen­tially a mock­ery of death — and once death and sin (which crops up in verse 57) have been dealt with you are free to laugh at it.

Per­haps laugh­ing at peo­ple who pre­sum­ably haven’t dealt with sin isn’t the most sen­si­tive thing to do.

But I digress — the rea­son for this post — is that I’m won­der­ing about satire and death, and satire and death as “inci­sive social com­men­tary” — par­tic­u­larly after view­ing this Twit­ter account pur­port­edly from a “Starv­ing African Child” (obvi­ously it’s not really from a starv­ing African child).

It seems to tread close to where the Chaser’s infa­mous sketch dared to tread — though per­haps not quite so con­fronta­tion­ally, and yet it is as con­fronting as a World Vision ad — which uses pathos for per­sua­sion rather than humour. Both are tools of per­sua­sion — and yet we frown on one and not the other.

The sense of out­rage sur­round­ing the Chaser sketch seemed to be that it preyed on the vul­ner­a­ble for laughs (while mak­ing some sort of point — per­haps their prob­lem was with clar­ity in terms of the tar­get — pre­sum­ably cathar­tic mid­dle class phil­an­thropy… I’m really not sure what their point was), while World Vision et al are draw­ing atten­tion to the plight of chil­dren. Is it wrong to use satire to do this? Is it only wrong when the tar­get isn’t clear? Is it inher­ently wrong to satirise the vul­ner­a­ble in order to draw the intended response from those in power?

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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