I also do not find the Chaser funny. However, that's no reason for canceling the show. I also hope to live long enough so that Elvis and Rock & Roll are only of interest to antiquarians. Satire sometimes misses the mark. The only reason to cancel comedians is that most people find them not funny.

Bad taste is in the eye of the beholder. I think it was in extremely bad taste for Bush 43 to lie his country into war, authorise torture and allow his Enron buddies to rip off the country. He was never funny intentionally.

Stuart,
Let me see if I've got it right. This article is about your disagreement with the management decision to suspend 'the Chasers' episodes?
Undoubtedly you have that right but I suspect it has more to do with your professional paranoia rather than the actual suspending of the Chasers' program or reality.

In my rebuttal to your argument I would suggest that in your haste to dispose of the smelly herring you failed to fully acknowledge why the it failed. To correct this deliberate oversight I would it failed for a number of reasons among which would be lack of care and due diligence, unchecked egos, and poor writing in short sloppy work. By filming in the hospital ward with children confused the target consequently it was in appalling taste.
This is important to note in that it gives sound reasons for the management decision.
Look at it this way If I owned a business and I had one group of staff who were upsetting my clients. Wouldn't I justified in removing the problem at least until it died down?

Your argument about the hypocrisy is null on two grounds .
The first is a separate organisation. Is Myers hypocritical because it has different employment practices to the Dept. of Defense?
The second is that your example of the “footy show” is on a private enterprise where the emphasis is on profit. They will simply ignore the complaints while it's making money.
The ABC isn't and they can't afford to ignore its owners by way of the elected government.

I would also add that that as presented the argument showed little understanding of the nature of humour or sociology.
The tactic was arguing by non existent extremes. The boy who cried wolf comes to mind.
Likewise the all or approach smacks of manipulation. e.g. elevating Chasers to a undeserved level. Personally, I don't confuse audacious with clever.
For the record I am a fan of New Matilda's satirist, G&S, Monty Python et al

My point about the Footy Show was that those leading the charge to slam the Chaser and demand they be pulled into line and hauled over the coals, or even taken off air (Daily Telegraph - which dedicated pages to it, Miranda Devine, shock jocks etc) had in their overwhelming majority *nothing* to say, no one word, about the much more offensive sketch the Footy Show did - not just more offensive but, as I said, actually dangerous. That type of sketch actually needs to be opposed, not necessarily with censorship but by taking a stance of complete rejection of the bigotry it contains.

Green Left Weekly did that, http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/796/40972 Unfortunately I didn't see anyone else in the media raise it in any serious way.

Stuart I am a fan of the Chaser but not the new series I must admit. I have found it a bit gross and OTT,trying to be so anti-establishment as not to be funny.

It would be a fine art to be able to manufacture comedy without falling flat on your face or pushing the boundaries too far so as to be offensive or just plain boring.

I have to disagree that the censure of the Chaser stems from the Right wing or as punishment in effect for APEC and the like.

It may have something more to do with the fact that Chaser is funded by the taxpayers and hence people feel the need to comment about content even if it were something they might endure on a commercial channel. Also the skit involved child actors explicitly playing dying children whereas similar skits were more subtle.

I wouldn't watch the Footy Show because it is facile but each to his own.

While the Make A Wish skit endeavoured to make fun of the Foundation rather than the kids themselves, it was a failure in terms of a duty of care towards those families who are facing exactly these illnesses. It was a bad call by Duthie who has since been demoted but I guess these experiencs serve as a thermomenter to what will be acceptable to Australia's (in general) fairly broad minded public.

How interesting! The editor of the Marxist-Leninist Green Left Weekly opposes censorship. Marxist-Leninists supported censorship when Marxism took power in Russia. A GLW seller told me he agreed with censorship should his compatriots take power.

Following their accession to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks took measures to prevent challenges to their new regime, beginning with eliminating political opposition. When the freely-elected Constituent Assembly did not acknowledge the primacy of the Bolshevik government, Vladimir Lenin dissolved it in January 1918. The Left Socialist Revolutionary Party, which protested the action, withdrew from the Bolshevik coalition in March, and its members were branded enemies of the people. Between 1918 and 1921, a state of civil war existed.

Bolshevik policy toward detractors, and particularly toward articulate, intellectual criticism, hardened considerably. Suppression of newspapers, initially described as a temporary measure, became a permanent policy. Lenin considered the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) the center of a conspiracy against Bolshevik rule. In 1919, he began mass arrests of professors and scientists who had been Kadets, and deported Kadets, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Nationalists. The Bolshevik leadership sought rapidly to purge Russia of past leaders in order to build the future on a clean slate.

These harsh measures alienated many intellectuals who had supported the overthrow of the czarist order. Suppression of democratic institutions evoked strong protests from academics and artists betrayed in their idealistic belief that revolution would bring a free society. Writers emigrating shortly after the revolution published stinging attacks on the new government from abroad. As a result, further exit permits for artists were generally denied.

The disenchantment of most intellectuals did not surprise Lenin, who saw the old Russian intelligentsia as a kind of rival to his "party of a new type," which alone could bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class. In his view, artists generally served bourgeois interests, a notion that fueled the persecution of intellectuals throughout the Soviet period.

Free speech must extend to an opposition.

My uncle Bill was a Bolshevik arrested by the czarist police before the revolution. He managed to leave the Soviet in 1921 cured of Bolshevism.

The purpose of this type of satire is to raise questions about our ethics, morals and value judgements. The idea that we all respond with such outrage at this one incident where one particular set of kids are shown to be suffering is meant to make us think about WHY we don't express the same rage and disgust at the fact that EVERYDAY according to the World Health Organisation, tens of thousands of kids suffer and die in many countries around the world. In some countries like Africa, they don't even have the luxury of lying in a hospital bed as they rot away from PREVENTABLE diseases! So, let's not over react to a spot of satire which should make us think and question ourselves. The Chaser needs to keep making these kinds of thought provoking programs that force us to confront our priorities and examine our humanity.