Lighten up!

Worse is that the “idiot culture” that makes a joke out of everything has spread beyond America, and even in Australia it is a sign of a distinct lack of cool to take oneself or others too seriously. I blame The Chaser in part. Young girls all over Australia aspire to be MTV stars, young boys aspire to be Julian Morrow. The highest form of political comment seems now to involve making funny comments at press conferences.

It is good to have a sense of humour: it makes life and relations between people bearable. But let’s at least get serious about ourselves in public matters.

For one thing, we’re a nation at war. And that’s a serious matter, a matter of life and death. That we give so little thought to what being at war involves is in part because so little space in public forums is given over to discussion of what that means for us.

Perhaps the most notorious example of the idiocy of the media in this respect was the Sydney Morning Herald page one headline in August 2006: “The good life catches up with Thorpedo”. It took three reporters to file the story, which began, “He munches on pizza and hamburgers and slurps cola. He hasn’t been training. And Ian Thorpe, the five-time Olympic champion, is getting fat.” August 4, 2006 was a day like any other in Iraq, a day on which SBS news reported that America’s leading generals testified to the US Senate Armed Forces Committee that “Iraq is sliding towards full-scale civil war”. The rest of the Herald was filled, as usual, with pathetic puns masquerading as article titles, each more silly than the last, and ever more trivia.

The British magazine Private Eye used to feature a cartoonish character called Dave Spart, a dour and humourless Trotskyite who would browbeat others on the state of the world until the article cut him off mid-sentence. We don’t have to become a version of Dave Spart, but neither should we have to turn everything into a joke in order to be cool. Sometimes getting serious is simply appropriate to the times.