NO POINT IN SEEING RED OVER CLOWNING

IWOULD love to join the bashing of Red Symons. What fun, to accuse a presenter on the sanctimonious ABC of racism.

And he’s given us good ammunition.

“What’s the deal with Asians?” the former Skyhooks guitarist asked an Asian guest.

“Are you yellow?” Twitter is in typical meltdown, and even the ABC is treating Symons, its Melbourne breakfast radio presenter, like a moral cretin, taking down his offending podcast and offering apologies.

But wait. We’re calling Symons a racist now? Seriously?

True, he asked questions of ABC journalist Beverley Wang that I never would, and that — written down — seem stupid. Some, if asked by the vicious, would indeed be racist.

But context, please. Wang was on Symons’ show to spruik her own podcast, It’s Not A Race, that examines “race, racism, identity, culture and difference” in Australia.

That’s when Symons, always allergic to sanctimony, quipped that he’d been thinking of doing a similar show, called What’s the Deal With Asians?

And soon Symons was asking if Wang was yellow and suggesting she must as a child in Canada have lived on the west coast “because that’s closest to China”.

Dumb stuff like that. Clowning around, because — spoiler alert — Symons really is a clown. That’s his gig. He jokes. He plays with words. He holds up certainties to ridicule. He is a contrarian (within the ABC’s tight cultural parameters) and bridles at the stupid constraints put on language by our modern bullies.

Symons wants to say the unsayable, just to show he can and won’t be told he can’t — an admirable Australian trait now being hounded into extinction by just this sort of confected outrage.

Listen to the tape. I hear Symonds being playful with a guest with Asian ancestry, who he treats not as a victim but a feisty equal.

I hear him tossing Wang stupid tropes — setting ’em up for her to knock down.

I don’t hear Symons trying to offend. I hear jokes and challenges that misfire as he plays the curmudgeon. I hear him being stupid, but not racist.

I hear no excuse for the pile-on that has followed, including the ritual guest appearance of our Race Discrimination Commissioner, fresh from the equally baseless witch hunt of cartoonist Bill Leak who, stressed out, died of a heart attack.

Symons a racist? What an offensive thing to say.