Freedom to mock isn’t funny
Irealise not everyone who reads this column is always in agreement with the ideas or expression of said ideas contained within. I know, hardly the revelation of the year, right? But hopefully, when you read this page each week you are either nodding in agreement over your Sunday toast and coffee, or you are ripping the page into tiny pieces in a tantrum worthy of a Real Housewife. I write; you are free to react.
In these very modern times there are many who claim free speech is under attack. You can’t even make a joke any more, it’ll be the death of comedy, yada yada.
This was on my mind when I caught the controversy over a new Australian TV ad designed to encourage people to sign up as organ donors. A very, very worthy cause. The ad shows Jesus Christ dying on the cross, talking to two Roman soldiers about whether he’ll donate his organs after death.
You can immediately see why that would be controversial. And those with long memories will recall it’s not the first time art and popular culture has collided with religion to explosive results.
Remember Virgin In A Condom? This tiny artwork was fiercely controversial, but not in the way we experience ‘‘fiercely controversial’’ these days. These days it would dominate the home page overnight – let’s be generous and say that once the religious professors had been interviewed and the vox-pops conducted with the public on Courtenay Place, it might splutter to a fourth day, but I doubt it.
In 1998, one month after Te Papa opened its doors, the row over Virgin In A Condom dominated the news for Six. Whole. Weeks. Every weekend, Catholics picketed. A group put on a live ‘‘last supper’’ tableau with a topless woman in the role of Jesus. Punches were thrown, arrests made, the Governor General was called on to prosecute Te Papa for blasphemy.
You won’t see that kind of carry-on this time, such is the pace of news these days. They played a snippet of the Australian ad on the TV news. Monty-Pythonesque, the newsreader called it, and that it was – audacious, outrageous – and a ‘‘lol’’ escaped my unguarded mouth before I could even register I’d found it funny.
Of course, humour is absolutely subjective and personal. It was funny to me, because I have no emotional or rational connection with religion.
Certainly my Mum tried her hardest to imbue her three little girls with a sense of the divine; she’d grown up High Anglican in England and wanted to cling to it in her strange and, as the bride of a hard-drinkin’ Aussie journo, largely heathen new home. But as children we only lasted at Sunday School until we were old enough to rebel, and Dad made that easy. God botherers, he called the devout, and he’d laugh about chasing Mormons from the doorstep by threatening to strip naked on the spot.
Suffice to say there was a time when I wouldn’t have thought twice about laughing at that organ donation ad. And yet as soon as that little guffaw had pushed its way to the surface, I stopped. And I thought about it. About what it must be like to live a life where Christianity is central to your being. What would a person like that feel when they saw Christ portrayed in this way, in probably the most holy moments of the Christian faith?
I thought of my partner’s mother, the most devout Catholic I know. I thought of what an extraordinarily good person she is, how unshakeable her faith, but how accepting and supportive she has been to her daughter and myself and our relationship, one that many think goes against the teachings of the Church.
I think it would have hurt her to see that ad. I hope she doesn’t see it. And although I wish the campaign for organ donation all the very best – suddenly I did not find the ad funny, any more.