Laughter can be cruel. We all know that – I’m sure every single one of us, at some point in our life (for some, many points) have been laughed at. To remember it, is to remember the emotional wound – whether brief, or that lingering, subconscious kind. And it really does come down to that cliché conceptual division, between laughing "at" someone and laughing "with" them. Truth be told, we don’t laugh with each other nearly enough; but it’s lovely when it happens - a true empathetic kind of joy, and decidedly healthy. Very different, of course, to laughing at someone. That is sadism. We find it first in young teens, who, in their evolving socialisation, take a brutal, blatant pleasure in the misfortune and chastising of others. Some would say it’s a kind of developmental phenomenon, a by-product of the mechanism of empathy being something we are not born with but grow into – as if sadism should become slowly eradicated, as we learn it is “wrong” on the basis of understanding how it makes its victims feel. Or, perhaps, it is a reactionary phenomenon, a kind of cornered or threatened mechanism, a way to attack those who we feel attack us in some way. At times, it’s probably either or both these dynamics. But human beings are, there’s no doubt about it, seemingly challenged when it comes to empathy for others, as well as rather territorial. And “comedy” – the process of eliciting laughter – has long been a favourite weapon for threatened societies who are unable to transcend the divides of that perception of threat. In the war years of my Great Grandmother, beautiful everyday Aussies sang the most horrendous comedy songs about the Asians they fought against in the war (cultural or otherwise). “I like Chinese” – bizarrely destined to be rewritten as the commercial theme for an electronics retail giant owned by Chinese Australians (“I like Bing Lee”) – was a crass tune punning the advent of the Chinese restaurants (how bizarre to think that these symbolised the perceived invasion) with literally eating Chinese people. Racism meets cannibalism – charming. And this week, all these progressive years later, we had the Chk Chk Boom Girl™. Wogs of the world, beware; we’re not that much further than 1955 as you would think.

 

I’m not going to spend time retelling the narrative, most of us know the scene. The Nine News cameras rush in to scavenge the crowd of drug-fucked Kings Cross revelers who have gathered round the “excitement” of someone getting shot. It’s just like Underbelly, but real. They find some young intoxicated girl (a waitress named Claire) who is more than happy to get her face on the camera and, in the process, “have a laugh”. They ask her what she saw, and she gives a chilling witness account.

 

 

It’s racist. I’m not sure how anyone saw that video and thought it to be anything else. I’ve got years of weekends spent in the Cross, in Oxford Street, in the club scene of the inner city – that this is perceived as in any way extraordinary makes me feel somewhat more exciting than most people must be. This is nothing. It’s the kind of racism that elicits chuckles all amongst the drugged white late-teens and young adults who stumble, in packs, through the streets where the beats roll til dawn. It’s not remotely clever. It’s just crass highschool breed racism. It’s just a video of some dumb, trashed, white Aussie, sqwarking her debasing ethnic generalisations for the validation of the other dumb, trashed white Aussies. Yawn.Someone was shot. Sorry, I just thought I should say that, because nobody else seemed to. It made worldwide media. And that’s not the shooting in the middle of the street – no, no, the world plugged into the funny girl mocking wog stereotypes as a response to a shooting.

While the victim lied in hospital, hundreds were remixing and re-editing the video into a variety of techno and hip-hop versions. “Shake shake shake shake the room…. Chk chk chk chk BOOM!”

ROFL, as they say.

Eventually, some clever journalist made the obvious leap to sticking a microphone in the victim’s face, post-surgery, and asking him what he thought of the whole thing. Funnily enough, he didn’t like it. And we didn’t like that. Some columnists – and hundreds of forum fanatics – thought he should really just “get over it”, and stop unfairly victimising poor, lovable Claire. How dare he suggest our laughter was somehow wrong? That wog really can’t take a joke. Not taking a joke (translation: not allowing the greater to make fun of you with debasing ethnic generalisations) is sooooo UnAustralian™.

In the end, the gig was up for Claire. It turned out she was lying. She saw nothing. She just happened to see the cameras arrive, and, being Gen Y, she knew exactly what to do. Perhaps the most amazing thing in all this is that most people actually needed someone to confirm that they were not watching a truthful account. Because surely, that would have happened, right? That’s what those wogs do, after all. Angry wog, shot wog… you can fill in the blanks, surely. Claire did. And it all seemed to fit for most of the country.

Tonight, she arrived on exactly the show you’d expect her to: A Current Affair. The “Journalist” (yes, I put that in inverted commas) did occasionally put it to her that maybe what she did was offensive and – just maybe – a little racist; but it was all set up only for her to respond and ultimately quash that very viewer perception. She flippantly refuted everything, the “Journalist” smiling – charmed by her Everydayness™, no less – adequately convinced by such as explanations as:

“It’s not racist. I understand how the word can be racist to older people. But in my generation, those words (like wog) don’t mean anything anymore.”

No, no, not at all a derogatory label and descriptive of an ethnic other – it meant absolutely nothing. That’s why we use words – because they have no meaning. Silly me! Do go on, Claire.

“We say things like wog, skip and bogan, to each other, all the time, and we’re just joking.”

But I’m guessing she uses “wog” to denote Lebanese, Greeks, Italians, etc; “bogans” to denote white trash Australians; and “skip”... well… I’m a little skeptical of her use of the word “skip”. Me thinks she knows to throw in a word that we know ethnic minorities use about us. Maybe she’s not as dumb as she seems. Or maybe the mechanics of racism are adapted for so long, even stupid people know how to be smartly racist.

Not to mention that the only other two words she gives as an example are words referring to white Australians – which Claire is a part of. Only one refers to an ethnic – the one she just happened to use (but not for any reason - “it didn’t mean anything”, after all) in her video using a shooting incident to make fun of wogs as gun-touting criminals who kill each other over promiscuous women.

 

Claire was backed up by Experts™, too. In fact, ACA didn’t bother to find a single expert offering anything as a counter-argument – all backed poor innocent Claire’s defense.

 

“Wogs, themselves, use the word to describe each other!” one Academic™ scoffed.

 

What? Like the word, Nigger, perhaps?

For all we may say about America (and I don’t take much of it back), they at least have a very sound cultural ideology in regards to the division between dubious lexicon being used by those it labels, and being used by others in reference to them. There’s the odd blow up, every now and then (hello, Michael Richards), but it’s just that – a blow up. It creates a furore. The Chk Chk Boom Girl™ has this week’s biggest fanclub on facebook.

“I don’t know why,” smiled Tracy Grimshaw, returning from the story, “But I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing more of that girl.”

That's probably because the exclusive was part of talks Nine are having with her. Hmmmmmm, now how can we capitalise and exploit her Fame™?

 

I have a feeling they’ll find a way.