John Roughan: Best humour is love-based

One of the things that survivors of convent school laugh about in later life is the tales they were told by nuns with names like Sister Ignatius.

I don't think nuns like Sister Ignatius are around any more, tough old crones who would swat you with their rosary beads at the drop of a pencil, but they carried in their heads a fund of gruesome and glorious stories that could keep a class spellbound.

The stories were always about saints and martyrs and quite a few featured characters or relics who bore what the church called stigmata. The dictionary defines stigmata in Christian belief as marks corresponding to those left on Christ's body by the crucifixion. But according to what we were told, they were not just marks, they bled.

So when I read a synopsis of the "Bloody Mary" satire that CanWest proposed to put on television I was not immediately offended. It sounded gross but it also sounded like it could have been made by blokes who had been held spellbound by the stories of Sister Ignatius.

One of the interesting things about offence is that it is rarely committed by people who know their target intimately. Try as they might, detest the subject as they might, they understand it too well to be truly vicious. At the same time their intimacy with the subject can improve the fun they have with it. It has been often noted that the best humour is grounded in love, not hate.

That was the difference between someone like David Lange, who loved human nature, and a dry wit such as Sir Robert Jones who was never half as funny.

The religious element in the South Park satire sounded like it could work, the menstruation reference, less so. That could only be the work of blokes. I could believe Helen Clark would find the programme repugnant, I was less convinced it would be offensive on religious grounds.

The Catholic bishops' letter to their congregations last Sunday had been less than convincing. They had not then seen the programme and seemed to be speaking out mainly to meet the expectations of Catholics looking for a cause. Many Christians who applauded media that deferred to Muslim sensitivities over the recent cartoons had wondered aloud whether they would receive the same consideration.

Here, sooner than they could have hoped, was a comparable case. Those who had defended publication of the offensive cartoons also drew the comparison and were quick to support the television programme.

When the broadcasters decided to bring it forward to this week they did me a favour. For to my mind this case was different from the Danish cartoons in one respect. We knew the cartoons had been commissioned to offend a religion that neither the cartoonists nor the publishers knew intimately or understood very well.

Not so, possibly, the South Park programme. I didn't need to see the cartoons to know there was no good reason to publish them. I did need to see this programme.

I tuned into C4, where I'd never been before, eager to apply my own test of offensiveness. It is an intuitive test. If the programme was going to hurt me, as the Virgin in the Condom hurt me, I would know it in my heart.

It is this spiritual character of religious belief that makes the subject such a difficult one for thinking people to deal with. As far as they can tell, religion is a purely cerebral orientation much like their adherence to civil liberties and all the values of the enlightenment.

That leads them to see a false conflict, fearing that any deference to religious sensitivity is a surrender of the freedoms they hold dear.

Ignorance of religion leads these people to say the most facile things. Brian Edwards, discussing the South Park programme on Newstalk ZB one morning this week, said, "You have got to distinguish between respect for people who hold a belief and respect for the belief."

After a little diatribe on the absurdity of the idea of virgin birth he went on, "What these people are saying is, you must respect this belief and if you don't we will punish you."

He could not be more wrong. All these recent issues of religious offence are entirely about respect for people, not their creed necessarily. I have no respect for certain tenets of Islam, or of Christianity if it comes to that, but I understand the importance religion has in the heritage and identity of people and I think what's important to them deserves a degree of care.

If religious people cannot easily explain the nature of their wound when they're offended it nevertheless should not be beyond the capacity of people like Edwards to figure it out.

His pretence of respect for the religious as people is mere cant anyway. How exactly does he propose to demonstrate his declared respect for them while reserving the right to defecate on images sacred to them?

Defecate, by the way, turned out to be not too far from what the producers of the Bloody Mary episode did with the Madonna. Did they hit me in the heart? No. It was gross, needlessly so, and it was the least clever element of a clever little sketch. But it didn't meet my test of offence.

It was quite funny in a devilishly juvenile way and it was part of a valid poke at the way religion can be perverted for purposes that relieve people of personal responsibility. It was a far stronger comment on modern social therapy and the destructive psychology of victimhood than on anybody's religion.

I wouldn't be surprised if Edwards was offended.

You will be thinking I don't like him, but it is important to distinguish between him and his beliefs. It his trite liberal orthodoxy that always rubs me up the wrong way.

Whenever I hear that comfortable academic humanism, the pseudo-compassion for the crowd, I have the urge to offend him, if that is possible, in the cold, dead circuitry of his soul.

That is a bit nasty but he wouldn't want me to censor myself, not with his beliefs in free speech and all. Anyway, I'm not being entirely gratuitous. I am trying to help him understand the nature of religious offence.

What hurts people is not what is said about them or their race, religion or other element of their identity, but rather the fact that somebody would wilfully hurt them out of the blue, with a cartoon, a column, a quip, for no good reason that they can see.

When they can see a good reason - and genuine humour can be a very good reason - they don't take offence. Not really, not in there where it hurts.