Paul Thomas: Learn to laugh a little

The musical comedy The Producers has won more Tony Awards - Broadway's equivalent of the Oscars - than any other show.

Time magazine called it "a gift from the showbiz gods" and it has been credited with reviving the fortunes of The Great White Way. Even when ticket prices hit US$485, the "full house" sign stayed up.

The stage show is an adaptation of the 1968 film by Mel Brooks, the prankster behind the western spoof Blazing Saddles, which did for baked beans what Last Tango in Paris did for butter.

It's about a struggling Broadway producer who figures out a way to make a financial killing from a huge flop. The key is to come up with a show so repugnant, so contrary to accepted notions of what constitutes healthy entertainment, that it can't help but fold on opening night.

That show is Springtime for Hitler, a romp of a musical set in wartime Nazi Germany.

The scheme backfires: Springtime For Hitler is seen as groundbreaking satire and becomes a huge hit.

The movie itself didn't - it was panned on the grounds of tastelessness on release. The New York Times critic wrote: "I suppose we'll have cancer, Hiroshima and malformity musicals next."

The first thing that needs to be said about humour is that, like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. One generation's cutting-edge satire is another's pointless bad taste.

The second is that every joke has a butt. One of the oldest gags is a man slipping on a banana skin - hilarious to see, painful to do.

The blandest children's cartoons revolve around someone copping it. Wile E. Coyote devotes every waking hour to catching the Road Runner but all his elaborate schemes go horribly wrong, he ends up pulverised and children the world over clap their hands with glee.

Comedy is fun at someone else's expense; we laugh at the fall-guy's pain and/or humiliation. Reality TV shows such as Jackass are post-modern variations on this theme - now everyone's in on the joke. The fall-guy laughs at his own pain and/or humiliation and the audience, partly in bemusement at the lengths to which some will go to get on TV, laughs along with them.

The third is that humour with a satiric or subversive intent - which seeks to deflate or discomfort or challenge individuals and organisations that exercise some power and influence over the rest of us - will always be denounced by those on the receiving end.

One of the great satirists of our time is the American cartoonist Garry Trudeau, whose Doonesbury strip has been poking fun at America's movers and shakers - sometimes with a very sharp stick - since 1970.

A memorable Doonesbury sequence was "The Mysterious World of Reagan's Brain" in which a reporter is miniaturised and sent inside President Ronald Reagan's head to find out exactly what, if anything, is in there.

This journey is narrated in the terse cadences of an intrepid explorer in a boy's own yarn: "March 25 - Progress up the brain stem is maddeningly slow. Sludge slides block our way at every turn."

Many newspapers dropped the strip, causing one that presumably didn't to comment that "Any voters who might be influenced by something they read on the comic page probably shouldn't be voting".

While one can only wonder at the toadying instincts of those editors who took up the censor's pencil on behalf of the most powerful man on Earth, the editorialist got it wrong.

Trudeau was making exactly the same point as any number of political commentators - that the leader of the free world was, to a remarkable degree, untroubled by intellectual curiosity - but because he did it by taking the piss rather than with earnest long-windedness, there was greater likelihood of readers getting the point.

Which brings us to Popetown, the cartoon show that made it debut on C4 this week. Even before it reached our screens, the Catholic Church's apparatus had moved into sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut mode.

As is often the case, the attack was two-pronged: various spokespeople accused the show of being disrespectful and offensive to Catholics. They then donned their critic's hats to add that, by the way, it's also childishly unfunny.

As Mandy Rice-Davies said of those eminent citizens who accused her of lying about their involvement in the Profumo scandal: "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?"

Having sat through the first episode, all that needs to be said of Popetown is that the new Pope needn't let it deflect him from his mission to turn the clock back. Compared to the damage done by a single predatory priest, Popetown amounts to the merest pinprick in Catholicism's large and leathery backside.

And a word of advice for any Christian soldiers inclined to keep up the attack: the more fuss you make, the bigger the audience.

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington writer.