The man isn’t even dead yet and the vultures are out in force.

Look, I don’t need to tell you that I like a laugh. I’m known around the office as the “office cut up”. A Monday doesn’t go by without me commenting on it. My speeches at the Walkley awards are legendary for the laughter they received. And I assure you, they’re laughing with me, not at me.

And you don’t need to remind me of comedy’s proud political and satirical history. I was the one who came up with the term “their ABC”. Cheeky, yes, but pointed. It’s no wonder I was likened to Richard Pryor in my twitter profile.

But these jokes in the wake of US President Barack Obama’s death are just too much. The man isn’t even dead yet and the vultures are out in force, picking the carrion off his still alive body.

I have my issues with the man, he increased access to health care and honoured former President George W. Bush’s promise to withdraw from Iraq, creating ISIS somehow. But he was the president of the world’s largest power, and a man, and he deserves our respect. If, as Steve Allen hypothesised, comedy is tragedy plus time, then you need to remember the time part of the equation. And the tragedy part.

Comedy is about reassuring us. It’s about poking through the darkness of life, like Wednesday being the “hump” of the working week. It makes us see things in a new light through the use of image macros.

But there’s no way to make death funny, no matter what angle or position the joke takes. It doesn’t matter if the dead man is not the target of the joke, or if it’s a launching point for something more absurd. All you can do is wait an appropriate amount of time and then tell the jokes you would have told a little earlier.

You don’t get “cool points” for getting in early. Only Dennis Miller can give out cool points and Dennis Miller’s joke writers at least wait until the person’s dead before making jokes about their death.

Satire’s been trapped in a downward spiral ever since Jonathan Swift made fun of eating babies, despite their high protein values. We need to demand better from our comedians. I, for one, will boycott any topical comedy show or website that doesn’t wait at least two months before making jokes about a topic. I hope you join me.

Matthew Farthing is an opinion columnist for The (un)Australian. His article about former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser entitled “The Two Malcolm Frasers” won a Walkley award for revealing that Malcolm Fraser kept his more conservative identical twin locked in his basement.

https://twitter.com/MattJFarthing

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Categories: Opinion

Tags: Barack Obama, Malcolm Fraser, Matthew Farthing, The unAustralian