Actually, political satire of the middle-class palatable kind - and there’s an oxymoron if ever one imploded - has been more-or-less dead for at least a decade, on just such TR grounds. You know the genre’s gone squiffy when the political lint-pickers’ tactic of first resort is good-humored - even eager - assimilation. If the absence of Charles Firth - the Brian Jones of The Chaser backstory (the true anarchic groundbreaker, the Real Deal nutter geenyus, the logical-endpoint boundary pusher, etc etc)* - didn’t white bread it into the comedy grave, Rudd’s nerd-cheery permission to jolly well ‘satirise us pollies, boys, we’re fair game’ has. Private Eye catchphrases invoked playfully in Westminster, Fey and Palin mirroring-up on SNL, our ‘boys’…come on, it’s all a bit like mum showing you where dad hides his wank mag stash, isn’t it (‘Do feel free, dear…’). Thus, the underwhelming spectacle of contemporary ‘edge-cutting’ in the only way left: evermore obnoxious middle-class wannabe Peter Cooks (Exhibit A-1 of the mo’ being Sacha Baron Cohen) light on talent, heavy on chutzpah, overweight on production values and morbidly obese on ambition, browbeating the increasingly bemused (and bored) non-satirical meeja and general public into playing obliging stooge to evermore ponderously, unfunnily elaborate set-ups.

It’s really all just a bit bleh. When irony’s a social default position it and all wot turns on it ceases to be. It’s not that satire’s dead - it’s just f*cking exhausted. To stop a complete collapse it needs to be supported by the tangible Show Biz talent of a Tim Minchin, a Wharf Review squad, a Lehrer. Give it a rest, everyone else, for gawd’s sake. If The Chaser boys are for real they’ll walk, tomorrow. Do something else for a while. In reality they never jumped the shark: they were lobbed casually over it in passing a couple of years back, when Malcolm Turnbull shrugged off an attempted ambush with the killer punchline: ‘Sorry, I’m not interested in playing your straight man…’ And so say all of us, ‘satirist’ dudes. Say, here’s a cutting edge idea: how about you tell some jokes, do some funny voices, and maybe a little dance?

(* I reckon…Reucassel = Jagger, Licciardello = Wood, Morrow = Wyman, Taylor = Watts, Hansen = Keef. Dom Knight is poor, stage-unfriendly Stu Sutcliffe, banished to play keyboard from the wings…)

Get real

Unlike those smarmy, smug, self-righteous little pricks on the Chaser