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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Mockery well-earned


The comedy video above is called “Colin Craig Says Words - The Opera”, and I think it’s funny—particularly because it quotes Colin’s loopier statements verbatim. So, thin-skinned, humour-challenged Colin will probably threaten to sue. He’s threatened to do that before, after all.

The video is on the YouTube Channel of Robbie Ellis who is on piano (the tenor is Andrew Grenon). Ellis has done several videos, some humour, like this one, with Grenon. Since New Zealand television has no political comedy shows, I think people doing videos like this is a great thing.

But, of course, Colin kind of lends himself to mockery. Just today itw as announced that TVNZ is being forced to apologise to Colin because the Broadcast Standards Authority ruled that back in April the “Seven Sharp” TV show was mean to poor little Colin—sniff, sniff! It was, in my genuinely held opinion, one of the most boneheaded decisions the BSA has ever issued. The BSA doesn’t seem to understand humour and satire any more than Colin does.

Colin is a public personality because he leads a party and is still being seriously talked about as a potential prop—sorry, “coalition partner”—to keep John Key in power. As a political figure, Colin has to expect harsh criticism, satire, mockery and belittling. It goes with the territory. If he can’t take that, then perhaps he should reconsider whether he wants to even be in politics. It’s his choice, after all.

A few weeks ago, I said about Colin, “Dude’s not crazy”. I stand by that, despite Colin’s best efforts to prove me wrong, as evidenced by his nuttier statements (some of which are in the video). The thing is, even his nutty statements are similar to things said by radical right politicians and activists in the USA, though they usually don’t put things in quite the way Colin has.

The upside of all this mocking of Colin is that it makes it less and less likely that he can ever be taken seriously. And, all the better, Colin himself is providing the comedy material.

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