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Keywords: Comic

  • AUSTRALIA

    Church sexual abuse in the media

    • Michael Mullins
    • 12 November 2012
    39 Comments

    Those paying close attention to media coverage of clergy sexual abuse might find Cardinal George Pell’s defence of the Church hard to swallow. But the weekend’s resignation of the BBC director general over mistakes in investigative reporting should cause us to treat the genre with a degree of scepticism, even though the media helps us to empathise with victims.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ways to unwind regret

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 October 2012
    3 Comments

    A narcissistic journalist's attempts to reunite with a former girlfriend reflect a human desire to resolve regret by returning to the past. Resolution for him lies in the agony and necessity of letting go. For his cynical intern and her eccentric friend, however, hope may be found in more metaphysical possibilities.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Historical precedents for Jones' Shamegate

    • Brian Matthews
    • 12 October 2012
    10 Comments

    The name Charles Hughes Cousens is not one that has been canvassed during the lamentable and often tawdry debate about the Alan Jones affair, but perhaps it should have been. Cousens' ordeal as the target of a treason-baying press lies in the distant but pointed background to Jones' assault on Julia Gillard.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Drowning rats of Wall Street

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 02 August 2012

    Eric Packer is 'the one per cent', who stoically discusses economics with his chief advisor even as an anti-capitalist protest broils outside his limousine; Occupy reimagined as animal anarchy, with protestors yielding spray-paint and dead rats; 'the 99 per cent' of the besieged city raging to reassert their worth.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The lighter side of dementia

    • Brian Matthews
    • 20 July 2012
    4 Comments

    Just when my friend was thinking to find a quieter place for this lost and distressed elderly woman while he worked out what to do next, she turned to him, her face alight. With one movement she opened her mouth, removed her denture and held it towards him. On the 'gum' was clearly inscribed her name and a phone number.

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  • MEDIA

    When rape is a joking matter

    • Ruby Hamad
    • 20 July 2012
    6 Comments

    US comedian Daniel Tosh sparked a furore with his now notorious rape joke. Many women have at least one story about being inappropriately and non-consensually touched — it first happened to me when I was 13. While jokes like Tosh's perpetuate such a culture, other comedians' 'rape jokes' seek to enlighten as well as entertain.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Trading fears for tears in complex asylum seeker debate

    • Fatima Measham
    • 11 July 2012
    16 Comments

    The tear-shedding in parliament over people drowning near our northwest coast was astonishing. In a decade that has seen asylum seekers demonised by policymakers, the reversal was nearly comical: asylum seekers, it turns out, are human beings. It illustrates how poorly the question of asylum has been discussed since 2001.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Steele's hymns in sickness

    • Andrew Bullen
    • 14 June 2012
    8 Comments

    'Monday is Day Oncology, where the dark burses arrive by courier, and we're glad to see them stripped for action, hooked in the air, lucent against fear.' Maybe only Steele could see these bags of chemo as Christological signs. As with the zoo once, so now the oncology ward offers hints of that other eden.

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  • RELIGION

    'Jesuit' James Joyce's Church challenge

    • Philip Harvey
    • 13 June 2012
    24 Comments

    One character sings a risqué satire called 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus'. Another wanders into a church and misinterprets the liturgy to comic effect. The puritanical Catholic hierarchy were offended, but Joyce's seemingly anti-religious novels would not exist in their final form were it not for his Jesuit education.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Intimate study of a failing marriage

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 07 June 2012
    3 Comments

    A group of women debate whether familiarity with a long-term spouse is not better than the passion of a new relationship. Everything new gets old, argues one woman. Take This Waltz is a kind of morality play about a woman torn between the familiarity of the old and the excitement of the new.

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  • RELIGION

    The Pope's butler did it!

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 31 May 2012
    53 Comments

    Catholics get used to being asked why they are Catholic. These days, in light of cases of clergy sex abuse and cover-ups, and perceived abuse of authority and contempt for women, the question is more accusatory: 'Why are you still a Catholic?' The recent affair of the Pope's butler provides a way out of this interrogation.

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  • MEDIA

    Bewailing Wikipedia's white male bias

    • Ellena Savage
    • 13 April 2012
    17 Comments

    Nearly 90 per cent of Wikipedia's editors are men, the majority in their 20s. This is not Wikipedia's fault: it exists in a world that is already weighted towards the white male experience. The murder in Florida of African-American teen Trayvon Martin has catalysed criticism of the effects of white male privilege.

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