In the leftist jihad against laughter, an important point has been overlooked. For as long as anyone can remember, the best human tonic against adversity has been humour.This is why monsters like Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden have become figures of fun in popular culture. How can we comprehend the depth of their evil other than by positioning them in the theatre of the absurd? How can we deal with the horror of their crimes without the aid of something to laugh about? It’s a natural reflex of our species to find mirth in the darkest of moments.

As a rugby league fan of the St George Illawarra Dragons, the dismal under-achievers of season 2020, I need as much laughter as I can get. There’s nothing politically correct about our team’s performance. It’s been crap.

My only coping mechanism is humour. Naturally I was delighted to see the NRL inviting fans to pay $22 to have a cardboard cutout replica of themselves placed in the Covid-emptied stadiums. More so when one wag slipped a picture of Harold Shipman through the system to have him sitting on the sidelines, watching games in Round 3. Shipman is the greatest serial killer in history, a British doctor who bumped off 250 of his patients with lethal doses of diamorphine in the 1990s.

I urged my mates to see if Pol Pot and Sirhan Sirhan could also get a grandstand spot. We’ve all heard of them, but there’s no way footy officials would know what they look like. During the NRL’s Multicultural Round, their $22 doppelgangers would probably be given a front row seat. But then Foxtel’s Matty Johns Show beat me to it. They ran a gag about Channel Nine’s Richard Wilkins by superimposing his image into the cardboard crowd, seated next to Hitler. You know the routine: ‘Who’s that evil bastard sitting there?’ ‘Oh, the one next to the bloke with the mo?’ It was funny, in a footy show kind of way.

Not for some of the peak Jewish bodies, however, the deputies of which burst onto Twitter with outrage about what they called the ‘normalisation’ of Hitler. Geez, if you were trying to repair Hitler’s reputation, wouldn’t you need to do a bit more than a fake TV image of him as a cardboard cutout in a fake crowd at a rugby league match? That’s a fair way short of ‘normalisation’. I doubt anyone watching the Johns prank thought to themselves, ‘Wow, there’s Adolf watching the footy, he must be a good bloke who did the right thing in starting a world war’.

As with all forms of PC censorship, the real offence is the Left’s assumption that people are stupid. That out in the suburbs they watch Gone With The Wind and think slavery is wonderful. Or they see Chis Lilley in dark face and think it’s someone other than a made-up comedian.Poor Chris, he could have been the next Canadian Prime Minister, but now he’s been booted off Netflix and the ABC.

The real bigotry is the bourgeois Left’s perception of working class people as idiots, as uncouth deplorables with no capacity for thinking for themselves on public issues. In the way of these things, Matty Johns apologised for his skit and begged forgiveness. We can now expect the movie Jojo Rabbit to be junked, along with thousands of comedy acts and footage where the likes of John Cleese are goose-stepping across stage, their fingers forming a mock moustache. Right on cue, as I was finishing this piece, news arrived of the BBC’s decision to delist the ‘Don’t Mention The War’ Fawlty Towers episode, due to ‘racial slurs’. This seems a strange way of highlighting Hitler’s sins: to never mention the war. How could we forget the horrors of the Holocaust while ever its architect continues to be mercilessly ragged and ridiculed as the biggest dipshit of all time?

The worst thing would be to let Hitler drop out of popular culture, to become just another figure of history, the enormity of his evil lost in the dust of archival records. The moments in life when we don’t know whether to laugh or cry are the ones we remember.This is true elsewhere in the world of sport – at the AFL and its latest round of virtue-signalling. In making its protest about fictitious Aboriginal murders in custody, the AFL has been guilty of cultural appropriation. Its players have been herded together and made to kneel at the start of games, in the style of American Colin Kaepernick’s dissing of the US national anthem. But couldn’t the AFL have found a homegrown Indigenous inspiration instead?  I’m devastated for the way in which they have overlooked Adam Goodes, the great millionaire victim of ‘racism’ in Australian sport.Wouldn’t it be more authentically Australian for the players to mimic some of the stellar moments of Goodesy’s commitment to racial harmony? Like dobbing in a 13-year-old schoolgirl or hurling mock spears at the crowd as part of a jiving war dance? But then again, the AFL has no spectators at the ground due to Coronavirus.

So here at the Neil Brown Spectator Australia Centre For Keeping The Left-Wing Offenderati Happy, we have devised the perfect solution. It’s good for everyone: for Goodesy, the AFL, NRL, outraged Jewish leaders and Black Lives Matters alike.

Put thousands of Hitler cutouts in the crowd, give the footy players real spears and let them ping the old racist Fuhrer fair between the eyes.