If you haven’t heard about them, I’m gonna be talking about The Chaser Team. The comedians that have bought greate Aussie comedy to our screens, including CNNNN, The Chaser Decides and most recently The Chasers War on Everything.

I’m a big fan of the Chaser. They’re politcal satire and comedy skits are fantastic. Willing to test the boundaries no other show, or no other TV Network is willing to go. Every other TV network has to keep their sponsors happy, not the viewers. The Chaser being on the ABC means they’re given almost a leash free run, well I must stress almost.

In 2007, The Chaser Team made international headlines when they successfully breached APEC Security in Sydney Australia, by pretending to be a Canadian Motorcade. The NSW Police let them through the biggest security operation in the nations history, without a single check. It wasn’t until the motorcade got meters from trained snipers on then President George W Bush’s hotel, that the Chaser executive producer (Julian Morrow) decided to turn the motorcade around.

In 2008, The Chaser team took a year off the air to go around the country with their live show. Now back on TV screens in 2009, the second episode of the season has got the show into hot water. There was a national outcry when a skit targeted seriously sick children. The skit, made the point that terminally sick kids in hospital should not have celebrity wishes, or things happen for them, because they were “going to die anyway”.

Although I can see why there would be such a reaction to the skit, I think people need to step back, and stop be so fucking self obsessed. The Chaser is a satirical comedy show. Not everything in the show is meant to be taken literally! There’s so much political correctness and people bitching that now, Australian TV will miss out on 2 weeks of the TV show, because the ABC has suspended it.

If you can’t take a joke, then don’t bitch about it and ruin it for the people that are actually smart enough to see the Chaser for what it is. A satire! Meant to evoke emotions.

The Chasers website has been taken offline, and now displays an appology that reads:

A message from The Chaser team.

We want to make an apology for a sketch we created called “The Make a Realistic Wish Foundation”.

We’ve just heard from the ABC that they’re suspending the show for 2 weeks. We were keen to keep making the show, so we’re disappointed by the decision, and we don’t agree with it.

But that aside, we’d like to apologise. The piece was a very black sketch. Obviously too black. And we’re really sorry for the significant pain and anger we have caused.

Many people have asked how could we possibly think a sketch like that should go to air. We realize in hindsight that we shouldn’t have done it. We never imagined that the sketch would be taken literally. We don’t think sick kids are greedy and we don’t think the Make a Wish Foundation deserves anything other than praise. It was meant to be so over-the-top that no one would ever take it seriously.

But we now understand the sketch didn’t come across as intended, and we take full responsibility for that. Now we’ve seen the impact of the piece we wish we’d thought it through better. There was no value in it that justifies the impact it’s clearly had on people whose grief or trauma is so great already. We should have considered that. We got it wrong. We’re sorry.

We’ll be making no further comment at this time.

Coincidentally, we had planned to use this long weekend to refresh our website at the conclusion of some redesign work, and it will be back online in a few days’ time.

Lets hope the Chaser’s war on everything survives this ’shitstorm’ to battle another day!

The Chaser has my full support, and I hope the winging people in this country can learn to take a joke, and get over it. If you can’t laugh at yourselves, then you can’t enjoy life.