Leaked guidelines for tobacco reporting, and THR humour

Paul has written written about leaked journalist guidelines for reporting stories on tobacco on the tobacco harm reduction blog.

If you read the blogpost you will soon realise that it is not entirely serious.

I thought it was a good send-up of tobacco writing , although I might have made it more over the top. I did think it was serious for a few minutes, and then had a laugh when I realised it wasn’t.

It may be a cultural thing, but I think humour is better when it doesn’t have big lines saying “THIS IS FUNNY” all over it. I like the sudden realisation that something is a giant piss-take. Some of the commenters didn’t, however, and were quite angry at being taken in.

I’ve taken some abuse myself, particularly over our Dangerous and Disgusting video, which I thought was blatantly obvious satire but brought in comments such as this:

Your bashing a product that works just so you can try and promote your pathetic little nicocrap pills…like i said go **** a garbage disposal you twitchy little virgin, ill smoke whatever i **** well please

Abuse or not, I think parody has worked. My piss-taking video has received 120,000 views whereas videos of our interviews with scientists have just had a few hundred. And parodys such as Smokle’s  Health Canada takes on the anti-tobacco industry have rated more comments and interest than serious articles. Besides which, there is just no point in taking life too seriously. So, I say carry on the good work, Paul, and if people get pissed off enough to write arsy comments about you remember Oscar Wilde’s wise advice:

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Tags: humour, tobacco

Related posts:

1. Dumbing Down the Electronic Cigarette Message
2. Smoking Kills Movie- Humour!
3. Major Change in UK Attitude to Tobacco Harm Reduction?
4. Leaked Letter: MHRA decision made before consultation
5. Health Canada Take On the Tobacco Industry

humour, tobacco humour