What's the problem with this moralising? The issue is not the piety per se, but the pretence that that's not what's going on. Why don't they all call themselves 'Reverend' and be done with? At least that would be honest. The pose of being an iconoclast, which adds to the comic an aura of authenticity, simply isn't convincing. These three aren't naughty boys, they are would-be messiahs.

They are actually deeply conservative, with a strong sense of universal and objective right and wrong, and a feeling of deep injustice when this sense is offended. They do not challenge the establishment and its values; they work for it, and preach them.

Only, it is not cool to own that out loud. You have to cover that with an ironic veneer if you want to be popular.

Dr Michael Jensen is the rector at St Mark's Anglican Church, Darling Point, NSW.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-11/jensen-comedians-have-become-sanctimonious-televangelists/7239764

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April 2015: Here let me mention another Charlie, the ABC's, pitiful, atrociously annoying attempt at satire by Charlie Pickering... Called the Weakly (sorry the Weekly) with Charlie Pickering, last night it replaced the finely-tuned high-octane satire Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell... Was there discreet pressure from politicians on the ABC to get that biting show off our screens ? Were the ABC lawyers shitting in their pants, as usual with Shaun Micallef's satire that was close to the bone, after cutting into the rotten flesh of politics? Who knows... But it looks as if the Shaun Micallef's show had two more episode to go for the season with a promising sixth season since our politicians are getting madder and madder... I don't know. Possibly it could have been due to budgetary consideration. The Weakly (sorry the Weekly) with Charlie Pickering must has been produced on the smell of two used toilet rolls. Very well done if you "still" work for the ABC.

It appears as if the show was like the recycling of another poor rating ABC show which also pertained to dissect the funny bits of "news" from the media. Horribly unfunny, puerile, possibly designed to catch the non-watchers — the young adolescents who are busy twittering fart jokes and kids who should be in bed by 8 thirty.

There is satire and there's satire...

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March 2016: I must say, there has been some improvements at the Weakly. But not enough to warrant watching five minutes of infantile tirades while I am in my later years of adulthood and getting older by the minute. I'm busy. I've got other things to do than to listen to what has been said 44 years ago with a better delivery then. So I could agree with the rector of St Marks, (church of A) in CONservative Darling Point Sydney — but I won't.

Preach?  No these blokes and sheilas of comedy do not preach... They only try to be funny by looking at their own navels and exposing the hypocrisy of some other people's navel, but they are afraid of saying so, so they take far too long to make their laborious point. By the end, only the juveniles amongst us will have a laugh, possibly because the moralisationing finish contains a turd joke or a bad anal-ogy (wink wink). But they sometimes hit the mark. It's a bit like shooting ducks with small gauge... shoot and miss or luck. Remove the pellets before eating the duck. Not well crafted despite the formulae. lots of rubbish filler in between. Television deserves better comedy than that... I agree, but then who would be watching? And most comedian doing biting political/sexist jokes would end up in prison.

Then again, we used to laugh at the dirty Benny Hill chases of women. At least they were speeded up with music to match.

The sad part is that some of these "comics" are conservative, unconvincing like a Sunday sermon and are as boring. So, where to from here? The point is that religion and comedy are done for bucks these days... Religion sells you a space in heaven while comedy tells you for a buck that you wasted your cash because the spot is free... Meanwhile you should know that heaven does not exist, but there is no cash in telling you so.

I must say I am not a fan of the Tim Minchin's song about Pell. But this reservation is more about the style of satire, in which the rhymes are more than loose. Quite ugly really but effective in raising cash to send people affected by pedophile priests, to Rome. But I'd expected a bit more tidiness at the end of each lines. Pell deserves to be pilloried — but done with satirical subtle panache and less grubbiness. 

Look who's taking! A crass cartoonist with a crooked pencil and who often uses words that don't exist in the dictionary... That's life.