Laughing Matter

16 March 2005



Britain's Red Nose Day Raises £37 Million

The British have some customs that no one else can quite understand. Stewed tomatoes at breakfast springs to mind. And celebrating the Queen's Birthday one a Saturday in June rather than one the anniversary of her birth. Another custom is stopping cricket matches when it rains -- while trying to play in exceedingly damp Lancashire and Yorkshire. A new tradition, known as Red Nose Day, though is easy enough to understand, using comedy to raise money for charity. It was last Friday and raised £37 million.

Charitable fundraising is usually a glum and dreary affair in which guilt plays a huge part. The recent tsunami relief efforts are a case in point. Fundraising was so successful that money exceeded needs in some cases. But it was a response to an acute situation. Chronic need, when it relies on the pictures and words, is a tougher sell. At best, the giver comes away feeling overwhelmed by the apparently bottomlessness of it all.

Red Nose Day started 20 years or so ago based on the premise that laughter and charity go together -- giving with a glad heart taken to its logical conclusion. This isn't a new revelation -- America's version of Comic Relief happened at about the same time, and Jerry Lewis' Muscular Dystrophy efforts are decades old. But as Bob Hope once observed, "If you haven't got charity in your heart, you've got the worst kind of heart trouble."

This year, the festivities included events on Radio One, Radio Two and Radio Three, and the "Red Nose Night" broadcast on TV (both BBC One and Two). Kids got in on the action with a "Blue Peter" showing where the money went in Uganda to the under 10s. Efforts to stop elder abuse in the UK, hardly a funny topic, got some of this year's funds.

The whole point, though, was to make the charitable act, the entire raison d'etre of the event, to be fun. And £37 million later, it looks like one does catch more flies with the honey of laughter than the vinegar of guilt.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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