So this guy walked into the 'loo, or was that a bar, and pulled out a jar of mango chutney and bunged on a funny accent ...

And so to the ongoing tragedy of Bill Leak.

The decline and fall of satirists is always a pitiful sight.

Barry Humphries is one such example, Patrick Cook another ...

But has there ever been a more tragic figure than Bill Leak?

Oh okay, we kept Larry Pickering out of the mix because we didn't want to go there. Anne Summers went there here, but if the pond had its druthers, we'd rather link to Larry Pickering - the conman stalking Gillard.

Back to the tragedy of Bill Leak and the news of the tragedy spread a little further thanks to social media and the Graudian here.

Well yes, it's the kool aid at work yet again.

Hang around long enough in the bunker and you lose all connection to the real world.

The pond could forgive Leak, could forgive other humorists if their racist humour was funny. 

But usually it isn't, usually it just relies on cheap laughs like mango chutney and dumb lumpenproletariat wogs being as thick as a brick or a solar panel...

It's unlikely that the reptiles will respond in any meaningful way ...

It's also part of the ongoing tragedy that Leak doesn't understand he's a tragic figure.

Anyone with a sense of perspective or proportion, or an understanding of comedy would slink away and cower in a corner if they'd put their name to that cartoon.

The world's moved on - oh okay, not Shane Warne and the average Australian footballer and Sam Newman - from "a mango chutney eater, a porridge eater and a pillow muncher walked into a bar ..."

Some time ago the reptiles reprinted Leak's defence of his situation. He seemed to think it was all about leftism and ideology ...

Actually it's all about comedy. 

Showing Robert Manne having a shit isn't funny. 

You could draw him as a turd and it still wouldn't be funny ... oh okay, maybe for Shane Warne and Sam Newman, but not too many others ...

So far as the pond's concerned, it's Leak's fall from comedy grace that's the tragedy. He used to be funny, but then some time in his career he lost the timing. Isn't it funny, isn't it queer ...

Patrick Cook was also abandoned by the gods of comedy and funny. Who knows why, but it's obvious enough when it happens ...

On and on Leak went, digging himself into the ideological hole ...

Actually it wasn't Voltaire who said it, but let the pedantry go, let's get back to the funny.

There's nothing funny about mango chutney. 

You might get a laugh out of Marlon Brando and butter ... well at least with Sam Newman and Shane Warne ... but in generality, butter's not that funny either ...

Now the pond is all for the freedom to offend, though being of an age, it's hard to get offended about anything.

What the pond wants is a good laugh, a bit of wit, perhaps the flash of a rapier blade and a Z inscribed on the face, sharply and with precision ...

Not a smearing of mango chutney and silly Indians ...

So this defence doesn't work for the pond ...

What is it with the talk of cesspits? Are we harking back to Robert Manne taking a crap?

Leak is free to go on offending anyone he likes, but the main offence he commits on a daily basis these days is against the gods of comedy and funny.

The pond can remember laughing at pooh jokes in primary school. Having a food fight was fun too - bring on the mango chutney - but at some point you have to put away childish jokes and find adult jokes to laugh at ...

And there's the tragedy. These days it's not his cartoons that are funny, it's Leak himself ... in a funny sad kind of way ...

The pond doesn't imagine Leak will be silenced any time soon ... the tragedy is that he should silence himself, before it gets worse, but no doubt he imagines it's all some kind of left wing conspiracy ...

Actually Leak has a companion cartoonist at the rag, Kudelka. He's funny. Sometimes he isn't but sometimes he is. Sometimes he's touched by the gods of comedy and funny .... 

Leak isn't, on a depressingly regular basis. 

Oops, scrub all that. It seems babies' nappies have been funny since at least 1986 ...