DVIR ABRAMOVICH: Mocking Anne Frank and Holocaust victims isn’t edgy — it’s a sign of deep cultural decay

There is a sound that unsettles more than a scream. Not a gasp. Not even a whisper of protest.

Just laughter.

That was the sound at the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, when Concetta Caristo, co-host of Triple J’s breakfast program, stood under the lights and delivered a line that should never have been spoken:

“Put me in a room with Anne Frank and I’d say, “S..t, I have a diary too! Congrats on the book deal.”

And they laughed.

Earlier this year, it happened again. Another room. The Sydney comedy troupe YeahMad: “Why didn’t Anne Frank finish her diary? Concentration problems.”

Again, the room cracked open. The machinery of mockery grinding a little louder.

I am trying to understand this.

And failing.

There are moments in a culture that don’t just test taste. They reveal character. And this, this, is one of them.

Because when we chuckle at a child who died in a concentration camp, we’re not making a joke. We’re revealing something about our own capacity to feel. When a society laughs at a girl who died of typhus in a camp built to erase her people, something has torn loose. Not just taste. Not just restraint. But the moral thread that ties us to the past — and to each other.

Let me tell you what wasn’t funny.

The lice. The cold. The final entry in her diary, written just days before she was found.

Let me tell you what it feels like to be Jewish and to raise Jewish children in a world that once organised itself to kill them. A world where your name, your accent, your daughter’s last initial could be a death sentence.

So when I hear jokes like these, I see the girl they’re mocking.

I see Anne, 13 maybe 14, writing by candlelight in a room she couldn’t leave. I see the fragile ink on the page.

The train car. The barracks. The cold slabs of Bergen-Belsen where she died, barefoot and starving.

And then I see a stage. A microphone. Someone calling her “s..t.”

They say it’s just a joke. That comedy heals. That it “punches up.” But who was being healed in that moment?

Not Anne. Not the millions who shared her fate.

Some say everything can be joked about. Maybe so. But not everything should be.

Not all wounds scab over. Some remain open. Some still bleed.

These jokes weren’t born from pain. They came from distance. From people living in Melbourne who have never once imagined their child hiding behind a wall, whispering through hunger, wondering if today is the day they are found.

And no, this isn’t just about Concetta Caristo. But we need to speak to her, too.

Concetta, I don’t know you.

I want to believe you are not cruel. I want to believe you stood on that stage trying to be clever, not callous.

I want to believe you lost your way in the spotlight, not in your soul.

But you stood there, under warm lights, with people looking up at you, and you called a murdered teenager a slut. A girl who died in rags, with lice in her hair and hunger in her bones.

And they laughed. And you smiled. And the moment passed, as if it meant nothing at all.

But it did mean something. It meant that even now, even here, the memory of a child who was hunted and killed can be turned into a punchline, and no one stops the show.

Maybe in that moment, the weight of her story didn’t land. Maybe it slipped past you. The truth that Anne Frank didn’t “get a book deal”.

She got betrayal. She got typhus. She got a shallow mass grave. She never made it to 16.

The world didn’t need another joke about her. It needed someone in that room to say: enough.

That someone should have been you.

It still can be.

But this trend doesn’t begin or end with Caristo. Anne Frank has become, somehow, a target, the most recognisable name for people who want to push boundaries without actually risking anything. Ricky Gervais once joked that she got caught because she was typing too loudly.

David Mitchell imagined her father buying her a drum kit. At Harvard, the student humour magazine pasted Anne Frank’s face onto a lingerie model with the caption: “Add this to your list of reasons the Holocaust sucked”.

This is not a local lapse. This is a cultural rot, spreading across stages, screens, and feeds.

Imagine a joke about the children in Rwanda who were hacked to death with machetes.

Or the women in Darfur dragged into camps and never seen again. There are no punchlines in mass graves. The moment we allow genocide, any genocide, to be mined for entertainment, we declare that no suffering is sacred.

That every atrocity is fair game, so long as the setup lands.

If you read Anne’s diary, really read it, you don’t walk away with a bit. You walk away with grief. With awe. With fury that the same world that let her die now lets her be mocked.

We are living in a time when memory is thinning. Where TikTok dances are filmed outside the gates of Auschwitz. Where Holocaust jokes go viral, and Anne Frank becomes a meme.

I am not calling for censorship. I am calling for conscience.

Let us draw one line. A clear one. A line that says: the murder of 6 million Jews, including one and a half million children, is not a punchline.

It is not content. It is not yours to perform.

If you have a child, look at them tonight. Look at their face. Their hands. Now, imagine someone turning their death into a joke. That’s what this is. That’s who she was. A girl who liked movie stars. A girl who dreamed of kissing a boy. A girl who never got to finish her sentence.

And Anne Frank, who once wrote, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”, deserves better than this.

We owe her more than memory. We owe her honour. We owe her a world where no child is ever turned into a punchline again.

She is not a joke. She is not content. She is not yours to own.

Anne Frank is every child who ever wrote by candlelight, hoping someone would care enough to remember her.

We are that someone.

And if we are not, then who will be?

Because it always starts with a laugh.

And sometimes, it ends in ash.

Dvir Abramovich is the chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission