Hugh Hefner, Crystal Harris and the death of comedy

Crazy love ... Hugh Hefner and his then-fiancee, Crystal Harris, in April. Photograph: Fred Prouser/Reuters

The Playboy founder's former fiancee was recorded for Funny or Die sending up her unusual romance. Is this the end of satire?

Is this the oddest use to which comedy has been put? When 25-year-old "glamour" model Crystal Harris jilted her fiance, the octogenarian pornographer Hugh Hefner, this week, she did so by means of, er, sketch comedy. Romantics the world over were still adjusting to news of the couple's breakup when, hours later, Harris tweeted a link to her new video on the Funny or Die website. In it, she flogs a spoof iPhone app called the Age Gap Cheat Sheet, sending up the vast age difference between Hefner and herself and mocking the absurdity of their affair. The sketch was apparently filmed while Harris was engaged to be Hefner's wife, but it plays less like a billet-doux than a somewhat barbed Dear John.

So is this what comedy has become: a means for nano-celebrities to conduct their private lives and self-publicise at the same time? Unless I've missed something, Harris is not known as a humorist. You don't look at this woman and think Joan Rivers. But Funny or Die – a comedy video website set up by Will Ferrell's company, Gary Sanchez Productions – defines comedy broadly. Previous sketches include a not-so-hilarious spoof dating profile posted and performed by dissolute Tinseltown starletLindsay Lohan. ("I'm looking for someone I can spend the rest of my life with – or at least the rest of my probation.") Funny or Die is not only for punters looking for a laugh. It's for celebs with brand-management issues.

These days, of course, we're all supposed to be intensely relaxed – to borrow a Mandelsonian phrase – about art's compromises with marketing. In the UK, Ricky Gervais's Extras has accustomed us to celebrities establishing themselves as good sports for the price of a few laughs at their own expense. But comedy should be careful who it starts getting chummy with. I fear for it, and us, when satirising Crystal Harris and the values she represents is largely left to, er, Crystal Harris.

In such a world, what's the role of comedy that exposes celebrity for theface-eating mask that it is? Fair play to Harris for sending up herself and her ludicrous predicament. But the only pleasure the rest of us can derive from the spectacle is the prurient one of perceived insight into the psychology of a freak affair. The video's sole relationship to comedy is that it raises the spectre of a time when the middleman – ie the comedian – is cut out of the satire equation, and public figures rib themselves lightly for the amusement of the proles at home. That's seldom very funny. And it's not satire, it's self-congratulation.

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