A Triple J radio host and rising ABC star has come under fire after she called Anne Frank a ‘sl**’ during a stand-up routine at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Concetta Caristo, a co-host of Triple J’s breakfast program, made the shocking remarks about the Holocaust survivor after she described herself as a ‘girls’ girl’ who could get along with ‘any girl in the world, even in history’.
‘Like, put me in a room with Cleopatra and I’d be like, “Oh my god, I love your eyeliner”, or with Anne Frank and I’d say, “sl**, I have a diary too – congrats on the book deal”,’ Caristo said during the set.
The joke has been condemned by the chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, who described it as a ‘brutal desecration’ of the memory of the Holocaust.
‘This wasn’t just a joke. It was a brutal desecration of the memory of Anne Frank and the one and a half million Jewish children who were murdered in the Holocaust – gassed, shot, starved, erased,’ Dr Dvir Abramovich said.
‘When someone takes a victim of genocide and turns her into an obscene punchline, they don’t just mock her – they violate her.’
Anne Frank was just 15-years-old when she died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just months after she was discovered hiding in a secret annex in Amsterdam.
Her diary, discovered after the war, has become one of the most powerful and enduring personal accounts of the Holocaust.
Concetta Caristo (pictured) has been criticised over making a joke calling Anne Frank a ‘slut’
Dr Abramovich criticised Caristo for using Frank’s memory to gain laughs.
‘Anne Frank was fifteen. She didn’t get a book deal. She got typhus. She got starvation. She got a death sentence in Bergen-Belsen,’ he said.
‘And now, in the country she never reached, at a festival meant to celebrate human creativity, someone turned the story of a murdered girl into stage material.’
The chairman also took issue with the word ‘sl**,’ describing it as a ‘term of sexual humiliation aimed at a girl who never lived long enough to become a woman’.
‘A joke like this tears something in us. This was kicking, using the silence of a dead girl to get a noise from the crowd,’ he continued.
‘In today’s culture, only Jewish trauma is up for sale. The genocide of six million has become fair game for cheap laughs.’
Dr Abramovich called on the ABC and Triple J to publicly condemn the joke.
‘This is not edgy. It’s empty. It’s what happens when cruelty becomes currency. Anne Frank is not a meme. She is not material for your set of “jokes”,’ he said.
The video of the joke was removed, minutes after Caristo’s management was approached by Daily Mail Australia for comment (Caristo is pictured)
‘She was a young woman whose last words were never written because her pencil was taken from her.’
When contacted by Daily Mail Australia, Caristo’s management declined to comment, saying she was ‘away this week and not available’.
Photos from the host’s Instagram account show her kayaking in Hamilton Island.
Daily Mail Australia has approached the ABC for comment.
Minutes later, a video of Caristo’s set was deleted from Facebook.
