Promising to Turn Someone Into a Sausage Roll is Not a Genuine ‘Death Threat’

Today, September 10th, marks a full year since Charlie Kirk’s shooting, meaning the issue of death-threats is back in many of our minds at the moment. Which poses the question, how should we distinguish between genuine death threats and those which are clearly intended to be satirical or ironic? What if you threatened to ambush your target in the woods, pull down their underwear, shove a large stick up their bum, stir it around so quickly that their guts transform themselves into meat purée, and then funnel the resultant pink mess out into a small pastry jacket, before serving it all up to unsuspecting passers-by as a free sausage roll, like Sweeney Todd reimagined via Itchy & Scratchy?

Somewhat surprisingly, this highly impractical method of killing was held by the oversensitive Australian broadcasting regulators to be a genuine death-threat.

Meat is murder

Gina Reinhart is Australia’s richest person, the mega-billionaire heiress of a mining corporation and prominent funder of conservative causes, who is often derided by Left-wing comedians as a greedy pig and something of a spoiled bratwurst. In July, the Australian BBC equivalent, ABC, broadcast a fake forest-survival guide comedy sketch (footage here) by satirical film-maker Kate McGuinness, in which she asked: “When the revolution comes will you hide under the bed, or will you know exactly how to shove a stick right up Gina Rinehart’s butthole, stirring it round, mixing her guts up nice and smooth, to make one big sausage roll to make something out of nothing?”

I think that may well count as being the ultimate rhetorical question, but not to Gina Rinehart herself, whose mining company sent threatening legal letters to ABC, demanding removal of the ‘threat’ from streaming-service episodes of the show, in addition to a public apology and a “comprehensive investigation” into how the whole thing had happened in the first place. When, a week later, ABC had failed to expunge footage of the ‘threat’, despite “the serious risks its publication and continued publication pose to Mrs Rinehart”, the lawyers formally placed the broadcaster on notice that legal action would be lodged against it, over “serious contraventions of multiple Australian criminal and civil laws”.

Initially ABC resisted, but before long politicians were getting involved, complaining the segment was “pretty revolting” and “unacceptable”, while overexcited TV commentators began literally accusing the broadcaster of encouraging viewers to sodomise women with tree-branches. Rinehart’s lawyers were clear they thought McGuinness’s words were actual incitement, calling it “nothing short of disgusting that the ABC would encourage and normalise… murder” and deploring how the organisation “believes it can hide behind the false shield of ‘satire’ to glorify sexualised and political violence”.

Others theorised it might spark cases of imitative domestic abuse. Maybe it also encouraged cannibalism? According to one academic, the sketch “uncritically invokes the familiar, misogynist representation of women as meat”. The gruesome method of execution described was laughably called behaviour “practised by terrorists”. When did Al-Qaeda do that? Muslims don’t even eat pork products.

Silly sausages

Faced with this tirade of pretend outrage, ABC folded. In August, an internal ombudsman ruled the broadcaster had done absolutely nothing wrong, but high-ups removed the offending words nonetheless, apparently leading all legal action to be abandoned.

Furthermore, ABC formally apologised and agreed to amend its editorial guidelines so that “no individual should be the subject of comedy that is violent in its description in our programming”. So, all future national broadcasting was to be perpetually censored in the future, just because some rich woman pretended to believe anal assassination with twigs was somehow a thing. 

As the supposedly ‘offending’ comedienne McGuinness said in a statement:

My writing is cartoonish and always satirical. Unfortunately, jokes do not land with everyone. Its purpose was never to be taken literally.

Indeed so. The Australian broadcasting regulator is called Acma; lawyers should really have protested to Acme, as the above proposed murder method is so cartoonish it could only ever be considered as carrying a serious prospect of success by Wile E. Coyote.    

Impractical jokes

The sad thing is, this is all part of a trend. Genuine, plausible death-threats are worthy of prosecution. Jokey, absurdist or clearly performative ones are not. But, increasingly, the two have become conflated. Last year, Nigel Farage quite rightly got an illegal immigrant with a large tattoo of an AK-47 on his face imprisoned for threatening to shoot him and rape his sister. But then, last month, as I wrote about for the Daily Sceptic previously, Farage also tried to get radio-host James O’Brien censured by Ofcom for calling him an “unflushable poo” who needed to be swept down the political U-bend, something Reform depicted as subliminal faecal encouragement to murder.

There is a difference here. Unlike the illegal immigrant, O’Brien couldn’t have been more clear he was joking if he had made his ‘threat’ while wearing a jester’s cap. But even that precautionary measure may have done him no good.  

In 2020, US performance artist Jeremy Garnier was so eager to make it self-evident he was only joking about wanting to kill people that he went so far as to dress up as the Joker from Batman to do so. Garnier was filming a novelty ‘Drugs can kill!’ film in a mall in Missouri, during which he entered a bar and asked for a can of Sprite, quipping to the bartender that, being the Joker, he could hardly be drunk while “I’m planning on, you know, killing a bunch of people!”

The bartender laughed at this, but the police didn’t, screeching up in cars and arresting him on charges of “making a first-degree terroristic threat”. Despite being completely unarmed, Garnier was later convicted and served over five months in prison. For telling jokes. While dressed as The Joker.

The most ludicrous such instance occurred in 2025, when Rod Liddle penned a joke Spectator column suggesting that Brighton be nuked as a gigantic nest of queers n’ woketards. The Labour Party leader of Brighton and Hove County Council immediately reported Rod to the police for committing an “incitement to terrorism”. In the Guardian, columnist George Monbiot justified the police being called by labelling Liddle’s article a piece of “irony poisoning” in action, which was meant to “seep obscene ideas into the range of the possible”. But how was it “possible” for an ordinary Spectator reader to get hold of a nuke and drop it on Brighton?

Incredible threats

“Humour offers deniability,” Monbiot said. To be fair, some genuinely dangerous people have tried to use this defence in court. In 2020, Shakil Chapra was convicted of glorifying terrorism after circulating clips of the leader of the African Islamist group Boko Haram online to celebrate the anniversary of 9/11. His partial defence was that it was just a misguided attempt at “comedy”. Another aspirant Islamic terrorist, Mohiussunnath Chowdhury, similarly (and similarly unsuccessfully) tried to dismiss his own extreme online statements in court as mere “jihadi banter”. So, potentially, malign individuals can indeed attempt to hide their genuinely evil intentions behind a fake label of ‘humour’.

But you have to use your common sense here. Someone threatening to stab people with a knife at a London gay parade while talking to undercover cops posing as fellow jihadis, as Mohiussunnath Chowdhury did, is one thing; ‘threatening’ to nuke Brighton or turn someone into a sausage roll is quite another. To illustrate just how ludicrous this can all get, Rod Liddle himself once claimed to have been visited at his home by police after animal rights activists had taken literally another joke column he had written about him supposedly hanging pesky neighbourhood cats from a home-made gallows in his garden. This was despite the fact the column in question also featured a description of a family of local mice standing around applauding the execution.

There is even a case of a man on an actual comedy show (which I believe Have I Got News For You still technically counts as being) having complaints made about him after making a jokey death-threat, on what is explicitly labelled as being a satirical panel-show. This occurred in 2009, when then-Conservative Shadow Cabinet Member Alan Duncan was asked to comment on the views of an American beauty queen called Carrie Prejean who had just said she thought gay marriage was wrong. He called Prejean a “silly bitch” and added: “If you read that Miss California has been murdered, you will know it was me, won’t you?” George Harvgreaves, leader of obscure political group The Christian Party, lodged a formal complaint with the Metropolitan Police, arguing that:

Mr Duncan has crossed the line. A senior politician suggesting, even as a joke, that it is okay that Miss Prejean should be murdered for her evangelical Christian views is totally unacceptable. How can we stop gun and knife crime when the man who thinks he will be the next Home Secretary makes death threats?

The logic of the complaint was bizarre. Initially, Hargreaves acknowledges Duncan’s words were just a joke; then he treats them as if they were a serious death-threat anyway. The implication seems to be that some viewers out there would just be too thick to realise the difference.

Die laughing

No doubt there are plenty more similarly overblown examples floating around out there – but it’s hard to tell because, when I went onto ChatGPT and asked it to provide me with past examples of joke death-threats which had been taken seriously, it refused to do so, saying: “This content cannot be shown for safety reasons.” Which absolutely says it all.

Why is it that so many people, like an AI chatbot, cannot understand what constitutes a really, really obvious joke any more? Maybe it’s because our supposed moral ‘betters’ in academia, politics and the media have been telling us that ‘words are violence’ for so long, and so relentlessly, that plenty of people out there have finally come to believe it. It’s all an attempt to control and flatten public discourse, a Milan Kundera novel come true. Our rulers don’t like us joking about killing them because it reveals how much so many of them are hated. 

Remember when, while serving as director of public prosecutions back in 2010, Keir Starmer spitefully tried to get a man sent to prison for joking that he would like to blow up Nottingham Airport because his flight was delayed? Once mirthless, AI-brained androids like Starmer begin staffing all our public institutions, it’s no wonder bodies like the police begin being unable to recognise a complete joke when they see one – not even when looking into the mirror.

I’d call them all terrible killjoys, but the hair-trigger lawyers of someone like Rinehart or Starmer might consider that to be violent rhetoric.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.