A few evenings ago, the ostensibly thoughtful Pat Sajak thoughtlessly said, "Maybe the dingo ate your baby," in response to something a contestant uttered. The audience found the remark typically so-darn-cute. But I didn't find it at all funny.
I found it, once again, insensitive, offensive, inexcusable.
See, there was a baby that got eaten by a dingo one terrifying night in August 1980—a baby who drew breath and was adored by her parents for just nine short weeks, and whose name was Azaria Chamberlain.
Azaria's disappearance from a camping site at Australia's Ayers Rock and the wrongful incarceration of her mother, Lindy, for her presumed murder were documented in the 1988 feature film A Cry in the Dark, starring Meryl Streep.
I'd seen that film and therefore immediately recognized the provenance of the "dingo" line so famously—and, judging from the overwhelming online evidence, admiringly—delivered by Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine Benes in a 1991 episode of Seinfeld called "The Stranded." It so startled and offended me that I wrote the following piece for my copywriting portfolio, illustrated with a grainy, slightly out of focus black-and-white photograph of a baby and a dingo-looking dog sitting in a kiddie car.
Not even from the mouths of babes!
"Maybe the dingo ate your baby," Elaine derisively rejoins in an exaggerated Aussie accent. And of course the live studio audience splits its sides at yet another outrageously hip Seinfeld riposte.
Only me, I'm gaping slack-jawed at the boob tube, dwelling on the outrageous part. As in outrageously offensive.
Because, I'd seen that movie too—the one the Seinfeld writers had obviously seen—where Meryl Streep plays a real-life Australian mother whose real-life little baby got dragged from a camping tent by a real-life dingo. Dragged into the night forever.
And sitting there, I could easily imagine, if only in some grossly thank God rudimentary way, the magnitude of that poor woman's horror—could infer its submerged mass from the visible part containing my unrelenting fears for my own children's safety.
How could anybody who knows that story (no urban myth) exploit that unspeakably tragic thing? How could anybody write that joke, approve that joke, deliver that joke (with pertinent regional inflection, no less), and above all find it uproarious?
Yeah, I'm something of a roiling cauldron of repressed irreverence, professionally speaking and personally speaking as well. Yet all hail the tempering spark of common human decency. May it eternally glow.
I blame everyone associated with that Seinfeld episode for investing a regrettable reference with pop-culture cachet.
As for Pat Sajak, maybe I'm being unfair in taking him to task for serving it up for the hundred-millionth time; it's been 18 years since "The Stranded" first aired, and as near as I can tell, I'm the only person in the world raising even a single eyebrow over "Maybe the dingo ate your baby."
I couldn't find anybody else offended by the line on Google, you see. But I did find an assload of dingo-ate-your-baby T-shirt offers.
Read the Wikipedia account of the tragedy.
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