A palliative care nurse told me it is common for patients or their loved ones to be discomfited by the insensitive remarks of others which, in the great majority of cases, are clumsy and unintended, not deliberate. She believes it is partly a product of our inability to discuss serious illness and death in an open and informed way. If we did, we'd realise cancer is no laughing matter, especially with the rate of diagnosis increasing.

Ultimately, she said, we should treat jokes about cancer as we do racist or sexist humour and realise the painful impact they can have on the people around us.

Each of us has, or at least should have, no-go areas in our daily discourse. One of the ABC's most successful radio hosts, Douglas Aiton, once set out for me his list of the medium's dos and don'ts. It ended with one in bold capital letters that said simply: ''And remember, Hitler is never, ever funny.''

Of course he isn't. But that doesn't stop ignorant or insensitive people from clumsily weighing in on the subject from time to time. But I think society generally has accepted that there's no humour in Hitler and the Holocaust. The same can be said about rape and sexual assault. But I'm not sure that's always been the case.

In fact, on cable television you can still see endless re-runs of episodes of The Benny Hill Show that thought nothing of seeking cheap laughs from sexual assault. Or racism. Or sexism, for that matter.

Probably the most egregious example of cancer insensitivity, was The Chaser's appallingly misjudged skit three years ago that parodied terminally ill kids and the Make-A-Wish foundation. It ended with, ''Why go to any trouble when they're only going to die anyway?''

An avalanche of complaints followed, leading to a two-week ban by ABC management and an apology from The Chaser team that acknowledged ''nothing could have justified the pain and anger that it's caused to people who have already suffered so much already''. Though it was excruciating at the time, I suspect The Chaser did us all a favour in accelerating societal recognition that serious illness, whether it's afflicting kids or adults, is not to be trifled with. There's no way such a skit would be contemplated now, much less aired.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that laughter is anything other than terrific medicine. But it should be the patient that chooses whether their illness is a laughing matter, not some insensitive buffoon or a comic or scriptwriter looking for cheap laughs. We should remember that one person's joke is often someone else's anguish.

Bruce Guthrie is a former editor of The Age, The Sunday Age and Herald Sun.

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