It must have been snowing paper shards at the Sydney Institute as Gerard Henderson clipped his way through his mountains of newspapers to find something bad about his ABC colleagues at The Chaser. They’ve mocked murder victims, embraced leftwing causes and hassled buskers, he complains in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, and their APEC stunt mocked victims of terrorism.

Gerard has been a fully paid-up supporter of the National Security State since 11 September 2001. Prior to that, some of his thinking had been showing dangerous signs of balance and rationality, but since then, he has used his Herald column to express a deeply-polarised worldview.

At one end there’s the Australian and US Governments, who have realised that basic freedoms need to be sacrificed in order to stop the menace of terrorism. And at the other end is the rest of us, who Just Don’t Get It, who don’t realise that terrorism is an apocalyptic threat.

But I’m not sure that’s entirely what’s at work when he bags The Chaser. I suspect the real problem is that Henderson has no sense of humour, and resents anyone who does.

“Some members of the team are both talented and funny,” he charitably grants.

But it’s pretty clear Gerard wouldn’t know funny if it broke into his office and confronted him. Which is exactly what it did, because the Chaser gate-crashed one of those earnest Sydney Institute dos where Gerard gets to pretend his little thinktank is relevant. So galled was Henderson that he wrote to Mark Scott to whinge about it, and correctly got short shrift from the ABC MD. Suddenly, Henderson’s complaint to Crikey about Irfan Yusuf’s mocking laughter starts to make sense.

Maybe it’s the lack of Vitamin D from spending too long out of the sun hunting through piles of press clips.

The Chaser has been looking rather stale of late, but the APEC stunt showed them at their best. And, oddly enough, it was important. One of the key requirements of the sort of National Security State thinking that we’ve had thrust upon us for the last six years is that we suspend our scepticism and mockery, that we wordlessly accept assurances that the terrorists are everywhere and that no inconvenience, no stupidity is too much to stop them.

This type of thinking has penetrated so deeply into western societies that we now accept the most absurd impositions in the name of security. What the Chaser stunt revealed was not merely the innate silliness of these measures but how ineffective they can be. Now we know, behind all the witless thuggery of the NSW Police, that anyone could have driven motor vehicles to within a block of where APEC leaders were staying.

See, that’s the thing, Gerard. When you mock something – and the stunt was mocking APEC security, not terrorism, as even you should realise – you are testing it, subjecting it to critical scrutiny. And the ludicrous overkill of APEC security was tested and found wanting. All power to the boys.