Lox, you seem to be saying that the joke is funny just because it's absurd.

Well, maybe that's why people *do* laugh. My point, though, is that the joke-teller, who dreamed it up, exploits a named, innocent, real person's destruction to get laughs and wants others to laugh too. Not a good thing. Anne Frank is an especially offensive focus, because her individual fate was that of millions. And pointlessly telling the joke over the air, to many who are close to the same sort of experience and might reasonably be expected to take serious offense, is not a good thing either. Finally, somebody decided it was beneath the Beeb's dignity to apologize: even worse.

Lox, your examples of absurdist jokes are unpersuasive. Pamela Anderson? Pole dancing in a mosque? The crux is what happens next. What if the joke ends with PA stoned to death by an angry mob? Worse, what if the *real* PA really had been stoned to death by an angry mob? And if you knew her relatives were in the joke's radio/TV audience? Would you criticize them for being indignant? If so, why?
Because they need to lighten up?

A media outlet shouldn't encourage people to laugh at real victims of monstrous crimes. And it shouldn't suggest to an audience of millions that it's proud of having done so. Nor should we leap to its defense when it does.

MtheGM, thanks for the correction on Belsen.