Egg Boy's star status rose astronomically after the incident. He was honored in a mural in a Melbourne laneway.Credit:Darrian Traynor
"Our research shows that the effect of terrorist attacks cross national borders and affect people in other countries to such a degree that they develop mental disorders,"Søren Dinesen Østergaard,associate professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University,said at the time.
While traumatic disorders among observers who watch coverage of terrorist attacks abroad remains rare,the Danish study backs up decades-old evidence for a much broader impact of such attacks than we often realise."Terror Management Theory,"Christopher Long and Dara Greenwood wrote in a 2013 study,"posits that human awareness (whether conscious or unconscious) of the inevitability of death can lead to potentially paralysing anxiety."
And that's where humour and the sort of response that captivated the world's attention hours after the Christchurch attack comes in.
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"Humour production may be particularly relevant to staving off death anxiety,not only because it typically is a culture-bound phenomenon,and hence useful for reaffirming one's place in society,but humour has also been identified as a psychologically useful coping mechanism that enables individuals to remain resilient in the face of aversive life circumstances,"wrote Long and Greenwood.
The two researchers also argue that humour can help observers"infuse the random chaos and suffering of everyday life with significance". In the case of Egg Boy,observers may have applauded what they saw as a justifiable public embarrassment of a politician whose anti-Muslim ideology has been condemned for encouraging right-wing extremist ideologies and for potentially radicalising extremists.
Anning's violent response to what appeared to be a rather harmless incident made viewers around the world rally around Egg Boy even more. That mix of the response to being egged and the underlying circumstances determine in which direction public opinion will sway.
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When British then-deputy prime minister John Prescott was egged in 2001,for instance,he tackled the egg thrower in what tabloids later dubbed a"punch scuffle". Surveys subsequently suggested that the public largely considered Prescott's violent response to be justified. Such support rises and falls with the popularity of the target,though,and some politicians may have wished they had responded to being caked or egged in a more restrained way.
French politician Nicolas Sarkozy,for instance,responded in fury after he had a pie thrown at him while he was still a local mayor. But about two decades later,then-president Sarkozy himself had to apologise after his own son threw a tomato at a police officer.
While eggs and other items thrown at politicians almost always spark debates over the limits of reasonable protest,they often distract from the more serious issues that triggered those incidents. In the case of Egg Boy,distraction may have been exactly what the millions of viewers were looking for.
But almost two weeks after he threw the world famous egg,Connolly appeared to have second thoughts during his interview with Channel 10 - not so much over the limits of reasonable protests,but over how much we should allow ourselves to be distracted:"It's playing out completely out of proportion,to the point where it's kind of embarrassing,because too much attention is actually brought away from the real victims suffering,"the 17-year-old cautioned.