An ABC personality is under fire after making a risqué joke about Holocaust victim Anne Frank during a comedy routine.
Concetta Caristo, who hosts the breakfast show on the national broadcaster’s youth station, Triple J, was performing a stand-up routine, telling the audience she was a “girls’ girl” who could get along with “any girl in the world, even in history”.
“Put me in a room with Cleopatra and I’d be like, ‘Oh my god, I love your eyeliner’, or with Anne Frank and I’d say, “Slut, I have a diary too! Congrats on the book deal’,” she said.
It is unclear what the audience reaction in the room was, but Anti-Defamation Commission chair, Dvir Abramovich said it was not funny.
“This wasn’t just a joke. It was a brutal desecration of the memory of Anne Frank and the one-and-a-half million Jewish children who were murdered in the Holocaust – gassed, shot, starved, erased,” he said in a statement.
“When someone takes a victim of genocide and turns her into an obscene punchline, they don’t just mock her – they violate her.”
He went onto say that there was no book deal for Anne Frank, but rather a brutal death sentence at the hands of the Nazis.
“Anne Frank… didn’t get a book deal. She got typhus. She got starvation. She got a death sentence in Bergen-Belsen,” Dr Abramovich said.
He also expressed shock at the use of the word “slut”, describing it as a “term of sexual humiliation aimed at a girl who never lived long enough to become a woman”.
The 15-year-old girl died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 after she was found hiding in Amsterdam.
She gained posthumous fame after the publication of her diary, which shared her personal account of the two years she hid from soldiers during the German occupation.
Ms Caristo is currently overseas, with her Instagram showing her on holiday.
The 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival was held between March and April.
SkyNews.com.au has reached out to the ABC for comment.