From 1966 until 2010, the first Monday of September, Labor Day in the US, was also the day when the comedian Jerry Lewis would host a marathon overnight television show, fundraising for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. This was an annual staple of ‘charitainment’, similar to Comic Relief in the UK, but without the risqué alternative comedy. Dissected by Paul Longmore (2016) as events full of cheesy paternalism, many saw these telethons as dehumanising of people with disabilities (especially children), framing them as pathetic individuals lacking agency, sexuality or skill, where the beneficiaries of charity were a vehicle for advancing the priorities and agendas of others. But these criticisms from disability rights campaigners were often thrown back at the anti-telethon activists by the charities themselves, with critics bullied for having the temerity to appear ungrateful (Longmore, 2016: 201).

Longmore examines the myriad tensions within such public proclamations of charity. Those telethons with the ‘greatest heart appeal’ will generate the most donations, not those causes where the money would do the most good, or where the greatest number of people are in need. In a country with privatised medicine and a limited safety net, such uneven focus has exacerbated the inequality within healthcare provision. We see the sheer number of US telethons for other causes, and their success in raising donations, as Americans paying a ‘social tax’ in lieu of a decent welfare state. Longmore's (2016: 72) work also exposes the commercialisation of charity, dismissing the use of incentives to give as ‘expos[ing] a selfish motive behind the boasted altruism’. His glare focuses on every donor who got ‘a shot of celebrity’ by being name-checked on the TV show, to those who got supermarket money-off coupons for donating, but at its most disparaging toward those large corporations who use the good glow of the symbolic power of charities to shield themselves from corporate misdemeanours, male corporate executives going on television to hand over novelty sized cheques acting as the nation's patriarchs, authenticating their humanity.