ON 23 October Australian current affairs show Today Tonight showed footage from a DVD that had been distributed in the Werribee area of Victoria. Entitled C**t: The Movie, it depicted a group of high school students that referred to themselves as "The Teenage Kings of Werribee". The DVD featured 12 students harassing a homeless man, throwing eggs at taxi drivers, starting fights at parties and, most controversially, assaulting a 17-year-old girl with mild learning disabilities. They urinated on her, set fire to her hair and forced her to perform various sexual acts.

In January, four people were jailed for the killing of David Morley at Waterloo Station, London.

Morley was kicked and punched to death as the sole girl in the group recorded the incident on her mobile phone. One of the attackers admitted during the trial that at the time he thought the attack was funny.

These two incidents represent the extreme end of the 'happy slapping' phenomenon, which involves attacking an unsuspecting victim while an accomplice videos the incident, usually on a mobile phone or small camera.

The happy slapping attack on Hazel O'Neil in Ballymun that made front-page news recently was Ireland's first highly-publicised encounter with the craze.

The 12-second clip, recorded on a mobile phone, appeared on YouTube showing the then 15year-old receiving a flying kick to the face as she made her way home, and the gang of thugs responsible falling about laughing as she stumbled from the force of the kick and crashed into a concrete bollard. She was hospitalised for five days and had to have pins and plates inserted into her damaged right arm. Quite apart from the sickening nature of the attack, it's also discomfiting to realise the clip was posted on the website in the comedy section and received over 10,000 hits before being removed from the site. Exactly how skewed has our sense of humour become?

There are no official figures available on happy slapping, as a garda spokesperson explains: "It's an assault; while there are subcategories within that, we wouldn't record whether or not a phone was used in the incident."

Nonetheless, Thomas Wehrung, a French student in Ireland on a gap year, pleaded guilty to assault two weeks ago following an incident on the North Circular Road, and was ordered to pay 600 compensation by Dublin District Court.

Wehrung's friend recorded the attack, but their "victim" turned out to be an able-bodied 50-yearold bouncer, who restrained Wehrung until the gardai arrived.

Now that's quite funny. Less amusing is the fact that his defence claimed it was "a bad prank".

When did we start being so amused by recording other people's misery? It can be traced to camcorders becoming cheaper and more mobile, and the skate parks of America. Skateboarders took to filming their more impressive moves to dazzle their friends with, but quickly realised that people were much more interested in the times when things didn't go according to plan and ended with a bone-crunching fall. Slapstick with emphasis on the slap. Video compilations of these mishaps started to sell and it was clear there was a niche in the market.

Homer Simpson famously claimed there's nothing funnier than someone being hit in the groin by a football. And of course he's right. Lots of the best comedy has always tended to have a cruel edge to it. The team behind Seinfeld had a strict rule of "No hugging, no learning", with four main characters that paid little attention to morals and were never going to develop any. The likes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office then arrived, using a faux-documentary style to make things more realistic, making it harder for us to remember it was just a sitcom with actors and taking us that much closer to the pain of the characters as they made us laugh and cringe in equal measure. Programmes like Jackass and various home videoclips shows take this a step further and remove actors from the equation, leaving you in no doubt that you are watching real people hurt and embarrass themselves.

But these people were willingly offering themselves up, sacrificing broken bones on the altar of celebrity; the line between what is and isn't acceptable is crossed when people are unwittingly involved. In the main, celebrities and those in the public eye are seen as fair game. Few people cried for the various politicians and celebrities sucked in by Chris Morris's scathing Brass Eye series, but the current trend is probably best exemplified by comedian-of-the-moment Sacha Baron Cohen. When posing as Ali G, Cohen seemed to have legitimate targets, successfully puncturing the pomposity of various politicians and experts. But in his current incarnation as Borat, the bumbling racist Kazakhstani reporter, Cohen uses people in his film who often plainly don't want to be involved. TV news producer Dharma Arthur lost her job shortly after booking Borat on a local live afternoon news programme. Cohen/Borat caused chaos and Arthur claims her bosses lost confidence in her after she was duped and sacked her. There's also a scene where Cohen trashes an antique shop while the elderly owners look on helplessly. It's neither big nor clever, but the film has made almost $220m (and counting) at the box office worldwide. It seems we've regressed, lost our better judgement and we're laughing at, or more accurately with, the bullies in the playground again.

What state does that leave the actual playgrounds in? Five pupils were suspended from a school in Derry at the start of last year and mobile phones banned after a spate of happy slapping incidents. When gardai investigated a similar attack on a schoolgirl in Coolock in September, they confiscated the mobile phone used and found a number of other assaults recorded on it.

Bullies demand to be noticed and will use whatever new technology is available to help achieve this goal. Complaining about phones with cameras or YouTube is a waste of time that amounts to shooting the messenger. The problem doesn't come from sick teenage minds or the internet but a society that takes glee in capturing real humiliation on film, as our voyeuristic tendencies increasingly give way to sadism.

Everybody finds it difficult to look away from an accident, but now it seems we have to point and laugh.