You might think the comments on Waleed Aly and Lee Lin Chin's Gold Logie nominations were funny, or perhaps a critique of the nomination process. But it's hard not to come to a simpler conclusion: it was racist, writes Michael Bradley.

Ben: "Where is Lisa Wilkinson's Gold Logie?"

Karl: "Lisa's too white."

Ben: "Is that it?"

Karl: "That's it."

Lisa: (laughing) "I got a spray tan and everything, still didn't make it. What can you do?"

Karl: "Logies controversy. Boom."

As you know, if you care as much about the Logie Awards as I obviously do, the nominations for the coveted Gold Logie, which is awarded by the popular votes of people who care about this in a non-sarcastic way, have just been announced.

For the first time ever, the nominees include two people who are not white - SBS presenter and icon Lee Lin Chin, and The Project presenter, writer, academic and basic legend Waleed Aly. Note the brave choice of both these people to have names which don't even sound white.

This revelation has caused major ripples in the television industry, as the above exchange among the hosts of the Today Show demonstrates. Their reaction can be characterised in three possible ways:

1. A joke; 2. A mild complaint of reverse racial discrimination against Lisa Wilkinson; or, 3. Racism.

Well, obviously they were joking - you can tell because they were so tickled by their own wittiness. Ben Fordham and Karl had been laughing earlier about how it isn't true that the Logies have been all white in the past because Karl's name, Stefanovic, is "from the Eastern Bloc". "Correct," said Ben, "so you've been trailblazing long before Waleed and Lee Lin Chin." Karl retorted: "I may look white on the outside, but I'm dark on the inside."

OK, that is admittedly some pretty hilarious banter. You can see why Karl got the Gold Logie in 2011. I can't show you the video of Karl's face when he mentioned Lee Lin Chin's nomination, but his eyebrows were definitely saying something profound about political correctness gone mad.

SBS presenter and icon Lee Lin Chin. ( Supplied: YouTube )

Mind you, the fact that the Today Show crew are superbly adept at cutting social satire only begs the question of what exactly they were targeting with their sharply drawn humour.

Their complaint is inescapably obvious: the Logies have fallen victim to reverse discrimination. White people (Lisa) are being discriminated against, perversely, because someone somewhere has decided it's time to introduce racial/ethnic diversity to the list of nominees. As the list of nominees is limited, people who deserve to be there (Lisa) have missed out because they aren't diverse. That, obviously, is unfair.

There's nothing new about the argument that reverse discrimination, whether by affirmative action or unspoken preference, is just as offensive a concept as direct discrimination. I won't get into that here; the contending perspectives are well rehearsed and unlikely ever to be reconciled.

More interestingly, what's the difference between this protest against non-whites being preferred for a Logie nomination, and the complaints this year that the Academy Awards acting nominations included no people of colour?

There's no conceptual difference. The complaint in both cases is that a nomination process which is supposedly colour-blind has been infected by prejudice in one direction or another. In the case of the Oscars, black actors are being discriminated against by exclusion. With the Logies, it's the reverse; people of colour have been preferred, with the consequence that white people have missed out.

There is a functional difference, of course, because the Oscars stand accused of operating an effective colour bar. That is, they have given 100 per cent preference to white people, while the Logies have reserved only two out of six places for non-whites.

There's also the small matter of history. It's fashionable these days for white people, men and Christians to complain loudly about discrimination against them, which is pretty funny and, wait, maybe the Today Show team were just being self-consciously ironic! Wow, hats off to them for a comedic masterclass.

In the end, the complaint of reverse discrimination falls down completely when you realise that the Logies nominations come not from a panel of judges but from popular voting. So, if Lisa is the victim of racial discrimination, then the perpetrators are the general public. Meaning that either the entire population has joined the PC brigade (also known as the Loony Left, or Inner-city Latte Sippers Set), or - could this be possible - Waleed Aly and Lee Lin Chin are actually quite popular in their own right.

This leaves the third possibility, albeit still not discounting that Karl and Ben might be the funniest TV comedy duo since the Two Ronnies.

Racism. Is it? When the most recent blackface uproar erupted, Waleed himself made the fairly pertinent point that, when he goes to a fancy dress party as a white person, he doesn't "white up". By contrast, the Australian basketballer who had done her best impersonation of Kanye West had decided that she needed to blacken her face to achieve the right effect. Waleed's point was that, if we see a person's skin colour as a necessarily relevant feature of who they are, then we are defining them by their colour. Sorry, unconscious racists, but that's racism.

It may be legitimate to argue, as many have this week, that Waleed and Lee Lin don't deserve their nominations because their TV programs aren't sufficiently successful. The fact that nobody made the same argument last year, when Waleed's co-host Carrie Bickmore won the Gold Logie, tends to suggest that the argument is lacking a little integrity this time around.

Waleed and Lee Lin have been nominated by popular acclaim; Waleed despite not campaigning for it, Lee Lin no doubt because she has threatened to kill all of us if she doesn't win. There is no factual or rational basis for pointing to the colour of their skin or their ethnicity as having played any role at all in their ending up on the list. That being the case, the Today Show's comedy routine, funny or not, was simply racist.

Before you start punching the keyboard with your outrage about how unfair it is that you can't even tell a joke anymore without being labelled a racist, try to shed your white skin for a moment and think about how you'd feel if your every success was attributed, by your peers, to your colour rather than your achievements. That feeling is why racism, no matter how casual, sucks.

Maybe there's another reason Karl and Lisa missed out. Maybe they're not that funny.

Michael Bradley is the managing partner of Sydney law firm Marque Lawyers, and he writes a weekly column for The Drum. He tweets at @marquelawyers.