Red Nose Day USA is run by Comic Relief Inc as an independent sister organisation of Comic Relief UK – the charity set up in 1985 by screenwriter Richard Curtis in response to famine in Ethiopia.
And as some of the negative reactions showed, pictures of suffering can trigger not simply empathy and a desire to help, but also anger at the way that the people at the frontline of famine and conflict are represented.
A recent report from aid agencies Oxfam and Save the Children suggested that donors are reluctant to act until there is photographic evidence that a famine is occurring.
We need new ways of picturing places suffering the effects of famine, and fast.
As they wheeled around the street they played a song mocking the Irish famine, a ditty that urges Scottish Catholics of Irish origin to "go home" now that the famine is long over.
He trusted in God, who gave him to understand that this meant years of plenty for the kingdom, followed by a terrible famine.
Don McCullin is best known for his unflinching photo reportage of war, famine and disaster from around the world, but he is also a fine observer of youth culture.
"I think the problem is, when people think of Somalia, they think of conflict and famine," says Chetwood.
It is absurd to suggest that the result would be an investment famine.
After the mass emigration caused by the famine, magazines such as Punch in Britain and Harper's Weekly in America portrayed the Irish as ape-like.
For the golden era of Ukrainian national identity was not tsarist Russia – where Ukrainian national self-assertion was thwarted – but the first decade of the Soviet Union, when Soviet policy in a Ukraine exhausted by war and famine was "indigenisation".
