Best Australian Comedy Writing

  Published by Affirm Press in 2015

  28 Thistlethwaite Street, South Melbourne, VIC 3205.

  www.affirmpress.com.au

  Copyright © this collection Affirm Press 2015

  Individual stories copyright © retained by individual copyright holders

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  without prior permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry available for this title.

  Title: Best Australian Comedy Writing / Edited by Luke Ryan

  ISBN: 9781922213754 (paperback)

  Cover design by Design by Committee

  Typeset in 12/18.5 Garamond Premier Pro by J&M Typesetting

  Proudly printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  The paper this book is printed on is certified against the Forest Stewardship Council® Standards. Griffin Press holds FSC chain of custody certification SGS-COC-005088. FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

  ‘The Wife Drought’

  From The Wife Drought by Annabel Crabb

  Copyright © Annabel Crabb 2014

  Reprinted by permission of Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  ‘Catching the Spirit’

  From Mistakes Were Made by Liam Pieper

  Copyright © Liam Pieper November 2015

  Contents

  Introduction

  Luke Ryan

  Lawrence Leung

  Fear and Clothing in North Fitzroy

  Lally Katz

  Flowers

  Andrew Denton

  Welcome to HED 2015

  Zoë Norton Lodge

  Almost Sincerely

  Patrick Lenton

  King of the World

  David Thorne

  Number Plate People

  Annabel Crabb

  The Wife Drought

  Shaun Micallef

  Trying Too Hard Now

  Monica Dux

  Gone a-Nunning

  Lee Lin Chin & Chris Leben

  The Tweets of Lee Lin Chin

  Andrew Hansen

  Termination Hotel

  Sami Shah

  I, Pervert

  Roz Hammond

  Because You’re Worth It

  Liam Ryan

  Total Product Recall

  Jane Rawson

  Bob Brown’s Farewell Speech

  James Colley

  The Backburner’s Six Most Burnable News Stories of 2015

  Liam Pieper

  Catching the Spirit

  Rebecca Shaw

  10 Films to Watch While the Patriarchy Burns

  Chris Taylor

  Worth a Thousand Words

  Fiona Scott-Norman

  Good English Stock

  Tony Martin

  Follies

  Robert Skinner

  The Art of Tour Guiding

  Felicity Ward

  10 Reasons Mary Poppins is a Jerk

  Ben Pobjie

  Diary of a Respected Actor

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction

  Comedians and jazz musicians are more comforting to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

  – Kurt Vonnegut

  When Affirm Press asked me to compile an anthology on Australia’s finest jazz writing, I could hardly contain my excitement. Finally, a chance to riff with like-minded tromboners and rhapsodise about the intrinsic bebop of the humble bassoon. When they suggested that I had misinterpreted the tenor of their Vonnegut-wrapped request (those ingrates), I instead cast my mind back to an experience at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few years ago.

  The Edinburgh Fringe is basically comedy’s version of Mecca, a relentless four-week orgy of artistic heartbreak, penury and high-grade alcoholism that every comedian really needs to experience at least once in their lives. At about four one morning, I was chatting with a British guy named Jeremy, dissecting the success of the UK’s comedy scene over a graveyard of empty pints. At one point Jeremy stopped and said, ‘You know what Australia’s problem is? It doesn’t take comedy seriously enough.’ This sentiment so offended my sensibilities that I stood up, swept my hand in outrage, and accidentally broke four pint glasses.

  Jeremy is right, of course, though I wouldn’t let the country down by admitting it at the time. While Australia has produced comedy for a long time, we’ve never quite been able to bring ourselves to give it the respect it deserves. Entertainment, yes. Art, no.

  This feels especially true when it comes to the written word. Australia hasn’t developed the grand tradition of humour writing and literary satire that fills the American and English canons, from Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut to PG Wodehouse, authors who paved the way for modern masters such as David Sedaris, Simon Rich, Nora Ephron and Terry Pratchett. While we’re hardly devoid of exceptional comedic voices in this country, we still seem to find it difficult to believe that funny writing might have literary merit. It all smacks too much of easy enjoyment, and Literature, as we usually conceive it, is a swirl of miserabilism and suffering tied together with historical curios and the occasional exotic location. Jokes have about as much place in your typical high-minded novel as a piercing insight into the human condition does on an episode of Family Feud.

  Aren’t we short-changing comedy here? Underestimating its technical difficulty and capacity to illuminate the human condition? Because comedy writing is a tough art. It requires concision, precision and an intuitive sense of how the reader is going to formulate your sentences in their mind. It needs a poet’s grasp of language, an encyclopaedic knowledge of culture, high and low, and a vast array of euphemisms for embarrassing bodily functions. More than anything, it takes a sharpened instinct for what people will actually find funny. You can learn the rules that govern joke writing, but they won’t help unless you understand what the joke actually is.

  Comedy is also a broad and sometimes profound church. Whatever the event, comedy has an answer. It can be a vehicle for confession and redemption, for political manifestos and biting satire, for well-crafted idiocy and out-and-out lunacy. You’ll find examples of them all inside these pages.

  The twenty-four pieces of comedic writing that you’re about to discover are by turns uplifting, mordant, sad, thought-provoking and just plain stupid. Sometimes they’re all of them at the same time. You’ll find the best of Australia’s books, magazines, online satire and Twitter feeds, as well as a dozen newly commissioned works that represent the latest and greatest in Australian written comedy. Some of the pieces are embarrass-yourself-on-public-transport funny, others will leave you nodding your head in thought, like you finally understood one of the cartoons in the New Yorker. There are non-stop gag-fests and slow-burning memoirs, offbeat parodies and surrealist wonderlands. There are some of this country’s most revered comic voices and some of the bright young things we’ll be laughing at for decades to come. I hope that you’ll enjoy exploring them as much as I did bringing them together.

  If a decade of watching, performing and writing comedy has taught me anything, it’s that throwing the word ‘best’ in front of the word ‘comedy’ is like throwing a bright red tablecloth in front of a hormonal bull. Whereas drama attracts gentler criticisms, there’s something about comedy we dislike that really fires up the blood. It’s not merely bad, it’s a personal insult, and everyone who likes it should be taken out the back and shot. If you think I’m overstating things, just try and tell me that you’ve ever had a civi
lised conversation with someone who sincerely loved Two and a Half Men.

  So let me finish by saying that you won’t love everything in this book. Some of it you may outright hate. But, hey, even if you do, at least you’ll be taking it seriously. Read it and weep, Jeremy.

  LAWRENCE LEUNG

  Fear and Clothing in North Fitzroy

  ❛Former Housemate Grace introduced me to her friend. She smiled and looked at Grace with a raised eyebrow that I knew meant: ‘Lawrence? As in, that Lawrence?’❜

  It was going to take all my willpower to enter the bookshop. All I needed to do was to buy a present for my mother’s birthday. However, in my hand was a novel that I had been reading on the bus. It was my book, but it still looked brand-new because I like to take care of my possessions. With nowhere to stash it, I was going to have to do it: enter the shop and risk looking like a shoplifter. My palms started to sweat.

  I’ve always had this weird phobia of being wrongly accused of a crime. I can’t seem to find a specific name for this affliction on Wikipedia or Doctor Google, but if there is one, I’m sure there must be an obscure German word for it. For me, it’s a chronic and persistent phobia of looking dodgy.

  I realised I was hovering in the doorway, looking … well, dodgy. So I took a deep breath and began crumpling a few pages of my paperback. The book started to look pre-owned, well-read, slightly abused. Ugh. This is not going to look good on the bookshelf next to all my pristine book spines.

  ‘Lawrence?’

  Two young women were standing at the shopfront, staring at me. The one who had spoken was Former Housemate Grace.*

  ‘Oh. Grace. Hello,’ I spluttered.

  ‘What are you up to?’

  She was looking at the mangled, sweaty paperback in my hands. I felt my face getting hot. How long had they been watching me? I managed to squeeze out a ‘Long time no see’.

  Former Housemate Grace introduced me to her friend. She smiled and looked at Grace with a raised eyebrow that I knew meant: ‘Lawrence? As in, that Lawrence?’

  I can’t remember the rest of the small talk, but I know I entered the shop feeling twice as dodgy as before.

  My looking-dodgy-phobia is crippling and absurd. It’s that niggling fear that everyone inside a JB Hi-Fi is an undercover security guard, burning me with their eyes. It’s the reason I sweat when a police car pulls up next to my car at traffic lights, despite the fact I am doing nothing.

  It’s got so bad now that I even cross the road whenever there is a lone person on the footpath ahead of me at night. I just don’t want them to think I’m following them, or have designs on their wallet. Once I hid behind a tree, waiting for an old lady to disappear from view around the corner. Surely she couldn’t be frightened of me if she didn’t know I was there. In that moment I realised I am less afraid of being mugged than of people thinking I’m a mugger.

  I blame the movies. Every second thriller is about some ordinary Joe who is wrongly accused of killing his wife/sidekick/President and becomes a fugitive. What would you do if you were on the run? Naturally, you’d try to clear your name by finding the real murderer. Soon you become so driven in your obsessive quest, you end up morphing into the heartless animal they accused you of being, culminating in your brutal slaying of the real killer. It’s intense, poignant, but what have you become? At this point in the movie, you have no choice but to dramatically punch a mirror.

  It seems the major side effect of wrongly-accused-phobia is that the more you are afraid of being a suspect the more you sound suspicious to everyone else. If you protest innocence, you look more guilty. As the old adage from the playground goes: ‘Whoever smelt it, dealt it.’ And I’m terrified of looking like I dealt a ripper.

  Recently, I explained my phobia to a slightly inebriated neurosurgeon who I met at a party. His name was Marcus and he had the annoying habit of beginning every sentence with a disclaimer:

  ‘I’m not saying there’s any formal scientific evidence for hypnosis, but I have friends who swear by it.’

  ‘I’m not speaking for everyone on the planet, but aren’t most people afraid of being wrongly accused?’

  ‘I’m not a psychiatrist, but your phobia doesn’t sound unusual at all.’

  Marcus’ phobia was of accidentally paralysing or killing a patient during brain surgery.

  ‘I’m not saying my phobia is more rational than yours, Lawrence, but my phobia has consequences that affect reputations, patients and their families.’

  I’m not saying he wasn’t a bit of a dick, but despite his arrogance, he was right. My own phobia sounded less hardcore than his.

  To regain some footing in the conversation, I needed to demonstrate my fear with a concrete example. So I told him about the incident with Former Housemate Grace.

  I had moved into a share house in North Fitzroy. It was one of those old terraces with hip-yet-kitsch antique furniture and housemates who practised Adulthood cosplay. Up until that point I had only ever lived with the two people who had created me and one fellow womb-mate. Living with people I wasn’t related to was a completely alien concept, so I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot.

  At the time, my only knowledge of share-house living came from He Died with a Felafel in His Hand and Single White Female, so I was well aware of the things that could leave a bad impression as a housemate: heroin, bongs and getting an identical haircut to Bridget Fonda’s. Before helping me load my last box into the car, my older brother sat me down and explained that in any share house, one flatmate will be the odd one out, the person who’s one MSG sachet short of a Mi Goreng packet.

  ‘Lawrence,’ he said in that patronising way that only an older sibling can pronounce, ‘if you don’t know who the odd one out is … it’s you.’

  I was determined to be the least dodgy one in the house. Perhaps in this new environment my phobia of looking suspicious would, finally, be an advantage. Surely it was a superpower that could give me a heightened sense of whether I appeared unusual, and I could prevent myself from being the odd one out.

  Unfortunately, I was the only one in the house with a Y chromosome. My housemates were three brilliant women: an artist, an academic and a fashion designer. They dressed in Frankie magazines and floated around pretty antique furniture while the music of vinyl albums from yesteryear filled the air. I was in Mad Men, but without the cigarettes and Men.

  Maybe they were looking for a Real Man to move into the house, but instead what they got was me. I don’t follow sport, I drive automatic transmission and I cry during every Pixar film. Even Cars. Determined to appear normal, I did all the apparently manly things required of me. I killed spiders. I tried fixing the washing machine. I rang the washing machine repairman to fix what I had done to it. For a few weeks, I didn’t blow my cover. Then, one morning, the storm clouds gathered over me. Literally.

  I was looking out the window, daydreaming about being Houdini, when I noticed that the sky had become distinctly morbid – something that I should have taken as an omen. I grabbed the washing basket and started taking my T-shirts down from the clothesline. The final thing left up was my Chewbacca beach towel. As I gave it a tug, it was drawn away like a curtain, revealing a long row of delicate underwear. They were not mine. They stared back at me like silky French sparrows perched daintily on a powerline.

  I found myself with an ethical dilemma. I could be a good housemate and carry the foreign washing out of the rain. But my phobia of looking dodgy was telling me: ‘You are new to this house. You do not touch someone else’s intimate apparel.’

  So I took only my clothes in.

  Through the window, the clouds were getting darker, threatening the petite pastel panties that clung onto the line like fragile notes on sheet music.

  My two anxieties began battling it out, with politeness berating looking-dodgy-phobia. I should bring them inside. It’s the good thing to do, right? I’m helping out a housemate. The wind picked up, and the lacy lady briefs flapped like tiny flags on the ta
il of an out-of-control kite.

  I grabbed the basket again.

  I stood inside the lounge room with a small pile of my housemate’s knickers. Should I just leave them unceremoniously dumped on the couch? Politeness flared up again; it didn’t look right. Should I fold them? How do females fold these? Is it like cutting a sandwich? I like my sandwiches cut into rectangles. My mum cuts them in triangles. Mum’s a female – I should fold them in triangles. It’s the polite thing to do.

  But here’s the problem. Whenever I take down the washing from the clothesline in the morning, I cannot tell whether the garment is still wet or merely cold. It’s weird, and there is probably an obscure German word for this, too, but my skin cannot tell the difference between the sensation of slightly damp and the sensation of coolness. The only way I can fathom the difference between cold (yet dry) and slightly damp is to rub the garment against some sensitive skin. Like my cheek. So I did.

  I grabbed a couple of cotton undies in each hand and massaged them against my face.

  Then my phobia kicked in. It was like Peter Parker’s spider-sense. I got the uncanny feeling that I was … being watched. Housemate Grace was standing in the doorway carrying shopping bags. She stared at me. I removed my face from her panties. She continued to stare. I slowly placed them back onto the pile. She avoided eye contact as she continued past me and into her bedroom. As the door closed behind her, I blurted out, ‘I was just checking if they were still wet!’

  In the years since, I have thought about this incident more than I should. I’m not saying I lose sleep over it or get horrifying flashbacks whenever I see underwear ads on a billboard. It’s just my strongest reminder of the curious fear I have of looking like I’ve done something wrong when really I’m innocent.

  ‘I don’t live there anymore,’ I told Marcus the neurosurgeon.

  He put down his glass with a smug clink.

  ‘Wetness is a perceptual illusion,’ he began. ‘If you put on a rubber glove and stick your finger into a glass of water, your brain will tell you your finger is wet, even though you know it is dry. Your skin receptors can sense temperature, pressure, even slipperiness, but they can’t actually sense whether things are wet.’