Best Australian Comedy Writing Page 14

  But his screams go unanswered, and later on everyone agrees that Detective Frank Thorn truly was the most delicious boy of all.

  World War Zzz

  A hideous plague is sweeping the world. It takes mere minutes for the infected to start transforming into a self-important, middle-aged bigmouth, and less than an hour before they become entitled, pompous windbags who just want to tell women about their newest property investment in Sydney, and how they should dress so that they won’t be attacked by men. The infected contaminate those around them by boring them into a stupor from which they awake a ‘zzzombie’.

  A team of female scientists struggles to develop an antidote that will save humanity from the unstoppable scourge. They make an exciting breakthrough, ascertaining that DNA samples from middle-aged men who ask long and self-involved questions at literary events (that turn out to not even be questions but just explanations of something they did twenty years ago) were somehow cross-contaminated in a laboratory and then fed to patient zero: Tony Abbott.

  But the excitement slowly turns to dread as the scientists realise that the zzzombies were willingly voted into power at the last election and have now cut all funding for the antidote. After a brief meeting, the scientists begin working on a suicide pill instead.

  Ghostbusters

  It’s Ghostbusters, but with women. Stick that in your dicks, men.

  CHRIS TAYLOR

  Worth a Thousand Words

  ❛As I was quickly informed, the Readers’ Wives page is a popular staple of the stick mag genre: a section devoted to amateur snaps of lusty women sent in by their proud-as-punch husbands. In the office it was known colloquially as the ‘Old Slappers Page’.❜

  At the airport, whenever called upon to state my occupation on the departure card, I’m never entirely sure what to put down. ‘Comedian’ doesn’t feel accurate. ‘Satirist’ feels too pretentious. And ‘Perpetual Disappointment to Gerard Henderson’ feels a tad too niche. So in the end I usually just opt for the simplicity of ‘Writer’. It’s not altogether untrue, and, if I was being honest with you, I quite like the way it makes me sound.

  For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. Attending plays as a young boy, I was always less interested in the actors getting laughs on stage than the person responsible for putting the jokes in their mouths. My bedroom walls were adorned with posters of Alan Ayckbourn and Michael Frayn. After school I played with my Alan Bennett action figure for hours. But it would be many, many years before I was ever afforded the chance to write professionally myself.

  After completing an Arts degree at university, I was obligatorily unemployed for nearly two years. I was turned down for everything, including a proofreading job at the Yellow Pages, where my Honours degree in English Literature was judged to be an insufficient qualification for the task of checking whether Aardvark Electrics had the correct number of ‘a’s in its name. I was even rejected by a boating and fishing trade journal whose editor thought my experience in university publications might turn the title into a socialist mouthpiece.

  ‘It’ll be red emperors and rainbow fish every issue with you lot,’ he barked. ‘Your mob’s the reason we had to stop using the term “jewfish” in print. Fucking “mulloway” … what a joke!’

  But my fortunes eventually changed when I was granted an interview for a junior editorial position on Picture magazine. At the time I hadn’t actually heard of Picture, but the references in the job ad to wanting someone ‘cheeky’ and ‘open-minded’ made it pretty clear that it wasn’t exactly The New Yorker. I popped down to a newsagent (for this was the pre-Google era) and found a disturbingly well-thumbed copy of the mag sandwiched in the adult section between Mayfair and Hustler. Even by porn standards, I could tell that Picture was decidedly downmarket: cheap-looking girls, poor quality paper, and an overabundance of exclamation marks on the cover. ‘What would Alan Bennett think?’ I kept asking myself. But I knew I didn’t really have a choice. It was the first job interview I’d been offered in months, so I made my way to the ACP offices and rode the elevator to the seventh floor, ready to sell my soul.

  Nothing whatsoever surprised me about the magazine’s offices. Staffed exclusively by men, and not the kind you’d ever call dashing or athletic, the copy area choked under the clutter of proofs, snack food and smut. Cubicle partitions were studded with bawdy cartoons or humorous newspaper headlines that featured the same surname as the cubicle’s occupant (‘Vaughan vows to go all the way’). Collins dictionaries jostled for desk space with old back issues of Viz, and it was impossible to walk anywhere without encountering an acrid waft of instant coffee and cigarette smoke, both bizarrely still legal to enjoy indoors at the time.

  The interview process itself was surprisingly rigorous. Far from wanting to have a chat, the magazine’s editor led me into a small room and asked me to sit three separate writing tests:

  1) The Synonym Challenge, where I was given one minute to write down as many variations as I could on the word ‘jism’.

  2) The Caption Challenge. This time I was given five minutes to devise a humorous caption for a photo of two naked women roasting a pig. ‘And please don’t go the spit roast angle,’ advised the editor. ‘It’s too obvious. We’re looking for people who can be one step ahead of the reader.’ I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I think it included the header ‘BOAAR BLIMEY!!!’, which impressed the panel.

  3) The Story Challenge, where forty-five minutes were allotted to coming up with a half-page story based on a series of photos sent in by a loyal pervert, depicting his recent Halloween-themed orgy. I crammed my story full of terrible house-style puns, mostly of the ‘trick or teat’ variety; and I lost count of how many times I referred to breasts as ‘pumpkins’. But whatever I did, it obviously worked, because I got the job.

  I was officially a writer.

  Right from the get-go, it was a baptism of fire. On my first day I got caught up in a crisis editorial meeting convened to resolve a dispute between the copy editor and the photo editor over the correct spelling of the word ‘BAZOOKA-RAMA’. It was to be the bold-splash header for a double-page spread about girls who like guns, but no one could agree on how it should be spelled. The copy editor was arguing strongly for two hyphens, so it would read as ‘BAZOOK-A-RAMA’. Pictorial insisted there was no room for a second hyphen in the layout.

  ‘But it just doesn’t look right without one!’ pleaded Copy. ‘We’d never write “JUGSA-RAMA”. We’d write “JUGS-A-RAMA”.’

  ‘Yeah, but “bazooka” already has an “A” built into it, so a second “A” is redundant,’ replied Pictorial, with an astute sense of logic that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from someone wearing a ‘No Fat Chicks’ T-shirt. ‘Besides, what about that issue we did in May with the “VAGINA-GO-GO” header?’

  This kind of back-and-forth intransigence went on for at least another two hours. At one point the copy editor threatened to set fire to his overflowing in-tray of World’s Dirtiest Jokes if he didn’t get his way. But ultimately, Picture magazine being what it is, pictures won the day. The copy editor graciously consented to a single hyphen on the grounds that it was impossible to lay the word up with two hyphens without obscuring a breast somewhere along the way.

  ‘It’s what the readers would have wanted,’ he conceded.

  My principal responsibility at the magazine was to look after the Readers’ Wives page. I’d never heard the term ‘readers’ wives’ before, and my initial, naive reaction was to assume that this otherwise prurient journal might also cater to literary tastes by profiling the female muses of respected men of letters. I half-expected to find polite Q&As with the spouses of Dinny O’Hearn or Jason Steger. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was just more tits and muff, only not quite as well lit.

  As I was quickly informed, the Readers’ Wives page is a popular staple of the stick mag genre: a section devoted to amateur snaps of lusty women sent in by their proud-as-punch husbands. In the office it was kno
wn colloquially as the ‘Old Slappers Page’. The women were typically over forty, and commonly on the tubby side. Almost always, they were photographed squatting naked on a bed, or clutching their breasts, in a clumsy approximation of poses they’d copied from the professionals.

  We used to receive between thirty and forty photo submissions a week. A reader named Arthur used to send in pics of his beloved wife, Ginger, every single week. Ginger was well into her sixties, but, on the evidence available, had lost none of her enthusiasm for amateur soft porn. Each week a new A4 envelope would arrive with fresh pictures of Ginger in all her domestic, undraped glory. She was variously photographed nude with a vacuum cleaner, nude with a watering can, nude with a rolling pin and, in a curious twist on the housekeeping theme, nude with a cardboard cut-out of Whoopi Goldberg from the film Sister Act.

  Arthur’s photographic studies of Ginger had never once found their way into the magazine, but it was hard not to admire his persistence. What I’d initially dismissed as a rather sad, tawdry relationship, I later grew to accept as harmless at worst, and rather touching at best: here was a husband still sufficiently enamoured and turned on by his wife to want to place her in the pages of Picture, which, in his universe, was the highest pedestal there was.

  And that’s how I came to regard all the readers’ wives. Or it was, at least, until the life-stopping day when I opened up an envelope to find pictures of my mother.

  My nude, raw, butt-naked mother.

  There she was, the woman who’d packed my playlunch for years, splayed across a queen-size bed, vagina-side up.

  ‘Who’s the hottie?’ asked the editor, looking over my shoulder.

  ‘I’m … not sure,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ll run it.’

  ‘You kidding me?’ he said. ‘With cans like that? She’s good enough to go pro.’

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. My own mother. This was the woman who was so prudish that she used to leave the room during the love scenes on Chances, and now here she was with her baps out like Mosman’s answer to Samantha Fox.

  I checked the back of the envelope for the sender’s name. Gunther Pippos, it said. Who the hell was Gunther Pippos?! Was Mum having an affair with a kinky dago? She traditionally hated foreigners, so this was becoming more out of character by the minute. An enclosed note from Gunther, written by hand in a disarmingly formal cursive and accompanied by sprigs of dried lavender and linseed, said: ‘I hope you enjoy these portraits of my saucy Marina.’

  Marina? I could still think straight enough to know that that wasn’t my mother’s name. I went back through the photos a second time and, under a less shell-shocked scrutiny – and to my profound relief – it became gut-soothingly clear that my mother hadn’t become an erotic model after all. She merely had a doppelganger. The order of the universe had been restored.

  Or so I thought.

  Roughly a week later, at the point in the production cycle when I had to sign off on which Readers’ Wives had made the cut, the photos of Marina were missing in action. I couldn’t find them anywhere. No matter how thoroughly I searched the piles of lewd refuse that littered my desk, they simply couldn’t be located.

  ‘Is this her?’ suggested a colleague, joining in the hunt.

  ‘No, that’s Whoopi Goldberg,’ I said. ‘Not even close.’

  ‘Have you been through your trays?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘IN tray and OUT tray?’

  ‘I’ve been through every fucking tray. They’re not here.’

  ‘Well, just go with someone else,’ he said. ‘You must have tonnes of other options.’

  Going with someone else had already occurred to me, but Marina had been such a huge hit around the office, especially with the editor, that questions would be asked of my editorial judgement if I didn’t include her. I was still relatively new at the magazine, and keen to make a good impression, so the way I saw it I really only had one option left if I was to give the bosses what they wanted.

  Nervously, I picked up the phone and dialled my mother’s number.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, it’s Chris. I’m in a spot of trouble at work.’

  ‘What do you mean – are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, no, I’m fine,’ I assured her. ‘I just need to ask you a slightly weird favour. I don’t want you to freak out or anything, but I’m wondering if I can come over to take some photos of you.’

  ‘Of me?!’

  ‘For the magazine, yeah. They’d be very tasteful. And we wouldn’t need to tell Dad.’

  ‘What sort of photos?’ she asked.

  ‘I need you to be a reader’s wife … I’ve lost some photos of our hero wife, see, and you look exactly like her. In fact, when I first saw her, I thought it was you. Which is a compliment, really. So I just thought …’

  ‘You want me,’ she interrupted, ‘to pose nude in your magazine? Is that what you’re asking me?!’

  The second she said it, I knew how ridiculous the idea had been. Was I seriously proposing to go round and take photographs of my naked mother? Too humiliated to explain further, I hung up, muttering a sheepish apology, and buried my head in my hands. ‘What would Alan Bennett think?’ I once again asked myself over and over.

  Resigned to submitting a substitute wife in place of Marina, I started sifting through the various candidates on my desk. As I moved the Whoopi Goldberg pic to one side to create some space, I suddenly had a wild idea.

  Ginger! Ginger could maybe – just maybe – pass for Marina if we shot the photos cleverly. Her face wasn’t especially similar, but her body was a reasonably good match, so I figured with a brown wig and some cunning lighting we might just get away with it. Once again I reached for the phone.

  ‘Hello, is that Arthur?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hello, it’s Chris Taylor from Picture magazine. I’m ringing up about Ginger.’

  ‘Oh, right, yes. So you got the photos I sent you then?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve been getting them for the past year …’

  ‘Smashing bird, isn’t she? Sixty-two years old, and still the best rig I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Yes, it’s very impressive.’

  ‘And all her own bits,’ he boasted further. ‘No fakies in this house. All-natural jubblies, as real as the day God gave them to her.’

  ‘Great, which is why I’m ringing, in a way,’ I said. ‘I’m wondering if Ginger’s free this afternoon to do a photo shoot.’

  ‘But I’ve already sent you the pictures.’

  ‘And they’re all great, really. It’s just that we have a new brief from the magazine that’s quite specific, so we’ll need to take some new shots.’

  ‘Well, she’s on the dialysis machine at the moment,’ he said. ‘What time are you thinking?’

  ‘Whatever suits, really, but it does need to be today.’

  ‘Do you need any props? I’ve got a new mop which might be quite good. Why don’t you swing by after three? I’ll get her in the mood for you.’

  Arriving at the appointed time, I was greeted on the porch by Arthur, who appeared slightly more distinguished than I was expecting. Wearing sensible slacks and a polo shirt, he looked more like someone who was about to play eighteen holes than someone who was about to order his naked wife onto all-fours.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ he offered.

  He was really quite the gentleman. Their home was by no means flash, but nor was it untasteful. Fresh flowers occupied the dining-room vases and, without exception, the oil paintings on the walls were originals, not prints. Arthur wasn’t lying when he said there were ‘no fakies in this house’. The living room was dominated by some bulky medical machinery, beside which stood a grotesque goddess in her dressing gown, flashing a leg that was all too familiar to me.

  ‘Where do you want me?’ the famous Ginger purred.

  It was clear almost immediately that this wasn’t going to work. In the flesh, Ginger looked nothing like Marina. Even with the a
ddition of the brunette wig, you couldn’t escape the feeling that she looked more like a character that Matt Lucas might play, rather than someone any self-respecting Picture reader would want to beat off to. But it wasn’t my place to spoil their fantasy. Not now. Not after I’d raised their hopes so high.

  ‘Shall we start in the bedroom or the shower?’ enquired Arthur, relishing his self-appointed role as co-director. ‘I’ve got a toilet brush, feather duster, hedge clippers – whatever you need, just sing out.’

  The shoot lasted just over an hour, alternately lurching from the monstrous to the comical, but only in my eyes. Arthur and Ginger had never had it so good. The pleasure on their faces was unmistakable: Arthur beaming with pride, Ginger glowing with joy.

  ‘So, which issue should we keep an eye out for, then?’ asked Arthur, as he saw me into my cab.

  ‘Hard to say,’ I replied. ‘That stuff’s not really up to me.’

  ‘But you promise they will be published this time,’ he said. ‘It would mean the world to her.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I promised. And I really did mean it.

  Racing back to Park Street to meet my deadline, I resolved to include the shots of Ginger in my layout submission, regardless of how ludicrous the photos might look. I dropped the film off on level two, where the photo lab traditionally looked after the Bulletin, but the assistants were always happy to moonlight for Picture because it was a nice change of pace from developing snaps of John Howard.

  To this day I can’t explain why I didn’t just come clean with the editors and explain the whole sorry farce. I tell myself that it was because I was anxious about looking incompetent, but part of me now wonders whether I thought Ginger had a natural right to be in the magazine, alongside the other wives. Whatever my motives, when I presented my final proofs featuring Ginger’s carnival smile in the place where everyone was expecting Marina’s snatch, I was fired on the spot. It wasn’t heated. It wasn’t dramatic. It was simply the moment when my editor accurately deduced that my passion for soft porn was no more real than my aptitude for it.