Best Australian Comedy Writing Read online

‘It’s a valid question,’ I continued. ‘Had you run out of your own wasp traps? As you’re a wasp scientist, it might be assumed that you’d have an abundant supply.’

  ‘So,’ said Geoffrey, attempting to change the subject, ‘you live around here? That must be nice.’

  ‘Apart from all the wasps, of course,’ I added. ‘You’ll probably be on top of that, though, once you get some more traps.’

  Geoffrey kicked me again.

  The man with the blond wavy hair nodded. ‘Are you from the mainland?’

  ‘Yes,’ Geoffrey answered, finishing the last bite of his banana. ‘Adelaide. It’s a shithole.’

  Adelaide isn’t a shithole. It has some nice bits. It’s the people who live in Adelaide that ruin it. Seen as a kind of joke by the rest of Australia, Adelaidians spend a lot of their time trying to convince themselves, and other Adelaidians, that they are not a joke and are actually fairly damn awesome. This means dressing in the latest European fashions, even just to visit the supermarket, and pretending they spend a lot of time in Melbourne and Sydney. Adelaide is more like a large village than a city. A village where the idiots outnumber normal townsfolk a hundred to one, and they all wear G-Star and Diesel. The tourism slogan for Adelaide is: ‘It’s heaps good.’

  I wish I was making this up.

  We left our trays on a counter near the bins, dodged a few wasps, and wandered down a grassy hill towards the ruins. Behind us, the man with the blond wavy hair finished his meal and carried his big bag back inside the cafe.

  ‘I’ve never met a wasp scientist before,’ I said to Geoffrey. ‘I certainly learned a lot.’

  ‘He seemed harmless enough,’ Geoffrey replied. ‘You have to expect Tasmanians to be a little odd. They don’t have much to do apart from growing apples, so they probably get a bit bored and make up stories to sound more interesting. Stand on top of that rock, and I’ll take a photo.’

  When I was nine, I told a kid at school that I was having a birthday party and he could come if he wanted. It was nowhere near my birthday, I just made the whole thing up. The kid was kind of a bully, and I thought that by inviting him, he would direct his attention towards others. Word quickly got around and, cornered by the lie, I confirmed to around twenty kids that yes, I was having a birthday party, and yes, they could come. I was enjoying the attention at this stage. To add realism, I gave each kid a sheet from a pad of party invites with my address and a date set weeks in the future, figuring this would give me enough time to think of a way out of the whole thing. I forgot all about it until the first guests arrived. My father was watching cricket on television while my mother was out doing the weekly shopping.

  ‘I’ll stand next to it,’ I said to Geoffrey. ‘There’s no point standing on it. People are watching.’

  ‘Just stand on it,’ he replied. ‘How is standing next to a rock even remotely interesting? We should make it our theme.’

  ‘Our theme?’

  ‘Yes, the theme of our holiday photos. We stand on a rock in every shot. Oh, no …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We should have got a photo standing on the rock shaped like a boot.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘and the round one.’

  Geoffrey frowned. ‘No, that would be stupid.’

  I stood on the rock.

  ‘Okay,’ Geoffrey queried, ‘is that what you are going to do? Just stand there? You don’t want to pretend you’re doing something?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know, pointing at something, perhaps.’

  ‘No, just take the photo.’

  ‘What if you jumped with your arms in the air?’

  ‘Like an action shot?’

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  ‘No, just take the photo.’

  Inside the cafe, the man with the blond wavy hair unzipped his big bag, took out an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, and began shooting patrons and staff.

  ‘Gunshots!’ exclaimed Geoffrey. ‘We’re missing a re-enactment. I bet a convict has escaped and the prison wardens are chasing him. Let’s go watch.’

  ‘It’s coming from way up the hill,’ I replied. ‘We just came from there. They will probably do another one in an hour. Let’s just finish looking at rocks and then we can walk back up. It sounds like it’s finished anyway.’

  The man with the blond wavy hair reloaded the assault rifle and stepped out of the cafe. Tourists heading towards the area hoping to catch part of a re-enactment were fired upon.

  ‘No,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Listen, it’s still going. Quick, take a photo of me standing on the rock and then we’ll go watch.’

  Geoffrey climbed onto the rock, looked to his left and held his hand to his forehead.

  ‘Why are you saluting?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not,’ he replied. ‘I’m gazing into the distance. Just hurry up and take the shot. We’re missing the re-enactment.’

  ‘Okay.’ I took the photo. ‘Now, put your hands on your knees, bend them a little, turn to the side a bit, a bit more, and put your head back and smile …’

  ‘You really are a dickhead,’ Geoffrey said, jumping down.

  We were halfway back up the hill when an old lady came running down past us. She was a large woman with blue eye shadow, a tight perm and tighter white slacks. Both her knees had large green grass stains where she had fallen and skidded.

  ‘Run!’ she screamed.

  We ran. The look on her face as she yelled her warning was all the convincing we needed.

  ‘Is it zombies?’ Geoffrey yelled as we passed her.

  Many hours later, after police officers took our statements and contact information, we were free to leave. We hadn’t been anywhere near the cafe during the shootings, so could provide no helpful eyewitness accounts. There was no discussion about driving back to Devonport – I just drove there. Both of us wanted to be home.

  ‘I hope the wasp guy is alright,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine,’ I said. ‘I didn’t see him … you know.’

  Geoffrey nodded. ‘They were covered, though. It was pretty hard to tell. Some of the sheets were small …’

  ‘Do you want to play Number Plate People?’ I asked.

  ‘Alright.’

  From Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades.

  We Should Get Them. by David Thorne (27b/6 2014)

  ANNABEL CRABB

  The Wife Drought

  ❛Why am I writing this peering round an infant who is intently stuffing Cheerios up my nose? I want a wife, damn it. And I don’t see how all these bozos get one, when I don’t.❜

  It was a funny sort of setting for a personal light-bulb moment. I was interstate at a ‘summit’ – one of those networking events at which various professionals and public policy experts waft about, politely waiting for each other to finish before sharing their own views. I was already in a bit of an ill temper about it. Having accepted the invitation to attend, I belatedly opened the conference programme and immediately experienced a familiar, sinking feeling as I scanned the columns and columns of male names – economists, business figures, foreign policy experts – and realised that I had very likely been invited to chock up the event’s skirt-rate.

  All the signs were there. The morning involved a series of panels in which the panellists were all blokes, and my job – as moderator – was to provide some sort of perky connective tissue. I noticed with particular horror that the following day I was scheduled to cross-examine, for sixty minutes, a chap who was a world expert in some sort of climatology in which I was significantly less expert. Of course, these things usually turn out to be interesting and worthwhile, and so indeed did this one, but as I headed to lunch on that first day I could not quite subdue the plaintive little voice in the back of my skull asking why I had abandoned my children for this.

  As luck would have it, I ran into an old pal at lunch: a fellow who had been a ministerial adviser in Canberra, but was now doing less, for more, in the private sector. We exchan
ged enthusiastic greetings and sat down. ‘What’s new with you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m married! And we have a toddler!’ he announced. Much mutual agreement ensued about how lovely children are, and so on.

  ‘Yes, life is great,’ he continued, digging with gusto into his French-trimmed lamb cutlets. ‘My wife has quit her job, so I can be absolutely confident our child’s getting the best of care. It’s all worked out really well.’

  Now, I like this bloke. I really do. And I wish him nothing but happiness. But why did I suddenly want to push his smiling face into the potatoes dauphinoise? Was it just because I was in a huff after spending the morning trying to make a group of economists sound interesting, while back in Sydney my own children nosed through rubbish bins for sustenance?

  It’s all worked out really well. I looked around the room, and I recognised what was going on. How many of these blokes had wives at home – picking up kids from school, digging Play-Doh out of the cracks in the floorboards for the gazillionth time, taking Nanna to the doctor, waiting around for the phone guy to turn up ‘between the hours of eight and twelve’, which, as any veteran of the game will tell you, actually means ‘thirty seconds after you have disappeared round the corner for a quick sortie to school to deliver the lunch bag that was left on the table this morning’.

  The hour of 2.45pm would never, for these men, bring that faint but always perceptible neural pressure. They had wives. I looked at the women I could see in the room. Was it my imagination or did they look kind of distracted?

  I glanced back at my companion, chomping obliviously through his delicious lunch. He didn’t even realise how fortunate he was; what a lucky door prize he’d won. What a weird and – for him – wonderful crimp in the sociological evolution of humanity it was that allowed him to walk out the door at 8am, work a full and rewarding day, eat a nice lunch with both his hands, and come home – or so I imagined – to a newly bathed baby poised for bed.

  He thought that was just how things worked. And the worst thing of all? He was right. Men get wives, and women don’t. That is how it works.

  I had wife envy, and I had it bad.

  Bouts of wife envy strike me periodically. Sometimes it happens in airports, where I see squads of booming businessmen flocking together into the Qantas Club, while I am skulking by, possibly with a nipper strapped to my chest who has just observed the baby’s prerogative to go what Martin Amis once termed ‘super-void’ in an already spongy nappy just as the final call sign starts flashing. The resultant reproachful personal paging and walk of shame onto the flight, to be confronted by the politely horrified eyes of my seat neighbour, only exacerbates my envy. ‘Well, yes,’ I want to say to the guy I’m sitting next to. ‘I find this a bit confronting as well, just so you know.’

  I, too, want to go over that report while enjoying a complimentary Crown Lager. I, too, want to talk genially about what a little tiger my young son is, while peacefully completing my meeting presentation, safe in the knowledge that his every need is being met by my beautiful wife. Why am I writing this peering round an infant who is intently stuffing Cheerios up my nose? I want a wife, damn it. And I don’t see how all these bozos get one, when I don’t.

  If you are working full-time, and your spouse is working either part-time or not at all, then – congratulations! You have a ‘wife’. A wife, traditionally, is a person who pulls back on paid work in order to do more of the unpaid work that accumulates around the home (cleaning, fixing stuff, being around for when the plumber doesn’t turn up, spending a subsequent hour on hold to find out why the plumber didn’t turn up, and so on). This sort of work goes into overdrive once you add children to the equation, and the list of household jobs grows exponentially to include quite specialised work such as raising respectful, pleasant young people, and getting stains off things with a paste of vinegar and sodium bicarbonate.

  A ‘wife’ can be male or female. Whether they’re men or women, though, the main thing wives are is a cracking professional asset. They enable the busy full-time worker to experience the joy and fulfilment of children, without the considerable inconvenience of having to pick them up from school at 3pm, which – in one of the human experience’s wittier little jokes – is the time that school ends, a time that is convenient for pretty much no one. Having a wife means that if you get caught up at work, or want to stay later, either to get some urgent job finished or to frown at your desktop computer in a plausible simulacrum of working in order to impress a new boss while actually reading BuzzFeed, it can be done. Many wives work, but they do jobs that are either part-time or offer sufficient flexibility for the accommodation of late-breaking debacles.

  In the olden days, wives were usually women. Which is funny, because nowadays wives are usually women too.

  I first started thinking seriously about the significance of wives back in 2013, when Tony Abbott named a federal Cabinet with only one woman in it, and the nation went into one of its periodic fits of self-examination as to why there aren’t more women in federal politics. I wrote a column expressing my view that if women MPs were blessed with wives in the same way that male MPs frequently are, you might get quite a noticeable participatory uptick, because that way women wouldn’t have to choose between having a career in politics and having a family. Many women have had to do that over the years, while male politicians breed like hamsters while in office and nobody even notices.

  I was left in no doubt, by the resultant stream of correspondence, that asymmetric rates of wife-having are a disparity not restricted to MPs. Businesswomen, executives, academics, journalists and lawyers wrote to me with spookily similar experiences. All of them watched their male contemporaries and competitors start families, and noticed how fatherhood made barely any difference to the way those guys worked; they still worked long hours, travelled at the drop of a hat, or had no difficulty making work functions after-hours. Usually it was because they had wives who either stayed at home full-time or worked fewer hours in order to manage child care. But my correspondents didn’t have wives, and all of them thought life would be easier if they did.

  Right then, I thought. Just out of curiosity, how many working fathers have ‘wives’ in Australia, compared to working mothers? What exactly, in other words, is the comparative national rate of wife-having, expressed as a ratio between women and men? Ascertaining how many working dads have part-time or stay-at-home partners, compared to the other way around, should be a relatively easy business, I assumed. Surely some statistics nut must have had a gander at it at some stage.

  My search for this information began blithely, with a few confident Google key-strokes, but quickly degenerated into a horrifying snarl-up involving the 2011 Census data, much back-of-the-envelope calculation, reams and reams of almost-helpful Australian Bureau of Statistics tables, and some heroic assumptions on my part that would offend any serious statistician. There was plenty of data on fathers’ employment, and mothers’ employment. But that was no use to me; I wanted to join them together, and find out which dads and which mums lived together, and how they managed things between them.

  Eventually, I did what many a statistical fraud would do in my position: I telephoned the Australian Institute of Family Studies, and asked to speak to Jennifer Baxter. I didn’t know Jenny, but her name was on all the most interesting reports I’d read about patterns in male and female employment, especially in relation to families. If anyone could yank the figures I was after, I was fairly confident it would be Jenny. And when I finally ran her to earth, after dealing with the traditional public-relations maze that most agencies have now installed to shield their employees from the horror of journalists cold-calling them, she was pleasantly receptive.

  I explained my problem: what I really wanted was a wife-count. Who had wives? Was it still just a bloke thing? Or were ladies getting them too these days?

  Jenny was exceedingly helpful, and her voice had the rich, reassuring cadence of the supernumerate. Just as I’d hoped. But she warned
me not to get too excited. ‘I get a lot of journalists ringing me about stay-at-home dads,’ she said, kindly. ‘Everybody wants a story about how they’re on the rise. But they’re not, really. You look at the data, and it’s just not there.’

  A day or two later, Jenny emailed me an exciting little package of data, which she had tickled out of the 2011 Census data with the assistance of her data-crunching software and her brain; always likely to be a better bet, I guess, than my brain, a pencil and forty-eight cups of tea, which is what I’d used.

  And here’s the story. Of Australian couple families with kids under the age of fifteen, 60 per cent have a dad who works full-time, and a mum who works either part-time or not at all. How many families have a mum who works full-time, and a dad who is at home or works part-time? Three per cent.

  Who gets wives? Dads do. Most mums have to make do with alternative arrangements. Only one in four mothers with children under the age of fifteen work full-time. These are the women who – in all sorts of lines of work – find themselves in open competition in the full-time workplace. What interests me is: how do their circumstances compare against the dads who are doing similar jobs? How many of the full-time working mothers have ‘wives’, compared with the full-time working dads?

  It turns out that in Australian workplaces, 76 per cent of full-time working dads have a ‘wife’. Three out of four. But among the mothers who work full-time, the rate of wife-having is much, much lower: only 15 per cent.

  Working fathers, in other words, are five times as likely to have a ‘wife’ as working mothers. As I suspected: Australian working women are in an advanced, sustained and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain.

  I think of a Candid Camera show I once saw, where applicants for a job in a doughnut factory were told they needed to do a trial shift on the boxing line. Secretly filmed, the candidates donned their hairnets and sat down at a conveyor belt, stacking freshly made doughnuts neatly into boxes. But as they worked, the conveyor belt got faster and faster. The piles of doughnuts got messier and messier as the poor victims tried to keep up. Eventually, they were just chucking the things into the boxes any which way, as more and more doughnuts relentlessly poured forth from the maw of the machine. It was – in the classic manner of such TV shows – utterly unbearable to watch.