The Best Australian Humorous Writing

Contents

Introduction

Andrew O'Keefe and Steve Vizard

 

Everyday Life

Teacherwoman

Olga Pavlinova Olenich

Torn between satay skewers and children as an endangered species

Wendy Harmer

Love is never saying sorry … so there

Danny Katz

Listen up, you selfish and ignorant people. Stop driving 4WDs

Catherine Deveny

Song of the crestfallen pigeon

Suzanne Edgar

My 2UE producer noticed a tendency for me to nod off during interviews. In my own defence, they lined up some boring farts

Phillip Adams

My father sat on Winston Churchill

Shaun Micallef

Idle hands make for short nails

Julia Zemiro

My loyal subjects and possums! A seasonal message from President Edna

Dame Edna Everage

 

Politics

Phwoarr, check out the policies on Julia Gillard

Kaz Cooke

The right wing

Guy Rundle

The pollies went a little crackers

Mungo MacCallum

All is not lost when you can see success in anything

Frank Devine

Er, thanks for your support. No, don't call us, we'll call you

Marieke Hardy

Don't worry, just testing

Guy Rundle

 

Society

Adventures in LA-Land

Mark Dapin

Fame

Les Murray

Seven modern wonders indeed? I think not

Roy Slaven

Corporatising culture: Who holds the past in common trust?

Malcolm Knox

The perfectly bad sentence

Clive James

In from a busy day at Barwon jail, Carl asks for a fair go

Shane Maloney

 

Environment, Science and Technology

On climate change

Clive James

Contact

Paul Mitchell

Planet Earth: Beware of the chimps

Kaz Cooke

Modern telecoms run rings around me

Barry Cohen

 

Popular Entertainment

I came, I buzzed, I lost

David Astle

You just know it will be deliciously messy

Ian Cuthbertson

Madonna's latest offering leaves listener pondering: Just because she can, does it mean she should?

Larissa Dubecki

A time to repent:
Big Brother
's over

Marieke Hardy

Lashings of lust curved up by Nigella

Marieke Hardy

Interview with Ja'mie King

Garry Williams

The Chaser
's Logies

Andrew Hansen, Dominic Knight, Chas Licciardello, Julian Morrow and Craig Reucassel

 

The Arts

Cook's tour: Peter Cook

Shane Maloney

The satire we had to have: Keating

Alexander Downer

So Ian McKellen drops his trousers to play King Lear. That sums up the RSC's whole approach

Germaine Greer

Group giggles groovy again

Rod Quantock

 

Business

Packed it in: The demise of the
Bulletin

Gideon Haigh

It's a loathe-hate relationship, but at least I own a slice

Frank Devine

Lies, damned lies

Charles Firth

 

Sport

Pump more beer, iron out muscle

Matthew Hardy

Having a ball: How we finally fell in love with the world game

Tony Wilson

 

Lifestyle

A hookworm's-eye view of the world around us

Charles Firth

The Library hotel, Thailand, and other hip hotels

Steve Vizard

Who cares if she can't sing and can't dance? Posh Spice is the Damien Hirst of dress-wearing

Germaine Greer

Fashion pinkoes are the fifth columnists of masculinity

Peter Lalor

Silence of the lamb

John Lethlean

Telly tubbies

John Lethlean

Rude food

Graeme Blundell

 

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

When I was nine, my brother Andy and I cut out a mail-order advertisement from the back page of our
Phantom
comic. The small advertisement promised delivery within seven days of “the world's best collection of postage stamps sourced from all four corners of the globe”. I remember the word “best”, just as I remember the expression “all four corners of the globe”.

Andy watched as I reverentially filled out the form and then we walked hand in hand to the post box at the end of Inverness Way, beyond which the known world ended.

These were the hazy days when summers came earlier and were hotter and drier and bluer. For seven days Andy and I sweated by our letterbox as cicadas roared and Mrs Pappas and the other neighbours smiled in collusion. On the seventh day, exactly as promised, the postie's whistle sounded.

It was a tiny brown cardboard box, the sort we had read about in Enid Blyton stories, the sort that never arrive now. I removed the lid and paper sprang out like square confetti.

The world's best stamps.

Andy and I painstakingly set them out in rows on the good dining room table. One hundred and thirty-seven stamps in all. Five
Australian kangaroos. Exotic triangular stamps marked Polska and Yemen featuring animals. I remember a leopard and a monster but-terfly with luminescent blue wings. A dull stamp with pictures of a city by a lake from somewhere called Helvetia. And one grey stamp featuring a profile that even a nine year old couldn't fail to identify, the visage of Adolf Hitler.

And I remember thinking, the best? The best? How can I know this is the best?

There was no doubt that the 137 stamps were good. To a highly trained 9-year-old's eye it was patently clear the Hitler stamp alone must be a scarce collector's item. Andy and I were fairly confident after deliberation that the Führer must have personally licked our stamp, most probably in his bunker or at the 1936 Olympic Games, and we dreamt of Messerschmitts and Jesse Owens.

But the best?

Surely there were other stamps that might have qualified for the best. We didn't know much about philately but we knew enough to recall a zeppelin stamp, an upside-down zeppelin, which had failed to find its way into our box. And wasn't there something about a Penny Black that might have made the cut?

Why had they called it the best? Who had picked the best? Was it a man? Or a woman? What did they look like? Did they have children like me? Where had they made their decisions? Was it in a room? I remember the location printed on the cardboard box was a mysterious Hornsby. Who were these Hornsby arbiters of all that is best? Was there a committee? A discussion? A vote? What did their kids say? Come to think of it, surely the Hornsby experts hadn't gone through this whole process of advertising on the back of
Phantom
and selecting the cream of the crop merely to dispatch one box of stamps? Were there other boxes of the best nestled in other canvas postie sacks in the other back streets of our continent?
Were their bests the same as our best? How many types of best are there?

I struggled to sleep each night in the countdown to the arrival of Father Christmas, certain these questions would plague me forever. Or until the arrival three weeks later of a red 26” Malvern Star, the best two-wheeler ever made.

After that long summer our lives were forever calibrated by a succession of bests.

The best showbag at the Royal Agricultural Show, a mouthwatering assortment of Bertie Beetles and chocolate frogs and cartoons, purchased as we twelve year olds trudged past sheds of bloated Herefords and arenas of axe-yielding Tasmanian timbermen, pondering how to maximise our 20-cent investment.

The best dozen Australian wine assortment, a mix of Australia's best reds and best whites as offered by Westpac in an envelope containing my monthly bank statements.

The best of the seventies, a musical compilation of original recordings, a late-night television offer: phone now and we'll toss in the best of the nineties.

The best university, the best cricketer, the best school, the best airline, the best of ABBA, the best of the best.

If the best is mercurial, the best humorous writing is totally elusive. One publisher contacted for clearance rights to an essay for inclusion in this anthology remarked of our request, “If it's supposed to be humorous, why would you want to include a piece by him? He writes about politics”. Spitting out the word politics, as though the subject were the black hole of humour. Conflating object and form. Forgetting that humour is rarely about what one is looking at, but almost always how.

It is true, some subjects are more intrinsically amusing than others. Sir Ian McKellen as Lear disrobing to reveal his mesmerisingly outsize member gives Germaine Greer a head start. And Rude
Food, the subject of Graeme Blundell's television critique, raises a smirk before a word is read.

Even if the subjects are not intrinsically funny, all of the writers represented in this collection are. Humour more than any other human condition is in the eye of the beholder. Each of these writers has a knack of beholding things through funny eyes.

In choosing works for this volume we have tried to accommodate the fickleness of subjectivity and have cast our net wide. Represented here is a large number of creators writing in a variety of styles across many media.

There is a diversity of form—essays, reviews, commentary, opinions, editorials and even poetry, such as Les Murray's distilled reflections on fame.

There is a diversity of subject matter. From Julia Zemiro's reminiscences of shoplifting and her childhood relationship with her father, to Clive James's personal encounter with climate change.

For most of 2007 the nation's attention was devoted to the prospect of an Australian federal election. Several of the works take the inexorable manoeuvrings towards November as their subject, including Mungo MacCallum's commentary on the doomed Coalition campaign; Kaz Cooke's reflections on Julia Gillard and the public's expectations of female politicians; Guy Rundle's reversioning of
The West Wing
; and Frank Devine's opinions on political schadenfreude.

Other books

Dexter the Tough by Margaret Peterson Haddix
High Heels in New York by Scott, A.V.
White Mughals by William Dalrymple
The Death Collector by Justin Richards
Origin of the Body by H.R. Moore
Jilo by J.D. Horn
The Honeymoon Hotel by Browne, Hester


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024