The Best Australian Humorous Writing (10 page)

“I'm glad plastic surgeons have took over this area,” he says. “I've got nothing against gynaecologists, but they're not delicate. They don't care so much about the
looks
. They're just worried about function.”

Rey later explains that somehow, bafflingly, a situation has emerged where there are people who want cosmetic surgery but
don't really need it
. Objectively speaking, their butt might already be Brazilian enough, or the nose they were born with sufficiently natural. The reason they might want to change it is as puzzling to Rey as it is to you or me. It is a medical condition with a Greek name: dysmorphia. Rey says this is “a huge problem”.

So, what makes somebody beautiful? “Beauty starts from the inside,” he says, and advises us to help mothers struggling with prams, after which we will find we “seem to radiate light”.

“If you want to erode the inner core, if you want to hate yourself, if you want to have a very bad self-opinion: live one thing, and preach something different,” he says.

“I'm going to ask this question for everybody,” says Gendreau, helpfully. “Do you feel like putting yourself on TV, and doing what
you do, in front of the world, has held you up to a higher standard of ethics? Has it made you a better doctor?”

“I always get the best questions with the foreign press,” says Dr Rey, apparently unaware that Gendreau is his PR.

The answer is yes, he does, and yes, it has.

There are two kinds of stars, real stars and reality stars. The difference between them is the difference between rapper Snoop Dogg and everyone else we meet over the week. When Snoop enters the lobby of L'Ermitage—fabulously late—he glides across the floor on a sheen of impossibly relaxed charisma, fuelled by joints as strong as his two colossal bodyguards. He must have helped a lot of mothers with their prams, because Snoop glows like an amber light at an intersection.

An interview with Snoop is worth serious money to any jobbing journalist, so we're divided into four groups of six, to make sure nobody in the same market gets the same quotes. Snoop disappears into a room, the smell of burning dope fills the corridor, and an announcement comes through the haze that Snoop will only do two sessions, which means nationalities represented by more than one correspondent will have to double up.

It is fine by me, and almost everybody else, but there are two kinds of journalists: the visiting foreign press and members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (whose Golden Globes ceremony has just been officially cancelled). Today we are joined by one of the latter, and she is furious that she might lose her exclusive. The rosters are revised over and again, but it is impossible to cosset her in a room with only Spanish and Hebrew speakers. Eventually, as the appointed hour for the two sessions passes without Snoop emerging from his cloud, she storms out without meeting him, while
the rest of us sit or stand or pace, waiting for our 45 minutes with the most honey-voiced, treacle-tongued rapper in the world.

When Snoop finally floats in, his eyes are half closed. He folds himself onto a throne (a throne!) at the front of the room. He is wearing glass beads in his hair braids, and what looks like the gusset of a stocking on his head.

He says he made the show
Snoop Dogg's Father Hood
to present himself to the public in a positive light, not as a playa and a gangsta, but as a loving husband and devoted father.

“I'm a French journalist,” announces a woman from the floor. (This is always a sign of a perplexing question to come.) “You're addicted to chicken,” she says.

Snoop smiles, as if this were a compliment.

“Aren't you scared to eat all the chicken of the world?” she asks.

This thought is alarming enough for a man who is so stoned that his hair beads are weighing down his head, but there is more to come: it is a probing, two-part question. “What would you eat if there is no more chicken?” the French journalist continues.

“Erm … if there's no chicken … ” says Snoop, stroking his chin. “I don't know about it. Hopefully, that'll never happen.”

It is left to the Brits to give voice to the question on nobody's lips.

“You've had loads and loads of fame,” says a man from the tabloids, reasonably, “and, obviously, Britney Spears has gone through nightmares. You've probably met her in the past.” He corrects himself. “Of course you have. How do you think she could get herself out of these problems? Is there any advice you could give her, coming from where you've been?”

Snoop looks at his crotch for inspiration.

“Association by affiliation,” he says. “You've got to associate with people who are doing the right things in life, and that rubs off
on you, you know. If you hang with nine killers, you're gonna become the 10th. You hang with nine doctors, you're gonna become the 10th.”

On the other side of the world, there is a nation dying in Iraq, another being born in Kosovo, and a premature Kurdistan struggling to breathe in an incubator built by Americans that Americans may yet take away. But none of this seems important—or even real—in Beverly Hills, where only the star-struck, car-crash cacophony of E! channel makes sense, and where everyone—except perhaps Kendra Wilkinson—is acting.

Here in Los Angeles, the big question is not what can be accomplished in Baghdad, Pristina or Mosul, but what should be done about Britney. Should she adopt Kim Kardashian's gruelling dietary regimen? Should she pose for
Playboy
? Should she, as Snoop Dogg seems to suggest, seek the company of nine doctors, in order to obtain medical qualifications by osmosis?

Patently unscripted, barely believable, packed with celebrity guest stars and impossible plot twists, and broadcast on E! all day, every day, Britney Spears is, without a doubt, the best reality TV show in town.

LES MURRAY

 

We were at dinner in Soho

and the couple at the next table

rose to go. The woman paused to say

to me:
I just wanted you to know

I have got all your cook books

and I swear by them!

 

I managed

to answer her:
Ma'am,

they've done you nothing but good!

which was perhaps immodest

of whoever I am.

ROY SLAVEN

I have just become aware of a list of the new Seven Wonders of the World.

The process of determining the list has totally escaped me, but apparently it was arrived at by democratic means through the World Wide Web.

I've subsequently grilled many friends, colleagues and associates about the new list and, to a person, they, like me, knew nothing about it.

So the democratic process that has delivered us the What's Paris Up To Now phenomenon has determined the new Wonders.

It's no wonder at all, then, that they are just a little bit ordinary.

The Great Wall of China comes in first. Rather than being a wonder it was a massive waste of time, achieving nothing and costing as many lives per metre as a normal month in downtown Fallujah.

While the idea was to keep the marauding hordes from the north out, it never achieved this noble ambition; bribing the gatekeepers put paid to this notion.

And having strolled a goodly section of the wall north-east of Beijing, I can report that much of it looks like it was built yesterday— because it was.

The original wall is all but disappearing out of sight of tourists. Should a failed effort of human folly be considered a wonder? I doubt it.

The ancient city of Petra at number two, however, is quite a nice spot, especially when floodlit at night. But again, I have to compare it with other surviving ancient cities and, if given the choice between Petra and, say, Pompeii or Herculaneum, Petra doesn't quite measure up.

If anyone was serious about getting a feel for what life in an ancient city was really like, they wouldn't go to Petra—even in the old days.

Paul, Peter and John the Evangelist headed off to Ephesus and Corinth because they considered Petra a bit on the dull side.

When you wander down the main street of Ephesus and pause outside the great library, you feel much more in a space of wonder than you do when appreciating the bronze chisel work of Petra.

Machu Picchu is good. If you were going to design a place where you could cut the hearts out of the hapless poor to appease the gods, this is it.

To sit in silence when there aren't too many tourists about and imagine the rivers of blood flowing down the steps, while not all that uplifting, is tremendously sobering, and that in itself is not a bad thing.

Ditto the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza. Full marks. A top spot for a bloodfest … a message not completely lost on the Spaniards.

And the same applies to the Colosseum in Rome, which was little more than an edifice to bread and circuses.

Though I think the Pantheon, tucked away as it is behind a shopping strip, is a much more wondrous building.

The Romans were not noted for their subtlety when it came to public architecture, but with the Pantheon they almost accidentally struck a particularly aesthetic note—and a note that still rings wondrously clear today.

Making up the Seven are the Taj Mahal and the big Christ in Rio. In Sydney, the St George Leagues Club is known locally as the Taj Mahal, and given the choice of Tajs to while away a few hours in, I think I'd go with the leagues club. I know Melburnians feel exactly the same way about Windy Hill. There's just a lot more to do at these places.

I'm not suggesting the Agra Taj could be improved with poker machines and carpet on the walls, but the white structure in Agra, while Christmas-cake pretty, I found just a little bit cold.

As for the statue of Christ the Redeemer, it's rubbish—the sort of work that gives kitsch a bad name.

The Greeks probably didn't have a bad idea when they thought up the wheeze of the Seven Wonders all those years ago, but to me the wonder of the ancient world is to where the enlightened sensibilities of the ancients disappeared.

To wander through the archaeological museums of Athens, London or Istanbul is to witness the very highest points of human aesthetics up until 1CE, yet 1000 years later artists were baffled by the simple notion of perspective—a problem not solved again until the Renaissance.

A truly modern set of wonders would have to echo our times and sensibilities—and that necessitates them being pop. For what it's worth, witnessing a Collingwood–Carlton grand final at the MCG is very hard to go past as a modern wonder.

But, then again, finding out that P. Hilton's performance on Larry King was the most watched show since the moon landing causes a very serious pause for thought.

MALCOLM KNOX

I am sitting in a car. A taut-voiced woman is leaning into the window, telling me what not to touch.

She points to a battery of buttons flashing across the dashboard.

“Don't touch.”

She points to the handbrake, gearstick and pedals.

“Don't touch.”

She points to the passenger seat.

“Don't touch.”

It is as I set off at 15 kilometres an hour, climb a narrow ramp and approach a sharp left-hand turn that I cannot remember whether she told me not to touch the steering wheel. Will the woman run up to me in my crashed vehicle and say,
I never told you not to touch the steering wheel! What kind of idiot are you?

I close my eyes, fold my hands on my lap and place my faith in technology. The steering wheel turns itself. I'm away, up hill and down dale, on a lengthy circuit past a ferris wheel, a test-driving track, an educational display, a photography exhibition, a modelled Formula-1 pit stop, an Imax theatre and a rank of race-car simulators. I am tickled pink every time the ghost in the machine turns my steering wheel. Soothing elevator music fills the cabin.