The Best Australian Humorous Writing (20 page)

Edgar's language is our language, our most valuable inheritance. There is no point in our massively subsidised cultural institutions if they devalue our greatest asset by blandly assuming that Shakespeare's language is impenetrable. Edgar does talk fake visionary nonsense but it has a point, one that Nunn and his minions ignored. No wonder we sat unmoved in the Courtyard Theatre as Edgar/Tom, in a crude version of quack aversion therapy, tricked his blind father into jumping from a precipice that wasn't there. There's no way an audience can get the point if the actors are persuaded that there isn't one.

ROD QUANTOCK

The First Melbourne International Comedy Festival wobbled around the unpredictable presence of comedy's Moses, Peter Cook, who was nursed along by an adoring festival patron, Sir Les Patterson. It boasted 69 shows and promised “1,262,148 jokes, japes, punchlines, pranks, guffaws, grins, giggles and a few puns”.

In its 20th year, the obvious thing to say about the 2006 MICF is, “My, hasn't it grown.” Its size relative to almost anything, including elephants, staggers those who were there at the start.

Festival 2006 is 160.778 per cent bigger than Festival 1986. That's a better 20-year return than the ASX and as a rate, second only to the growth of China over that time.

This year there are 233 shows and more than 3000 individual performances in 4.2 million venues spread over 53 pages of the
Melway
. These figures are up from an all-time high of 211 shows in 2005, which was up from an all-time high in 2004, which was up from an all-time—well, you get the idea.

(Based on the number of comedians needed to perform the burgeoning shows, it is projected that by 2050, comedians will outnumber audiences and the glut in the apartment market will ease as every available space becomes a venue. That this should happen at
the same moment the oil runs out and polar bears become extinct, is perhaps but a happy coincidence.)

If the 1986 festival was the first, it wasn't the beginning. That was somewhere in a disjunction of the space-time comedy continuum that occurred around the introduction of television.

Until the early '60s, theatres such as the Tivoli formed a national touring circuit for musicians, jugglers, exotic dancers, magicians, hypnotists, animal acts, escapologists and comedians. The great George Wallace, Maurie Fields, Chico Marx, WC Fields, Victor Borge and Jimmy Edwards all performed on-stage in Melbourne.

I was too young to go to the Tiv before it closed but I watched its last show broadcast on the medium that killed it.

The passing of the Tiv broke a succession of comedy that could be traced to the music halls of industrial Britain. For the next 10 years, live comedy was off the menu.

Some comedians such as Funny Face Gordon, Maurie Fields, Rosie Sturgess, Ernie Bourne and Joffa Boy made it into the black-and-white world of the box. Lots didn't.

For them, working meant working live, and the only places booking live in Melbourne in the '60s were liniment and lager pleasant Sunday mornings and smoke nights with strippers and 8mm porn. The patter was blue and the ladies, God bless 'em, weren't welcome even if they bought a plate.

Public laughter became private laughter until baby boom comedians, fresh from student theatre (God rest its soul), and disconnected by a generation from their antecedents, did comedy differently, without joke books and writers. They would never think of inviting you to take their mothers-in-law, because they didn't have mothers-in-law. They had other things to talk about, Melbourne things. But there was nowhere to say them.

Until 1974, year zero for Melbourne comedy and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. In 1974,
Countdown
came to the ABC, ABBA won Eurovision, and Nixon resigned on
television while the last US citizens were rescued from Saigon. Cyclone Tracy stopped Santa getting to Darwin, John Howard entered Federal Parliament and Whitlam was prime minister. Just toss in the entrails of a chicken and you've got everything you need to start a comedy revolution.

And that's what happened in 1974 when The Flying Trapeze Cafe appeared, Tardis-like, in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, and out stepped John Pinder, who promptly put up an “acts wanted” sign. The festival that is Melbourne laughing at itself began that day. Brunswick Street probably started that day too.

Suddenly 40, 60, 80 people a night were leaving their lounge rooms and laughing together. Before decade's end there were hundreds gathered for a giggle as venues bloomed: Foibles in Carlton came and went in flames; the Last Laugh took off with the Barnum and Bailey Pinder; performers started The Comedy Cafe and Banana Lounge; the prince of venues, the Prince Patrick, was open; and the Dick Whittington was the other side of the river with the Espy.

In 1983,
Australia, You're Standing in It
pushed Melbourne comedy through the cathode-ray ceiling and onto the ABC while Pinder was busy lobbying the State Government to fund a festival of comedy. In 1986, the propitious year that Haley's Comet returned, the first Melbourne International Comedy Festival was announced by premier John Cain, wearing a Groucho nose'n'spectacles set.

Names of myth and legend and the household variety populate the first program—Max Gillies, Gerry Connolly, Evelyn Krape, Barry Dickens, Los Trios Ringbarkus, Wogs Out of Work, The Cabbage Brothers, Lawyers Guns and Money, Let the Blood Run Free, Funny Stories, Linda Gibson, Combo Berko, Gina Riley, Maryanne Fahey, Wendy Harmer, The Hot Bagels and The Doug Anthony All Stars.

That first year a women-only show,
La Joke at Le Joke
, was a hit and every festival since has had a women-only performance.

“Cartoonists Speak” started something too that year and exhibitions of cartoonists have been part of most festivals.

There was a cake exhibition in 1989 at the Arts Centre, featuring cakes made to look like famous celebrities. Hills hoists decorated in-situ graced the 1990 festival. There was an unfulfilled scheme of then director, Shane Maloney, to run seminars in the City Square for garden gnomes who could be dropped off by their owners on their way to work and retrieved at the end of the seminar day happier and wiser gnomes.

Subsequent years saw John Clarke's attachment to the written word beget
Humourists Read Humour
. This year, the Annual Comedy Debate turns 16.

Every year since, the festival has had its stayers, its newcomers, its up-and-comers and its faders. A lot has been lost or changed in those 20 years. Today, the Fly Trap is a Japanese restaurant, and strangely, so is The Comedy Cafe. The Last Laugh is a bar. The Prince Patrick is an up-market pub and the Espy is a VCAT decision. The Universal Theatre is—well I haven't dared look.

In
The Graduate
, Dustin Hoffman was advised to get into plastics. Today he would be told “comedy”, judging by the number of people who enter for
Class Clowns
and
Raw Comedy
.

These contestants do what everyone dreads—get up on stage in front of stingers and make 'em laugh. And most of them do.

Those who can do a “tight five” through the heats and semi-finals and make it to the final can expect a long apprenticeship if they want to stick it out. It might be fun, but there are less live options now and many more live comedians.

Between festivals, the opportunities to run your tight five are few and the competition for stage time fierce. The aim is to go from that tight five that wowed the judges to a tight 10, then 15, then it's the Comedy Festival. Can you do an hour? Can you do it three, four or more years in a row until noticed?

Despite the success of the festival, it has never been harder to survive in comedy. Working means a night here, a night there, sometimes for money, mostly not. The smell of the grease paint and
the roar of the crowd are an addictive concoction and people will work for nothing. Because if you do make it, the rewards are enough to make your parents stop nagging you to finish your law degree.

This year, as a judge of some heats of
Raw
and
Class Clowns
, I have already seen two or three who could make a go of it. You should see them too. I know you have your must-see favourites and you spent a lot at the Commonwealth Games and you're worried about your AWA, but if the budget will stretch, go and see someone you've never seen, someone you may never want to see again or someone who will one day look back at you from your flat plasma screen as they take home the gold Logie or Nobel Peace Prize. If you can't see them during the festival, track them down in the 11-month off-season. They'll enjoy it and so will you and between-festival comedy may just boom again.

GIDEON HAIGH

Few Australians have loitered so long at the brink of death as Kerry Packer, and perhaps none so ambivalently. Tens of millions of dollars were lavished on the campaign to prolong his life. He was saved first by timely defibrillation, then by a transplanted kidney, and finally by a constant cycle of surgery and steroids, trailed everywhere by the best minds in clinical care. But, heedless of the medical consequences, Packer was resolved to make no changes to his life whatsoever. The addiction to junk food remained unaltered by diabetes; the smoking continued unabated, despite six coronary angi-oplasties. “Light my cigarette, son,” he famously told a prominent cardiologist. Upbraided for his lifestyle by a specialist at the Cornell Medical Center, he made his priorities perfectly clear: “All right, son, you've given me the fucking lecture … Now are you going to fucking fix me up or aren't you?”

No title in Packer's print empire was closer to his overtaxed heart than the weekly
Bulletin
. And in its last two decades, no title seemed quite so shaded by its proprietor's personality. Tens of millions of dollars were allocated to the
Bulletin
's survival. There were constant transfusions of journalistic talent and executive expertise. There were regular relaunches and recalibrations. But the venerable masthead, dedicated to the week's news, geared to rapid
response, found it hard to break the habits of a lifetime, and outlived its legendary master by barely two years.

On the morning the
Bulletin
finally closed, Thursday, 24 January 2008, editor-in-chief John Lehmann went for a haircut. There were bound to be television cameras; he might as well look his best. Lehmann was right. The news crews duly came, but they camped out the front of ACP Magazines, at 54 Park Street, Sydney, unaware that for four and a half years the
Bulletin
had been round the corner in Stockland House, at 175 Castlereagh Street. It was a happy accident allowing
Bulletin
employees to stroll mainly unmolested to their impromptu wake at Darling Harbour's Pier 26; it also attested the magazine's marginal position in the Australian media.

Newspapers the next day rushed to tell the story of the suits at CVC Capital Partners, who now control ACP Magazines through the 75% stake in PBL Media they secured last year, and who had now trampled the traditions of 128 years. “Welcome to the brave, but soulless, new world,” said John Lyons (former
Bulletin
nationalaffairs editor) in the
Australian
. “It was the last bastion of the long view,” said Tony Wright (former
Bulletin
national-affairs editor) in the
Age
. At word that the
Bulletin
was losing about $4 million a year, eyes moistened in memory of the dear departed. “Kerry would win or lose that [$4 million] in a weekend in Las Vegas or London,” observes David Haselhurst, for 35 years the stock-tipper extraordinaire behind the magazine's “Speculator” column. “The money the carpetbaggers [CVC] were losing in the
Bulletin
was an eighth of what they had just paid themselves in executive bonuses,” notes Patrick Cook, for 20 years the voice of its satirical “Not the News” page.

Squirming at the scrutiny, the venture capitalists proceeded with a hugger-mugger interment. The magazine's website was switched off within a day. Its name was swiftly removed from the downstairs listings at Stockland House, while mail was soon being
returned to senders with blunt stickers advising, “NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS …
BULLETIN
CLOSED.” On the day I visited, the door of the magazine's eerily silent office was still blazoned with its last cover, “Why We Love Australia”.

Yet there's no doubt that this passion of the
Bulletin
's was, towards its end, unrequited. Audited circulation had halved since the 1980s, its ageing subscribers were not being replaced and its newsstand visibility had dwindled. When one former senior staffer sought a souvenir of its last edition at Central railway station on 24 January, he searched a big newsagency high and low, to no avail; finally asking for help, he was directed to two copies hidden almost out of sight.

Schadenfreude
is always possible when one magazine reports the closure of another with which it is widely supposed to be in competition. That's not the case here: this writer enjoyed a happy decade as a contributor to the
Bulletin
and counts a number of former employees as friends. In studying the decline and fall, nonetheless, you can't help hearing the echo of its erstwhile proprietor's famous deathbed comment: “Am I still there? How fucking long is this going to take?”