The Best Australian Humorous Writing (6 page)

ADVISER 2: What does Newspoll say?

ADVISER 1: Don't know. Don't read much fiction.

ADVISER 3: We've got to do something or we're cactus. We need entirely new ideas; an entirely fresh team. We need a bunch of political geniuses the likes of which we've never experienced.

ADVISER 2: Now you're talking fiction.

ADVISER 3: You speak truer than you know.

There is a blinding flash of highly theatrical light and smoke and when it clears some of the advisers from
The West Wing
—Sam, Josh, Toby and Leo—are revealed, dazed and confused.

TOBY: Vertigo. I've got vertigo.

JOSH: You're getting vertigo?

TOBY: I said I've got vertigo from the shazam whatchammacallit meshuggenah.

LEO: People …

JOSH: Sam, Toby's got vertigo.

LEO: People.

SAM: You've got vertigo?

West Wing
adviser CJ enters, dazed, from another room.

CJ: Hey, has anyone else got vertigo?

TOBY (
shouting
): Yes, I've got vertigo.

CJ: OK, you've got vertigo.

LEO: People, can we forget the vertigo?

JOSH: Easy for you, you don't have vertigo.

LEO: Is everyone all right?

JOSH: Yeah, as far as I can tell our dialogue style remains unaffected.

SAM: Where the hell are we—looks like the early 1950s.

ADVISER 1: Welcome to Canberra. I'm senior political adviser to John Howard and at phenomenal expense to the management we've acquired your services for the duration of the election campaign.

JOSH: Canberra? We're in Canberra?

SAM: Canberra we're in.

LEO: We're in Canberra?

CJ: What's a Canberra?

TOBY: Apparently, what we're in—Canberra.

ADVISER 2: Yes, um, do you always do that—only the election's in three or four months and we'd quite like to crack on.

ADVISER 3: Yes, we all admired the way you turned around Jed Bartlet's re-election campaign through an application of stern principle and an appeal to the best that is in the population and we'd like you to help John Howard win an election exactly in that fashion, except in reverse.

TOBY: Win their election.

SAM: Their election they …

ADVISER 1: Please, really don't start.

LEO: You do understand that we're … fictional? I mean, we're Democrats but we're not real people.

ADVISER 2: Yes, just like our Democrats.

LEO: Gee, I don't know.

SAM: I don't know either.

TOBY: Know? Who knows?

ADVISER 1: Christ, I wonder if this was a good idea.

ADVISER 2: The PM's coming.

John Howard enters. Despite the fact that it is 10.10am, he is wearing a burgundy patterned dressing gown and bearing a cup of Horlicks. He makes his way to an old Genoa armchair in the centre of the room.

PM: Well good morning and how is everybody this morning nice sort of weather we're having isn't it a nice sort of weather I said to Janette that's the wife I said to Janette this morning nice sort of weather we're having this morning and she said yes it would be if it doesn't rain but I said it'd be good for the farmers and the hydrangeas of course and she said John is that a statement of policy and I said what about the hydrangeas and she said no about the farmers and I said yes I suppose it is and she said well if it is going to rain I better get your spencers off the Hills hoist and I said yes you better had because you don't want your spencer re-wetted after it's been dried it'll give it that sort of yellowish tinge which is a shame because a good spencer can last you a lifetime and really there's nothing worse than a damp spencer. Mind you there's nothing better than a dry spencer. Have I mentioned that we're occupying North Queensland next week? Actually who are these people?

ADVISER 1: Um, Prime Minister, these are the new team of advisers we hope will win us the election.

PM: Really? Why are their mouths hanging open?

ADVISER 2: They're just amazed at the opportunity they've been presented with.

PM: New advisers, hey? Do you think they understand Australian culture?

ADVISER 3: Well, they come from American television, so they sort of are Australian culture.

PM: Well, um, wonderful to have you aboard. I've got to go and have a snooze before my nap. Could someone draft up a regulation confining Aborigines to the cattle stations they work on? I'll see you all later. Do help yourself to Horlicks. It feeds night starvation, you know.

And he is gone.

ADVISER 1: Well?

LEO: Gee, I don't know.

TOBY: Know? What's to know.

ADVISER 2: Sorry, what's the problem?

CJ: It's just that we've never met anyone who's more tediously repetitive than we are.

Josh calls from a corner.

JOSH: Hey everyone, it's all right—I was just reading this Fairfax newspaper and in between the sex blog and the guide to the best Tex-Mex cuisine in Phuket there was this actual news story. We can work with this guy.

ALL: Really.

JOSH: Yeah, he's one of us—he's a liberal.

The White House. The Oval Office. President Bartlet is writing on a card.

PRESIDENT: Res ipsa loquitor mens rea ars longa vita brevis. Do you think that's enough, Charlie?

CHARLIE: For an eight-year-old girl with leukaemia, more than enough, Mr President.

PRESIDENT: You know what's funny, Charlie?

CHARLIE: That this show is written by Hollywood liberals yet the only regular black character is a 21st-century Step'n' Fetchit?

PRESIDENT: No, it's that, well, let me put it the way I did to the Swedish academy when I won my Nobel.

CHARLIE: Which one, Mr President?

PRESIDENT: Physics—the second one; in Sanskrit it goes … hang on, Leo should hear this. Leo!

MRS LANDINGHAM (
on intercom
): He's not here, Mr President.

PRESIDENT: Mrs Landingham? Aren't you dead?

MRS LANDINGHAM: Still very much here.

PRESIDENT: You were dead last episode.

MRS LANDINGHAM: That's because Channel Nine plays them out of sequence.

PRESIDENT: Where's Leo and Toby and Josh and CJ?

MRS LANDINGHAM: They're on an exchange. We've got their opposite numbers.

Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor enter.

PRESIDENT: Good morning, gentlemen or as Schopenhau …

CROSBY: Cut the shit, you lefty arsewipe.

TEXTOR (
through intercom
): Hey, grandma! Hold the calls! Right— let's kill the rest of the Indians.

The Lodge.

TOBY: Meshuggenah this, guys, meshuggenah.

LEO: He did what?

ADVISER 1: He said that he didn't want people who threw their kids overboard in this country.

SAM: But they weren't throwing their kids overboard!

ADVISER 2: Yes, well, I think you'll just have to appreciate the validity of the differences of our political cultures, if you don't mind.

JOSH: You know, President Bartlet had just this problem with a group of Chinese Christian illegal immigrants in series three. He told the National Guard to stand down so they could escape from the detention camp, thus preserving freedom and diplomatic relations.

What does your guy do?

ADVISER 3: Locks 'em up till the kids start cutting themselves.

SAM: Aren't cultural differences wonderful.

TOBY: What kind of shmo is this nebbish? Can we do anything with this shmendrick?

SAM: What's the matter?

TOBY: Yiddish. I'm all out of Yiddish. This guy has de-yiddished me.

This guy has de-yiddished me!

LEO: Calm down, Toby.

TOBY: Calm down?! It's easy for you to say, calm down. You're written without mannerisms!

SAM: Could we get back to the matter at hand? This guy we're working for has invaded the Northern Territory.

JOSH: So?

SAM: So, it's the Northern Territory. Of this country.

JOSH: Oh, I thought it was just one of those African countries we invent for shit to happen in from time to time, like the Republic of Mugunga or Equatorial Bong-Bong.

SAM: No, apparently it's a real place—like Montana, only the white people are even crazier.

JOSH: I always wanted to invade Montana, you know. It would solve our problems in the third congressional district.

SAM: Yeah, then we could move Jackson on the armed services committee.

LEO: Which would free up a place on ways and means.

ADVISER 1: Stop, stop!

TOBY: What, what? For chrissake, what?

ADVISER 2: You're being too multi-layered.

ADVISER 1: This is Australian television.

ADVISER 3: You just gave out more backstory in four lines than the entire last series of
Stingers
.

ADVISER 1: Listen, you're not really giving us what we need. What's the problem?

JOSH: Yes, well, usually you see, we're all arguing about some knotty detail of policy and President Bartlet kind of floats in and listens to what everyone has to say and then says something gnomish and lateral, with a few quotes usually starting from Thomas More and going via way of Aeschylus to the Ayurveda
Upanishads
about the great wheel of life in order to lay bare the radically transcendental and redemptionist base to American liberalism.

ADVISER 2: Then what happens?

SAM: Same every episode. We bomb the shit out of somewhere. Usually fictional—somewhere that's been made up as the pretext for something we want to do.

LEO: Like Kosovo.

JOSH: So, can we get that? Huh, what can the PM give us by way of inspiration? Something from
Paradise Lost, Urne-Buriall
, maybe? A little burst of the
Lusiads
?

ADVISER 3: Are you familiar with a thing called
Wisden
?

SAM: So, no inspiring quotes then?

ADVISER 2: We do have a bloke a bit like that—name of Bob Carr. Closest thing Australia's had to a philosopher king for a long while.

LEO: Right, so now he's busy helping humanity?

ADVISER 1: No, he got a job with the bank he'd previously hired to build toll roads.

There is silence.

TOBY: Right, so at least give us the minor character dying. At least!

ADVISER 2: Of course. (
Into intercom
) Maria could you get Bill Heffernan over here?

The PM enters in dressing gown carrying steaming coronation mug of tea.

PM: Oh hello everybody sorry I'm late I've just been watching the tea steep and I had an idea—which rather took the fun out of it but I think it's a winner. Let's attack the unions!

LEO: The unions? Why?

PM: Because membership has fallen to 20 per cent of the workforce.

JOSH: So, what you're suggesting is that in an era when no one pretty much joins anything, we allow ourselves to be fooled by their proportional decline and attack the body that has the single largest membership of any social institution whatsoever?

PM: It's getting results.

TOBY: Who for?

PM: OK, how 'bout this? Kevin Rudd when he was a child didn't live in a car or if he did he didn't for nearly as long as he said he did.

JOSH: Didn't … live … in … a … car.

SAM: For nearly as long as he said he did.

TOBY: Anything else?

PM: Julia Gillard?

LEO: Illegal shares? Sex scandal? She kill someone? What?

PM: She's kind of whiny.
(Silence.)
You know Crosby and Textor would have loved this stuff.

SAM: Crosby Textor, why does that ring a bell?

JOSH: Two guys of those names were executed in Texas this morning.

PM: I think we're home and hosed, don't you?

CJ: Of course.

JOSH/TOBY/CJ/SAM/LEO: President Bartlet!

There is a blinding flash of light and President Bartlet appears, with Charlie.

PRESIDENT: Greetings all or as Nietzsche said “Chock chock tish tash chock”, rendered of course in the click language of the Kalahari Bushmen which I presume I have no need to translate. Do I, Charlie?

CHARLIE: Don't ask me, Mr President, I thought your dentures was loose.

PRESIDENT: Charlie, how come you can say anything to me?

CHARLIE: Because I occupy the archetypal role of the Fool in this series—ain't that wonderful? All's I need is a banjo and tap shoes. Mind you, I'd rather be anything but a fool but I wouldn't want to be a Hollywood liberal.

PRESIDENT: I think what we can say is that from the citizens of one new country to another the world will little note nor long remember what we did here, especially if we were up against
Big Brother
. But that these are the times that try men's souls, the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink but that if we are our nations to be the last best hope of man or we are to honour not the old dead tree but the young tree green we must say that independence is our happiness, our country is the world and our religion is to do good, then we shall eventually find out what it was all for and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. And if everyone's got a tear in their eye I think it's time for
Lateline
.

Theme music begins.

PM: Times that try men's souls—you know I think you and I might have the same desk calendar.

Cut to living room, viewers watching closing credits in dressing gowns stirring Horlicks.

VIEWER 1: Well, wasn't that a nice night's entertainment?

VIEWER 2: That stuff Bartlet said—it was all bull, wasn't it?

VIEWER 1 (
sighing
): Pretty much—but it sounds a lot better than comfortable and relaxed.

MUNGO MACCALLUM

The morning walk is what we'll remember best: that daily ritual which started as a harmless exercise routine, then morphed into a defiant demonstration of the continuing vigour and virility of an ageing, bald, myopic, partially deaf contender.