The Best Australian Humorous Writing Page 15

  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.

  Business

  GIDEON HAIGH

  Packed it in: The demise of the Bulletin

  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 u
naltered 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?”

  The last 18 months of the Bulletin’s deathbed vigil had been gruelling. There was a sense, in some of its more panting covers, of a publication running hard to stand still. There had been a constant cycle of farewells, 20 staff reading the signs and moving on. Most of the senior staff members were replaced by less seasoned reporters, where they were replaced at all.

  Much of Lehmann’s time had been devoted to doing more with less, sometimes with nothing at all, as when he invited politicians to contribute to the Bulletin during the election campaign. “Who can I get?” was the question by which he became known. Sometimes this had an unconscious comedy. “Who can I get to do a cartoon?” he said, emerging from his office one day, apparently oblivious to his having just let go his last two cartoonists.

  In these austerities he was watched over by his publisher, Paul Myers, a short, bossy figure installed by PBL Media CEO Ian Law, who had previously run the RM Williams magazine, Outback. Myers might have fitted in a century earlier, when the Bulletin had rejoiced in its reputation as the “Bushman’s Bible”; staff now referred to their cheeseparing publisher as “Small Pliers”. Some economies were noticeable, such as the replacement of Jana Wendt as “Lunch with” columnist by the lighter and less costly Juanita Phillips; some seemed niggardly, like canning The Chaser’s droll headline news summary. Others became the stuff of legend. Book reviewers? Who needed them? “Why do we have to pay these people?” griped Lehmann one day. “Don’t they like reading?” Myers stormed: “We’ve got 26 people on staff! Get one of them to do something!”

  The Bulletin, nonetheless, had soldiered on, and continued to punch above its diminishing weight. Its ace Darwin correspondent, Paul Toohey, broke the story of Therese Rein’s business interests; its dogged investigator Jennifer Sexton revealed the shady past of Paul Keating’s business associate Bruce McDonald, and the bizarre mores of Rene Rivkin’s inner circle. The magazine had unearthed one excellent young reporter, Katherine Fleming from Medical Observer, and manufactured another, Joey Catanzaro, promoted from manning the front desk to touring Iraq. By the end of last year there was the kind of euphoria that comes from having apparently cheated the hangman. Cook remembers that where the Christmas lunch of 2006 had been “thinly attended and resentful”, that of 2007 had involved “a vast amount of enthusiasm, goodwill and yippee”. So, despite all the grim tidings, it came as a shock when group publisher Phil Scott introduced ACP Magazines CEO Scott Lorson in the Bulletin office that Thursday morning.

  Lorson arrived like a man bearing bad news—dark suit, navy blue shirt, scuffed loafers—and wasted no time sharing it. He herded staff into a tight group in front of him, as though they were soldiers on parade or children at a school assembly, and told them they had published their last issue, efforts to sell the magazine having failed. Phones in the office were ringing before he had finished his address: a press release announcing the closure was already in circulation. How long did it fucking take? In the end, about 20 minutes. In hindsight, probably closer to 20 years.

  During his three vigorous years as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin, Lehmann’s predecessor, Garry Linnell, toyed occasionally with the strapline “Setting Australia’s Agenda Since 1880”. His news editor, Tim Blair, would laugh: “Are you sure you want to remind people of some of the agendas we’ve set?” After all, earlier straplines had included “Socialism in Our Time”; then “Australia for the Australians”; and, most infamously, “Australia for the White Man and China for the Chow”.

  For much of its history, the Bulletin was chauvinistic to the point of isolationism, denouncing foreign wars and foreign capital with equal ardour; it was also unblinkingly anti-British, especially when the empire was in its view insufficiently racist. “There is nothing to lead us to believe,” it editorialised a hundred years ago, “that [John] Bull, bloated with pride over the possession of over 300,000,000 nigger subjects, has a vestige of sympathy with, or comprehension of, the White Australia ideal.” It was variously anti-Semitic and anti-communist; it was content to yield Spain to Franco, and Italy to Mussolini; it advised appeasement of Hitler (“Far from being a megalomaniac,” said the Bulletin, three weeks before the invasion of Poland, “Adolf Hitler is probably the most modest man in G
ermany”) and counselled scorn for Churchill (“Mr Churchill is the Dangerous Dan McGrew of Imperial politics,” said the magazine in January 1940, “and he is far more dangerous to us than to the enemy”).

  At its best and boldest, however, the Bulletin was more than a periodical. “It was Australia,” said the writer–adventurer Randolph Bedford. DH Lawrence’s alter ego, Richard Somers, exempted the Bulletin from his drear view of Australian culture in Kangaroo (1923): “He liked its straightforwardness and the kick in some of its tantrums. It beat no solemn drums. It had no deadly earnestness. It was just stoical and spitefully humorous.” There were the writers: not just Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, but Steele Rudd, CJ Dennis, Joseph Furphy, John Shaw Neilson, Dorothea Mackellar, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Frank Dalby Davidson, Christopher Brennan, Ethel Turner, Barbara Baynton, Vance and Nettic Palmer. There were the artists and cartoonists: Hop (Livingston Hopkins), Phil May, Norman Lindsay, Fred Leist, Will Dyson and David Low. “Perhaps never in the history of world journalism has a paper stood nearer to the heart of a country than the Bulletin,” thought Sidney Baker, who studied the publication intently for his classic The Australian Language (1946). “Perhaps never again will so much of the true nature of a country be caught up in the pages of a single journal.”

  Every journal has a lifespan, of course, and founder JF Archibald had no illusions about the Bulletin’s, foretelling that his “clever youth” would inevitably “become a dull old man”. His prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled 50 years ago, when the Bulletin’s circulation was barely 27,000, having more than halved since World War II, burdening the Prior family, its owners since 1927, with heavy losses. Its survival was a fluke. Frank Packer, publisher of the Daily Telegraph and impresario of Channel Nine, wanted to neutralise the Priors’ Woman’s Mirror, a rival to his own Australian Women’s Weekly. Packer was not quite sure what to do with the unprofitable, inert Bulletin, which came as part of the purchase, in October 1960. He rang Donald Horne, editor of his new fortnightly, the Observer. “I’ve bought the Bulletin,” he said. “Which will we kill off? It or the Observer?” The Bulletin endured on Horne’s whim: it was, if you like, the Lucky Publication.