The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  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.

  Scene three

  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 pollies went a little crackers

  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.

  As intended, it drew the television cameras, with their inevitable following of supporters and opponents. What had been a solo performance turned into a daily spectacular with full-on audience participation.

  Naturally the log-rollers and satirists seized their opportunity, and we had a few weeks of theatre of the absurd before the arena was swamped by full-blown loonies and exhibitionists. By the end, the walk had become wholesale theatre of cruelty—a bit like the entire election campaign, really.

  John Howard was not the only player strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage: he had an all-singing, all-dancing supporting cast, with a generous sprinkling of stuntmen and clowns. But essentially it was all about him, and his increasingly farcical attempts to elevate what turned out to be a pretty mundane sitcom into something approaching high drama.

  In hindsight, the tragicomic denouement was obvious from the time the polls settled in favour of our hero’s unlikely antagonist, a fresh-faced man with a plan. It was not so much that Kevin07 became an object of love and affection as that he was just something different. Without noticing, Howard had passed his use-by date, and there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it. But, being Howard, he refused to accept it; he might be mired in the merde, but he remained undeterred.

  He had been written off before, but sooner or later the mob had been bribed or frightened back to their senses. Surely the tactics that had worked in the past could be made to work again. So, in the manner of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig in World War I, Howard spent the year hurling his (or, rather, the taxpayers’) resources into the fray, regardless of cost, in increasingly frantic and always futile efforts to break the enemy line as measured in the opinion polls.

  Send forward a revolutionary water plan. Cost: $10bn. Gains: Nil. Enlist a new education foundation. Cost: $5bn. Gains: Nil. Mobilise the troops to take over Aboriginal settlements. Cost: $10bn. Gains: Nil. Hit them with the big one: hitherto irresistible tax cuts. Cost: $34bn. Gains: Nil. Finally, call up the reserves: the great launch offensive. Cost: $10bn. Gains: Nil. And all the while keep up the advertising barrage in an unrelenting assault on the public purse. Cost: $1m per day. Gains: Well, you’ve got the picture.

  The whole campaign cost (or would have, if the bills had ever come in) something more than $65bn. It was not totally wasted: over 12 months, the Liberal vote revived by just over two percentage points. This meant the party managed to avoid annihilation; they saved sufficient territory to regroup for another try in three years. But it need hardly be said they comprehensively lost the war.

  The madness of it (in the clinical sense) was that, although from time to time Howard talked about changing his tactics, he never actually did; he and his demoralised army just went on pushing against the door clearly marked pull. The themes were unchanged: WorkChoices good, unions bad, you can trust me, you can’t trust him. Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

  What do you mean the mob’s stopped listening? They have to listen. It’s their job to listen. They must be joking with us. Or perhaps they’ve gone off to live in an alternate universe for a while and will come back to Earth on voting day. Be reassured by our friends in the media, who say the polls defy reality, they can’t be happening. I mean, Professor Paul Kelly says political reality is inside the beltway and people have moved outside it, whatever a beltway might be. That must mean something. Well, doesn’t it?

  This chronic refusal to accept the facts led to some wonderful instances of paranoia, one of whose victims was the Channel 9 worm. Howard had always loathed this innocent invertebrate, and its appearance, against his express wishes, sent him into paroxysms of horror. Unfortunately, the feeling appeared mutual: at his every statement, the worm retreated to the depths, while the mere sight of Rudd caused it to leap like a gazelle on steroids.

  Rudd was so pleased with the worm’s performance that, campaigning at a school the next day, and asked to paint an elephant, he elected to paint a worm instead. The young girl wanted to call it Samara; Rudd christened it Ted.

  The ever-alert Tony Abbott deduced that the worm was clearly fixed: it was an anarchist annelid, a new left nematode, a filthy socialist crawler. But of course it wasn’t; it was just another opinion poll, albeit a more immediate and graphic one. Once again, the Liberals declined to emerge from their state of denial.

  There were flashes of insight: shortly before announcing the election date, Howard blinked his way out of his fantasy world just long enough to ask his colleagues if, just possibly, he might be a teensy-weensy part of the problem and they would prefer him to piss off. Obviously he expected a raucous rejection of such an absurd proposition.

  When his loyal envoy Alexander Downer replied timidly that actually, while they all loved and admired him, truly they did, there was just a kind of a sort of a feeling that it might be better if he stood down, he went off to consult his family, or at least the bit of it that talks. Janette apparently advised that she was not going to leave Kirribilli House one second before she was forced to, and that was that.

  Howard then embraced the worst of both worlds by saying he would hand the leadership, which he clearly believed was his own private property, to Peter Costello in 18 months or thereabouts. He also said he and Costello would campaign as a double act, but of course they didn’t. Howard continued down his own doomed path while Costello did things like attending a children’s teddy bears picnic and explaining to a five-year-old that God created cacti.

  Eventually, maddened by relevance deprivation, he came out screaming that Australia was faced by an economic tsunami. Howard said it would only be a little tsunami and he could save us. Costello was taken away and sedated and soon afterwards Howard started talking about himself in the third person. Mark Vaile skateboarded down a footpath in Tweed Heads with a baseball cap on backwards and Tony Abbott abused a dying Australian folk hero. Malcolm Turnbull whined to his colleagues in obscene terms about Howard’s refusal to sign Kyoto and was accused of leaking the story for personal advancement.

  Finally, Howard and Costello did appear together on a commercial television chat show, where they were invited to say nice things about each other. Howard said Costello was clever and funny (implication: Howard wasn’t) and Costello said Howard was a hard worker (undoubted fact: Costello wasn’t).

  Meanwhile, Rudd marched steadily forward from one FM radio station to another, being asked about the colour of his underpants by people with names like Miffy and Daffy and Cobber and Rowf. Having secured the post-adolescent vote when an old home video showing him eating his own earwax was revived and became a bigger hit than The Lord of the Rings, he dived into the nearest telephone booth and re-emerged as Super Scrooge, a crusty old skinflint who could be trusted not to spend your savings—on political advertising, anyway.

  Julia Gillard, portrayed by the government as Rudd’s own Madame Defarge, became—at least for the duration of the campaign—more like Ben Bolt’s Alice, the most dutiful and meek of helpmeets. The only break in the calm was when Peter Garrett lurched phallically into the picture and had to be treated with cold showers and bromide.

  Rudd still found time to shadow most of Howard’s promises and movements: in one memorable hour, both leaders managed to molest the same long-suffering infant in the same shopping centre. Howard accused Rudd of too much Me-Too; Rudd replied that this was just another scare campaign, and proved he was very different by unveiling a visionary policy whereby Western Australians could use their profit from the mining boom to set up as entrepreneurs and sell land in Latin America to wealthy Chinese. When Howard’s best reply was a grant of $500,000
to Indonesian orang-utans, his defeat was inevitable.

  Rudd won in a landslide—a conservative landslide, as it turned out—but he had always said he was a conservative. Or some of the time, anyway. And Howard went off on his morning-after walk. Even when it was all over for him, he couldn’t break the habit of a lifetime.

  FRANK DEVINE

  All is not lost when you can see success in anything

  The British journalist and author William Shawcross once described me in a book as a “cheerful right-winger”. Though welcoming the portrayal, it left me with a Zen puzzle: was I cheerful because I was a right-winger or a right-winger because I was cheerful?

  The fact that I am cheerful following the election of a Labor government favours the second option, I think.

  It goes without saying that we right-wingers require no government support to stay aloft. We are cultural knights rather than political infantry. The lavish skewerings and tramplings of political correctness we enjoyed during the Howard years have left us pretty jaunty.

  Our spirits are further elevated by Kevin Rudd moving so close to us culturally, in order to win an election, that there is some talk of clearing a place for him at the Round Table.

  In The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, our brother Tim Blair caused a small frisson by pointing to the pleasure that awaits us from being able to blame everything on Rudd.

  However, there is no prospect of our festering with Rudd-hatred in the way that the sauvignon blanc sippers (chardonnay has become a bit déclassé) of the Left pumped themselves up and made themselves miserable by hating John Howard for a dozen years.

  Self-evidently, the less we have to blame Rudd for, the more agreeable our lives will be. However, we’ll probably get a kick from watching some natural enemies suffer in the grip of scheissenbedauern, a German word that means distress at seeing things turn out well.

  Radical Greens have panicked at the prospect of their dreams of post-Howard life going wavery. On the day he was appointed Environment and Arts Minister, they called for the dismissal of the quasi-Quisling Peter Garrett.