The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  What kind of a man does Kim like?

  “I think that now I definitely want someone who has a really good body,” she says, “who’s really fit. I’ve dated people who haven’t, and now I’m like, ‘What was I thinking?’ I’ll never, you know … look back.”

  Like Kim Kardashian Superstar and Kim’s support bra, Keeping Up with the Kardashians is essentially a vehicle for Kim’s breasts. It is only a reality TV show in the sense that it is more real than, say, Shaun the Sheep or Teletubbies. It feels rehearsed, staged and very badly acted, particularly by Kris, who seems unable to play herself with any emotional authenticity. Similarly, Kim is not a very good Kim Kardashian, which augurs badly for her stated ambitions to star in other, more challenging roles.

  There are two kinds of people: those who watch pay TV and those who have no idea what the other kind are talking about. Those who watch pay TV tend to watch everything on pay TV, and are the only people in Australia who might have heard of Kimora Lee Simmons, star of Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane.

  Simmons, a former model, owns the clothing brand Baby Phat, and is the ex-wife of Russell Simmons, co-founder of the Def-Jam record label. Part Japanese and part African-American, she calls herself “a pop culture phenomenon”. Much of her appeal seems to rest on the regularity with which she uses the word “fabulous”, from which she has derived a new noun, “fabulosity”.

  Simmons has skin the colour of pawpaw, and licorice hair like a Gauguin muse. She talks about Carla Bruni (“always very fabulous”), Victoria Beckham (“fabulous”) and Amy Winehouse. (“I’m not saying she’s not fabulous. She’s quite fabulous in her own lane. Which is not my lane.”)

  Simmons does not stop talking, even when her sentence is finished and her idea is clearly exhausted. It is as if she cannot stop, does not know when to stop, has no idea of structure or punctuation or logic. She consistently contradicts whatever she said last, and appears to be speaking not so much to communicate as to drown out the competing voices in her head. When she says “negative” she adds “connotation”, even when nothing is connoted. When she says “talented” she appends “bunch”, even when she means only one person.

  Was she worried about putting her two children on the show? “I don’t think my kids know that they’re different because they’re on TV,” says Simmons, “because that’s their world. Their nieces and nephews [she means their cousins] have a reality TV show, too.”

  Simmons’s niece and nephew star in MTV’s Run’s House, about the family life of Russell Simmons’s brother, Rev Run, once a rapper with Run-DMC. Kim Kardashian, before Keeping Up with the Kardashians, guested in reality shows Sunset Tan (about a tanning salon) and The Simple Life. Even her sister Kourtney has appeared in Rich Kids: Cattle Drive. When Kim posed for a Playboy centrefold, she cemented a link between two competing LA unrealities, the Kardashians and the Playboy Mansion.

  The Girls of the Playboy Mansion press conference is the only one held off site, at Hef’s place itself. The mansion is the expected mix of culture and kitsch, with a Picasso on one wall and a portrait of Hef with three lions on another. There are peacocks in the grounds, and cabin rooms with beds, magazines and tissues, for party guests (but not journalists) to “get to know each other”.

  Hef appears first. At 82, and dressed, as usual, in his pyjamas and dressing-gown, he somehow manages not to look as if he has just torn out his drip and escaped from the hospice.

  He may have had a bit of surgery on his face, and a lot of creative work done with the remains of his hair. It is impossible to say where his part is, and a dark streak that perhaps once grew down from the side of his head now turns upwards and shelters his crown. But he still looks good. He has bedroom eyes, lizard eyes, laughing eyes, and the lines on his face flex then fade when he smiles.

  In the savagely compelling show, the jewel in E!’s navel, Hef sleeps with the oldest “girl”, Holly Madison, but the two others, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson, live in as his “girlfriends”.

  “My relationship with Holly is a real one,” says Hef. “What you get on this reality show is reality, unlike most reality shows, which have been scripted. The reason we are able to go on despite the writers’ strike is we have no writers.”

  The Writers Guild of America’s strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has caused problems for everyone in the room except Hef. The writers have asked the actors to boycott the Golden Globes awards night. The journalists are supposed to be here to attend the Golden Globes after-party. All over the world, newspaper and magazine editors are wondering why they have dispatched their top writers—and me—to cover an event that looks increasingly unlikely to happen.

  The dispute has also had the awkward side effect of focusing attention on the essential nature of the Golden Globes. On movie posters, DVD sleeves and actors’ CVs, a Golden Globe seems to have the cachet of an Oscar, but the Oscars are awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has more than 6000 members, all of whom are in the movie industry. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, meanwhile, has 82 members, many of them only part-time journalists. They are not a representative section of the foreign press corps, most are not film reviewers, and, in any normal situation, their collective opinion would be only marginally more important than a consensus among LA burger flippers, or car valets.

  Hef says he supports the right to strike but would like to see the dispute settled, and talk soon moves on to the real issue facing Hollywood—Britney.

  There were rumours, says a journalist, that Playboy asked Britney to be in the magazine and she said no, or that Britney asked Playboy if she could be in the magazine, and the magazine said no.

  “I think,” says Hef, “that there was a period of time—and it is still going on—in which the need to invent stories relating to Britney Spears was everywhere, and all the tabloids and other publications made up stories as they went along.”

  A journalist asks if there is anywhere in the house the cameras are not allowed to go.

  “Well, you won’t see me in the toilet very often,” says Hef. “We leave the best part to the imagination,” he adds, referring to the bedroom rather than the toilet.

  Hef wanders back to bed, or wherever it is he spends all day in his pyjamas—and the girls take his place. They are all blondes (of a shade not often found in nature) and big-breasted (of a shape not often found in nature).

  Kendra Wilkinson introduces herself.

  “I just got my boobs done,” she says. “Redone,” she amends. “They’re bigger, too. Bigger and better. I was going to go smaller but I decided not to.”

  The journalists are keen to know what the girls’ parents think of them being on the show.

  “My family loves coming here,” says Wilkinson. “My mum just got a plastic surgery makeover,” she adds, pointing to her own breasts.

  Everybody else in LA seems to see themselves as role models. Do the “girls”?

  “We encourage people to work out, get an education, follow their dreams,” says Bridget Marquardt.

  “Be themselves,” says Wilkinson.

  “We’re not encouraging them all to date the same guy,” says Marquardt.

  Wilkinson, 22, describes her career to date thus: “I graduated when I was 18. I was a general assistant. I got my boobs done, then—bim!—I’m here.”

  A reporter wants to know if all the girls’ periods are in sync. Wilkinson pulls on the belt of her pants, looks down into her underwear, and says, “I think I’ve just started mine, actually.”

  It is Wilkinson who makes Girls of the Playboy Mansion so ferally watchable. Like everybody else in LA, she talks all the time but, unlike everyone else, she says exactly what she means. This, oddly, has given her the reputation of being a bit thick.

  Nowhere is the disconnection between actions and words more apparent than in the press conference given by Dr Robert Rey, one of several cosmetic surgeons who feature in the E! reality show Dr 90210. Oleag
inous, predatory, handsome, slim and egomaniacal, Rey laughs confidently, nervously and hysterically, talks patronisingly, excitedly and apparently disinterestedly, flirts, flatters, takes us into his confidence (“I’ll be very honest with you”), calls us baby, calls himself baby, and at one point appears to refer to a penile implant as “baby”.

  Rey, the story goes, was born to a poor family in Brazil, and brought to the US by Mormon missionaries.

  “Let’s start with a question from Brazil,” says PR Gendreau. So a Brazilian journalist asks a question in Portuguese.

  There are no lines on Rey’s face, and there is no fat on his casually displayed midriff. Somebody asks the secret of his youthful good looks. “It’s diet!” he says. “Diet and exercise! And happiness! You can decide to be happy and, when you’re happy, you don’t age!”

  This is the first of several bizarre replies that avoid entirely the question of cosmetic surgery and are punctuated with audible exclamation marks.

  “Coffee’s no good for you!” he declares. “Eat like Palaeolithic people!” he advises. “Spirituality!” he spruiks.

  Then he gives a spontaneous presentation about fashions in contemporary cosmetic surgery.

  “[Implanted] chins are very popular,” he says. “We are an-drogynising women. The little nose that went like this [he presses his nose upwards], like Barbie, that’s long gone. Today, a natural nose is in. I had my nose done so it’s a natural look,” he says, and I think it is the strangest thing I have ever heard.

  There has also been “a shocking increase in butt augmentations”, he says. “We do lots and lots of butts: either the Brazilian butt lift [whatever happened to impenetrable Latin names for operations?], which is the transfer of fat from one area to the behind or, for girls too skinny, we put an implant in.

  “We’re doing a lot of vaaaginoplaasty,” he says. He relishes the word, drags it out. “Laaaaabioplasty.” He almost flicks it with his tongue. “Women have these beautiful lips down below,” he says. “When they give birth, those lips may get dragged down.

  “And sadly, sadly—remember, I was brought to America by Christian missionaries—sadly, fashion in sex is unfortunately driven by the porn industry and unfortunately today everyone shaves their genitals. Hair, you don’t see any more,” he announces. “I’ve undressed about 11,000 women—about 50 girls per day— and, I tell you today, no one is hairy. So what you could hide before, today you cannot hide. So that little extra lip down below now starts to erode the girl’s self-confidence.”

  “It” can be inherited—“from your mom”, he adds, help-fully—or it can be a result of pregnancy. Luckily, however, “It can be fixed by a half-hour operation.

  “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 sh
e 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

  Fame

  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

  Seven modern wonders indeed? I think not

  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.