On balance, British journalist David Stubbs thinks not. His new book, Different Times: A History of British Comedy, opens with a bravura critique of the weakness in the British character that forgave Boris Johnson almost everything because he’s fond of a joke, often apparently at his own expense: “Humour, our craven inability to resist humour, is what created Boris Johnson.” This is a salutary reminder that laughter matters, but it can anaesthetise as well as enlighten. As Peter Cook said about the satirists of the Weimar Republic: “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war.”

Comedy may seldom transform the world but it provides a revealing window on continuity and change in a society. Different Times traces British laughter during the United Kingdom’s decades-long retreat from imperial primacy, and perhaps it is no coincidence that America is getting funnier as it becomes more intractable while China is one of the most dangerous places on earth to crack a joke.

Stubbs has watched a lot of TV and been to a lot of gigs. If you enjoy anything British, funny and filmed, from Chaplin and Stan Laurel to The Office, chances are they’ll be here. It’s a compendious survey that moves decade by decade from the 1920s to the noughties, with a sketchy coda towards the present. Comedy and satire emerge as lagging indicators of cultural change.

As an Australian with an Anglophile education I kept flashing in and out of recognition. A lot of it I know, because a lot of it we see. The British roots of Australian humour remain strong and possibly predominant against the onslaught of American stuff that comes down the wires and through the ether. The bits I didn’t know are well described, but I’m seldom persuaded I was missing much. English comedy, in particular, can appear rather insular at a distance.

So some of the jokes seem inbred, overwritten by class obsessions. But I do sometimes wish our own writers had the time and the patience to write so well. The sophistication of script and characterisation, the attention to human quirkiness — nobody does it better.

The good news for readers is that Stubbs writes as a proper fan but not uncritically. This is a mostly good-natured, sometimes school-masterish book, its critical arc summed up early: “With magnificent but too few exceptions, British comedy in the twentieth century was not so much about the human condition as about the white, male condition.”

So if you are after a “war on woke” lamentation that no one can take a joke anymore, go to another shop. Things are getting better: “Political correctness liberated comedy,” says Stubbs, “forced it to resort to its creative imagination, helped create a new self-consciousness about what it meant to create comedy, to be more inclusive and open to new forms, new avenues of social exploration, rather than falling back on lazy, reactionary stereotypes and tropes.”

What’s important about this is the demand that comedy must do without the lazy and the reactionary, not that it try to do without tropes and stereotypes entirely. Stereotype is a particularly dirty word these days, and the reflex for a lot of people is to assume it is always a terrible thing. But comedy uses various forms of shorthand and thus always trades in tropes, stereotypes and metaphors. The real debates need to be about who the jokes are targeting and whether they conform to the poetic justice of comedy. That’s what makes the lettuce such a perfect joke. It didn’t implicate anything extraneous like Truss’s class or gender — it focused purely and searingly on the public matter of her government’s doomed program.

We can and should move from a narrow set of stereotypes towards a wider and more representative set. This would be progress, yes, but not a revolution. Comedy can’t do entirely without caricature, stereotype, ridicule. If the world doesn’t see another mother-in-law joke, if an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman never walk into a bar again, it will be no loss. But other tropes and stereotypes are filling the vacuum.

The better angels of our nature would prefer to believe that we mostly laugh with rather than at, but that isn’t true. The same overworked angels then try to insist that only punching up can be funny, and that works a little better. Most people I know think it’s fine to laugh at a president or prime minister and not okay to laugh at someone for being gay. But still people laugh at babies suffering mishaps on YouTube — maybe we shouldn’t, but often enough we do. It seems unlikely that many of the babies really deserve it.

Another good thing about this book is that Stubbs tries hard to see things in social and historical context. He doesn’t judge, as people sometimes do, from the perfect moral clarity of the present. The Carry On movies are a necessary and popular part of his story; Dad’s Army is lovingly analysed as 1970s nostalgia for a plucky, unified and rather ridiculous wartime Britain. The radical satire boom of the Thatcher years is lauded, even while we are reminded that it was mostly posh boys who did the shouting in The Young Ones and elsewhere. Working-class comedians from the Northern club circuit get respectful attention despite their reactionary jokes and views.

Or, rather, Stubbs doesn’t judge prematurely. Monty Python’s creators get lavish admiration but lose a few marks on women and race for being the postwar Oxbridge boys they were. In the end, he lets “progressive” and “morally palatable” merge a bit. Occasionally Different Times drifts into marking the exams of comedians of the past by standards they were unaware of.

Here, Stubbs is in good company. The slippage between what is and what should be funny is near universal in humour studies. Laughter feels good, so we want to feel good about why and when we laugh. Often we are kidding ourselves.

Stubbs tries hard to hold a catholic view of British comedy as a sort of fun-park mirror held up to the decline of national significance. Nevertheless, the most abiding impression I got from this book is how pervasive the hegemony of Oxbridge has been and remains. Stubbs admits he arrived at Oxford two years ahead of BoJo and they both expect to be attended to, as of right. Did the British tolerate BoJo’s lying simply because he made them laugh? No, there is also the fact that he came from the class that was born to rule.

We Australians fool ourselves that we don’t have class distinctions. Lined up beside the British, though, we at least don’t have as concentrated a stream of cultural privilege as Oxbridge. With all the self-congratulation, there is still something in the idea of a larrikin sense of humour, a persistent disrespect for authority in a tie. It used to belong entirely to white blokes like me, and we are still wildly over-represented, but more voices are claiming the right to call bullshit than used to be the case. We don’t defer as much as the British to the bright, loud boys who went to Sydney or Melbourne universities. Things could be worse.

But Stubbs’s BoJo thread shines a light on something less pleasing. What a humourless bunch we tend to elect in Australia! Keating had a killer vein in invective that sometimes looked like satire, but only Whitlam and Menzies were genuinely funny, and that mostly counted against them with the general public as aloofness. People say George Reid could be funny on the hustings, but that’s going back a long way. We obviously expect earnestness in our leaders, certainly in the half dozen since Howard set the pattern. Our public figures should be able to bear a joke, but heaven preserve any politician who gives the impression they are laughing at us, for Newspoll certainly won’t.

Are we really much good at laughing at ourselves, I wonder? Some future historian of Australian comedy may have a tale to tell. •

Different Times: A History of British Comedy
By David Stubbs | Faber | $39.99 | 416 pages

The post Born to laugh appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of us still carry grief from John’s sudden death, seven years ago now, chasing birds in the Grampians. Lorin has more cause for grief than the rest of us, but it just doesn’t seem the right word for so joyous a book. Instead, she has taken the time to create something luminous out of her loss. I read this book while coming down with a cold, and it made me feel a lot better, in heart and mind at least; unfortunately, it didn’t seem to do my chest any good.

The family happiness is real and the product of both experience and fortunate choices. It makes you realise that Tolstoy’s tragic vision is not something John could ever have warmed to. Come to think of it, impish and ironic minimalism is not among the more obvious characteristics of War and Peace. In Tinkering (2017) John does Anna Karenina in forty-three words, and the great Russian realist gets knocked off in the third round in The Tournament (2002), despite a high seeding. It’s a path not taken by the satirist with the twinkle in his eye.

Now Lorin, the elder of John’s two daughters, has her say, and shows that she has arrived as a writer. Her metier is the fragment, its supply responsive to local movements of thought and emotion. The remarkable thing is how deftly she deals with sentiment without becoming sentimental, how amusing she can be without becoming (unduly) competitive. The story she has to tell is one of an ensemble, not the more common tale of a towering genius who draws those around him into his vortex.

The central event in the family’s story really is the love of a good woman, Helen McDonald, who married John in 1973, reportedly so that she could work in New Zealand. No romantic nonsense in this relationship — just endlessly inventive and competitive play sustained by laconic affection. This was necessary to heal the wounds, and especially the sense of inferiority, that John bore from his parents’ rocky relationship. For that, the second world war is to blame.

Neva, John’s mother, went to war in Italy as a young secretary and ended up working directly with the major-general commanding the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Cruelly, she was twice defiancéed (if that’s a word), the second time after hostilities were supposed to have ceased. She returned to New Zealand, married Ted faute de mieux. Like many talented women of her generation, she discovered that she was supposed to rejoice in the life of a housewife, and forget that she had ever had other aspirations or capacities. She loved her children, but came to hate the suburban life.

Ted, meanwhile, was a successful and bottled-up retailer, disinclined to talk much about the years he had spent fighting Rommel, or to show much feeling about anything. He was also hard on his eldest son, John, who spent a couple of decades convinced he was never going to measure up. Ted and Neva’s marriage did not last, but long after the divorce, as Nevana and “the White Furry Fellow,” they got over the wounds and discovered separate talents as loyal and quizzical grandparents.

The crucial plot point came when John met Helen and her warm and supportive family, especially parents Charlie Boy and Gina de Babe (nomenclature is mostly for playing with in Clarke-world; the book comes with a useful glossary). Without this happy turn of fate there would have been no Fred Dagg and John may well have been just a funny bloke who remained a bit tortured and never amounted to much. With Helen and her family, his comic talent had found an anchor in a hyper-verbal but emotionally warm world. Some humourists seem to need the spur of insecurity to create, and a few wreak havoc in their private lives for fear of losing the creative spark. Not John and Helen.

Their warm homes in Greensborough and Fitzroy welcomed friends and extended family, then two daughters, Lorin and Lucia (“the sisterhood” as far as they are concerned, and the inspiration for John’s “Federated Under Tens”). The only battles seem to have been over the best way of framing words: “A topic our father could speak about for hours was how helpful form could be when writing something. By form he meant format, schema, structure, configuration, style, even genre. Sports scores. A news report. A legal letter. Furniture assembly instructions.”

Expression was always about craft in John’s work, and parody was a primary move in pretty much everything. The energy came from a sure inner compass straining against the automatic words of fools or the devious rhetoric of knaves. From Fred Dagg’s broad accents to the arcane terminology of farnarkeling and the two minutes and forty-six seconds of the Clarke and Dawe episodes, form was fundamental — not quite more important than delivering a message about fools and knaves, but utterly co-dependent. He’d have hated the job description of content-creator, because content is just stuff until you find the shape that belongs to it.

The business of writing for John and Lorin is not to cover things up, but to pierce their real significance. If you seek to understand the corruption of corporatised sport, can you do any better than this?

MR WILSON: So you’ve measured the track?

JOHN: Yes, we’ve measured the track, Mr Wilson.

MR WILSON: So you know how long the 100-metre track is?

JOHN: Yes, we do.

MR WILSON: Okay.

JOHN: How long is it, Mr Wilson?

MR WILSON: You know how long it is.

JOHN: I want to hear you say it.

MR WILSON: Ninety-four metres. (The Games)

This is the pure and precise anger of John’s satire, focused laser-like on the sin and its systemic sources in human weakness, while being almost gentle on the sinner. Could anyone really resent being caught up in his apt contempt? It has the detachment of justice and none of the animus that drove, say, Barry Humphries’s genius for comic disgust. John as satirist is the tolerant uncle who lets you know that you’ve fallen short. Maybe you will do better next time.

And we miss him. Imagine what he would have made of Morrison of the many ministries!

Meanwhile, in Would That Be Funny?, Lorin has found the right form to tell the family story. She mixes fragments of intimacy, blocks of narrative in far from rigorous chronological order, found documents, and many lists. The book is nearly always funny, apart from when it is suddenly intense, nearly always kind and celebratory, except when it is emotionally ruthless. It dances on the tightrope of tone that memoir demands, and succeeds with vim and lucidity. She grants us entry to a family of super-intelligent and playful eccentrics strangely like the aunts and uncles in the most perfect item in the Complete Book of Australian Verse, “A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool.”

Might Would That Be Funny? work for readers who do not know and love the works of the father? I can’t say, because my powers of detachment cannot take me that far outside the memory of John. But I think the book might just be good enough to lead new audiences to his works. It is certainly a treat if you miss that weekly moment of sanity on the 7.30 Report.

The Clarkes’ humour is polished to a fine edge, but it welcomes anyone who wants to laugh with those who dream of a juster and kinder world. One paragraph nails that:

The sisterhood regarded Dad as the Great Relaxer. Always zooming out on the picture and reminding us we’d be okay. He’d make me snort with laughter on my way to an exam I was terrified I’d fail. He’d say, “We still love you if you fail, you know. I don’t want to boast but I’m the clubhouse leader when it comes to failing stuff.”

When Beckett writes “Fail better” it comes through as a grim admonition. The Clarkes can make the same advice sparkle.

John’s genius was, often, for stopping. He did it in life as well. Many of us miss him, but none as deeply as the happy family he left behind. That is clear on every page of this fine and amusing memoir.

As an admirer of your father’s work, as a father of daughters, as a believer in the resilience good humour can give us, I just want to say, “Well played, Lorin.” •

Would That Be Funny? Growing Up With John Clarke
By Lorin Clarke | Text Publishing | $35 | 288 pages

The post Yes, it is funny appeared first on Inside Story.

Petty in the Australian, 25 March 1967. Flinders University Museum of Art

In a cross made of newsprint, the words on the upright are Ho Chi Minh’s and those on the crosspiece are Lyndon Johnson’s. You can imagine the indigestion at the breakfast tables of a still very white Australia when politicians’ words burdened a shockingly Vietnamese Christ on a modern via dolorosa. It isn’t pretty or funny, but it is morally and intellectually arresting. It has historical and symbolic depth as well as contemporary bite.

If you’re looking for ground zero of the idea that cartoonists are “of the left” in Australia, Petty’s stint at the Australian during its first decade is it. He sided with the little guy, then asked how the system worked to keep him little and the usual suspects (captains of industry, financiers, the military industrial complex) big. His cartoons can be busy because he thinks in systems and mechanisms and wants to make them operate more fairly and generously.

Petty was always inclined to treat politicians more as lackeys of vested interests and playthings of historical processes than as proper villains in their own right. This, I think, made him deeper than most other cartoonists or, indeed, most other satirists. I put no statute of limitations on this view. Juvenal looks like a grumpy whinger with a brilliant turn of phrase by comparison. Bill Leak could play the man superbly in his caricatures and punchlines, but the shafts of lightning didn’t shed consistent light on Australia as it is, and as it could be.

Petty’s cartoons did just that. The critique changed with the times, as the times demanded, but the golden thread of wanting a better, fairer, more intelligent and independent nation never disappeared into the fabric of daily affairs. On my first visit to interview him in the late nineties, he pointed me to a cupboard where there were “a few pictures of mine.” It was less than a dozen — Petty visited the past often to learn lessons, but never to dwell there. He lived for tomorrow’s paper, and the current art project.

He came a long way from a fruit farm in Doncaster as a child of the Depression, but he never lost the practical attitude to problems and sense of guiding purpose. Every cartoon asks something like “How do you fix this bloody thing, and get it to do what we want?” More or less sequentially, his satire had four great themes.

I have already illustrated the first — the horror and stupidity of war, particularly the Vietnam war. He had been to London and witnessed the collapse of Empire made explicit in decolonisation and the Suez Crisis of 1956. He returned to Australia via Southeast Asia in time to be cartooning during the death of Kennedy, the resignation of Menzies and, most importantly, the incremental decision to join the United States in Vietnam.

Rupert Murdoch’s adventure in national influence, the Australian, was in its initial (wildly) progressive phase, and Petty was its standard-bearer. He was half a generation older than baby boomers threatened with conscription and increasingly inclined to flood the street with moratoria. He also blew up the pomposity of Anzac Day in 1969 with a dismembered soldier’s corpse from the actual war diverting a pious procession of “lest we forget.”

Meanwhile, the Coalition governments were deteriorating comically, and Petty especially “owned” the image of Billy McMahon as a hapless, vainglorious fool with very big ears:

Broadsheet, November 1972. National Gallery of Victoria

It’s funny, in a bitter kind of way, how often people have had recourse to the “worst PM since McMahon” trope in recent years. I wonder if Morrison has reset the clock on that one.

In a series of cartoon books as well as at the Australian, he sought to shape the rebirth of interest in national character and destiny in the dawning post-British age. In the heroic age of this project, the hero — and the exemplar of Petty’s second theme — was Gough Whitlam:

The Australian, 14 November 1972.

The fulfilment of the dream of an open, egalitarian and cosmopolitan Australia under Whitlam was messy and exciting — Petty even donated a logo to the 1974 election campaign. The big hump in his career was when the dream collided with the first of several stages of reaction to the dismissal at the end of 1975. Malcolm Fraser wrongly assumed that normal postwar boom conditions would return with sensible chaps back in the big white cars, a trick Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison tried in recent years with even less success.

Petty spent the second half of his life exploring his third and fourth themes, a long, intelligent dissent from this “Lucky Country” mentality and from the Reaganite confidence in market forces that came in its train. He never tired of showing how and why the economy should serve human needs and desires rather than its own geometry of indices. And he was farmer’s son enough to recognise that you have to protect long-term interests from human rapacity. Two cartoons, from 1977 and 2015 respectively, show that you can be right a long time as a satirist and not necessarily be attended to:

The Age, 30 April 1977.

The Age, 17 August 2015.

When the Age suggested that he stop cartooning in 2016, at the ridiculously premature age of eighty-six, he was annoyed and disappointed. He lived for the work, and kept drawing anyway, right up to the last months. He understood ideas and the weight of the past, but it was the next paper, the next crop, the next generation that always mattered most. His optimism was informed by clear-eyed experience but was also incredibly robust.

What would he say to the nation today? With his genius for being stern yet quizzical, I don’t think he’d mind having this cartoon thrown back into the current debate over what it is to be a proper nation, one true to its past, present and future:

The Age, 20 April 2015.

Though he is gone now, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to look again into the satirical mirror he held up to us for so many decades. We might see something we could fix. •

The post Petty’s golden thread appeared first on Inside Story.

Pawle is a loyal friend to Leak, but not a hagiographer. He does not downplay the alcohol, the women, the reckless personal life or the periods of depression. His Leak is a Romantic hero — flawed, generous, brilliant and sometimes haunted. I grant all this — Leak was one of the greatest Australian cartoonists of the last half-century, and the best visual artist among them. No one learned to use colour so well when it appeared in newspapers in the 1990s, and no one has a more incisive line for caricature. If there is such a thing as a larrikin line in Australian cartooning, he had it.

Like most cartoonists, at least those in the baby boomer generation, Leak learned mainly on the job. He went to various state schools in the country and then Sydney as his father rose through the ranks as a postmaster. He was a bright and flamboyant individualist, the class clown and raconteur rather than a leader of the football team. In his later years at school he began drinking, and he only ever got the drink under control sporadically for the rest of his life. Pawle suggests that, for the teenage Leak, “the torment associated with overactive creativity was beginning to impose itself.”

He qualified for university, but went to art school instead. From there, he took to the road in pursuit of his muse as a painter, first around Australia, and then to England and Germany. He was wrestling with paint as a deep craft rather than dabbling in conceptual art or seeking an internship in the creative industries. It seems a long time ago, and it bespoke a mildly conservative view of the nature of art even then.

He became and remained throughout his career a successful portraitist, perennially snubbed by the judges of the Archibald Prize. This is a middle path in the art world — serious but not experimental — and Leak could easily have made a living flattering the great and good in oils rather than attacking them in newsprint. Once he sold some cartoons to the Bulletin in 1983, however, he was hooked, by both the immediacy of print and the more regular pay in that distant era of numerous staff artists and good money for freelancers.

Frustrated ambition: Bill Leak’s portrait of his father Reg (1974).

He moved into the extraordinary Fairfax stable of black-and-white artists in Sydney in the 1980s, primarily drawing caricatures to accompany articles rather than as an editorial cartoonist. His cartoons didn’t articulate political views so much as display an anti-authoritarian attitude and a killer style. Larrikin anti-authoritarianism in the long wake of the Menzies years was still straightforwardly of the left, and that is where Leak sat, with a large majority of cartoonists. For his vigour and brilliance, he started being awarded Walkley and Stanley awards by his media and cartooning colleagues while the Archibald judges stayed annoyingly aloof.

In 1994 Paul Kelly, arguably the most sombre presence of the last half-century in Australian journalism, decided the paper he edited, the Australian, needed Bill Leak and made him an offer too good to refuse. That he was clearly associated with the bohemian left was not a problem then, as it might be now in more battlemented times. The nineties were a great era for his cartooning, and he provoked the Howard government scabrously. The story about an unpublished cartoon faxed around Canberra of John Howard, Bill Clinton and submissive sexual postures is still wild enough to require euphemism.

In attack and style, he could have stridden into the artists’ room at Smith’s Weekly in the 1920s and taken a desk, wherefrom to attack pompous fools and self-serving knaves who were bilking ordinary diggers. He could work ideas with wit and humour, but he was a larrikin individualist at heart, and best at playing the man rather than dancing to any abstract set of ideas. You can see this in his portraits also. Moreover, some of the chapters of his life would not look out of place in Lennie Lower’s Rabelaisian Here’s Luck (1929). He comes from the print-era world of newspapermen (and they were overwhelmingly men) who worked frantically to meet deadlines and then drank frantically to recover from them.

He never really built a recognisable political philosophy of the kind visible in Bruce Petty, Bill Mitchell or Cathy Wilcox. When John Howard was in power and subservient to the United States, he had him raising funds for Brown-Nose Day. When Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election he quickly turned from Tintin into Narcissus. If you look at a lot of cartoons, Leak was clearly an equal opportunity offender. But it seems to me that, during his last decade, fewer of his cartoons achieved what John Dryden admired about satire in 1700: “there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and leaves it standing in its place.” But that may tell you more about me than it does about Leak’s achievement in that time — anyone who sets up to be an objective judge of satire is a charlatan. We laugh most when we already agree.

When his friends and his newspaper changed, the ideological tenor of his cartooning changed a bit also, but the ground had shifted for everyone by then. There was less middle ground, and it is not a good satirist’s job to go looking for it.

People who care about Leak’s art should enjoy Pawle’s sympathetic but unflinching account of his complicated family and personal life. His passions were difficult for anyone to live with for long, his need for peak experiences too great. His last years, constrained by death threats prompted by his anti-Islamist cartoons, were also his years of greatest domestic security. He married Rewadee “Goong” Phitnak and was thoroughly reconciled with his sons Johannes and Jasper, from his first marriage to Astrid Wiegand. After the death threats and the life-threatening fall from John Singleton’s balcony, he reduced his socialising and lived on the Central Coast north of Sydney. Consequently, he seldom went to the newsroom and relied for sounding boards on those, especially at the Australian, who were most loyal to him. Despite a voracious appetite for company, he became a bit isolated.

People of the left like to say that Leak’s cartooning changed after the fall at Singleton’s, as if only brain damage can explain opinions they find unpalatable. It was much more complicated than that. Only pathologise conduct when you’ve first tried hard to take it seriously. Pawle’s book shows clearly that Leak cared deeply about the right to free speech, and that this viewpoint was not simply a cynical shield for racism, neoliberalism and the other Halloween dolls of progressive critique.

Of course, being serious doesn’t make him right in all his provocations — freedom of speech is not the right to dominate the conversation, let alone to be heard and obeyed. But deploring things you disagree with is (almost) always a healthier option than patronising them — let alone legislating for pre-publication licensing or using post-publication legal censure to punish individuals and chill debate. Where power has access to really effective means of censorship, citizens get “protected” from far too many things that should see the light of day.

So what of the cartoon that was brought before the Human Rights Commission under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act? In my opinion, it was being arraigned in the wrong place. No one needs to admire it, but it was far from the racist equivalent of the “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” test so often referred to in debates and legal cases about legitimate constraints on speech. Like all political cartoons, it deployed stereotypes for compact communication, and the subject matter involved race, so the stereotypes were racial. This entails obvious risk of offence, but is silencing really a valid response to all complicated images and issues?

Pawle shows convincingly that Leak was not deliberately expressing a racist purpose in this cartoon. He worked hard on it over a couple of days and was not aware it would be published on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Day. He had a good record on race in his personal life and his cartooning, even if his deep attachment to individualism made it hard for him to see or value more communal forms of belonging. Even if you think the cartoon too easily misinterpreted by readers who wanted to draw racist conclusions (as I do), that is grounds for criticism, not for sending in the lawyers.

Barry Humphries, the eternal provocateur and genius of Australian satire, saw in Leak a fellow spirit. He launched Trigger Warning as Sir Les Patterson and contributes an introduction in his own voice to this book. As you’d expect, it is fey, brilliant, and worth the price of the book on its own. His most critical point (in all senses of the word critical) absolutely nails the abiding force of Leak’s work. Talking of the 2016 cartoon, he criticises “the Australian Humour Police who have failed totally to understand the ferocity and compassion of Leak’s satire.”

Ferocity and compassion are what you want in your great cartoonists. It is not their job to comfort us. •

The post The scalpel and the axe appeared first on Inside Story.

The anthology’s year begins and ends around October, so the full fire season is there, while the Trumperies peter out with the Orange One trying to put down violence on the streets by inciting, well, violence on the streets by the good guys. The collection doesn’t reach the election, of course, and is testament to the trepidation with which so many people around the world awaited 4 November (and its seemingly inevitable aftermath).

Radcliffe doesn’t pretend to be politically objective in his selection, but his politics is a fair match for the tribe of cartoonists, and he does step beyond his comfort zone in a few selections. This is an entertaining and opinionated overview of a pretty terrible year.

You’ll recall it started badly for our own glorious prime minister. Something about being in Hawaii during an environmental apocalypse back home didn’t work well for Scott Morrison, and by the end of the summer he was looking pretty crook in the cartoons (as evidenced by David Pope’s cartoon at the top of this review).

Then came the virus, and even the cartoonists, not the most indulgent of judges, acknowledged that his stocks began to rise. Inevitably, their cartoons were dominated by the pandemic, and by the politics spontaneously generated by a once-in-a-century health shock that arrived almost exactly on time.

Australia did fairly well, so premiers and prime ministers fare better than usual in this most critical of modes. Morrison was starting to look more and more like the Steven Bradbury of world politics, so a creeping respect for his flexibility in the face of a new and unexpected world order began to tinge a few cartoons, even when they point out something close to his heart like the collapse of austerity economics.

John Spooner in the Australian.

It was a year of terrors but not much of the terror that has so far dominated the twenty-first century. The wider world appears more in these cartoons than usual, partly because of the rise of Xi Jinping and a more openly authoritarian Chinese regime. But the biggest international cartoon story was the approaching US election. The chaos over Black Lives Matter becomes more than a spectator sport when our own treatment of the First Australians is brought into the frame.

Fiona Katauskas in Eureka Street.

It added up to an angry year among the cartoonists, and the anger works best when borne  quizzically, for example in Jon Kudelka’s single-image provocations rather than First Dog’s multiframe lectures.

Jon Kudelka in the Saturday Paper.

Radcliffe’s quotes from politicians and commentators, given for context, are always well chosen, but I wouldn’t read all of them unless you too are writing a review. They make it all a bit heavy, while the best cartoons manage to convey the tragedy all the more forcefully for staying a little light. Cathy Wilcox does this best of all in a series of cartoons like this one:

Cathy Wilcox in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Sure, cartoons can and should shout at us, but when they shout at length we end up rehearsing our own bitterness and disgust, and that can become debilitating, whatever your political outlook.

So, what did most of these cartoonists want for Christmas? A vaccine, a change of government in the United States, less mendacity in politics — and, above all, to avoid another apocalyptic summer like the last one, and to have something cogent done about the environment. For them, as for most of us, one 2020 has been more than enough. •

The post A year of living dangerously appeared first on Inside Story.

Matt Golding, Fairfax syndicated, 28 August 2018

Twenty-eighteen was certainly a bumper year for public idiocy and political self-harm, a bit like Alexander Pope’s 1738, when “Vice with such giant strides comes on amain, / Invention strives to be before in vain; / Feign what I will, and paint it e’er so strong, / Some rising genius sins up to my song.” Would we seriously have believed a satirist who prophesied the mayhem of the High Court’s rulings on parliamentarians’ citizenship? Or the incompetent Brexit negotiations? Or the exposure of posthumous bank charges? Or Barnaby’s love life? Or the Dutton challenge on Turnbull that failed on so many levels except the basic one of removing a PM?

Pope’s conceit was that he had to write satirical exaggeration fast because the rising geniuses of real life were reaching his satirical standards so quickly. A hold-up at the printers could too easily turn something intended as political satire into political history. This must also have seemed true to the cartoonists this year, even before that Magic Pudding of satire, Donald Trump, got counted in.

Jon Kudelka, Australian, 11 June 2018

So make yourself a good strong cup of tea (alcohol may be too dangerously depressive) and wander through Radcliffe’s book or MoAD’s exhibition to relive the lows and lows of 2018. The brilliance of the cartoonists will make the experience a perverse pleasure. Readers will all have their favourites (who has been better than Cathy Wilcox in recent years, I ask rhetorically) and should enjoy them as simply and sadly as possible.

In the lines that remain I want to ring the changes these compilations expose in Australia’s powerful tradition of what used to be known as black-and-white art.

For starters, almost nothing is in black and white anymore; cartoonists are now working naturally and well in colour. For a long time after colour hit newspapers late last century, it was more of a distraction than an improvement, especially given the drab reproduction on newsprint. Warren Brown in the Daily Telegraph was, for mine, the trailblazer, and now colour is integral to the pathos and meaning of many cartoons, like this from Peter Broelman, which reminds viewers so economically of the same-sex marriage debate and the implacable logic of a shift in public morality:

Peter Broelman, Syndicated, 6 December 2017

Better colour is, perhaps, the only obvious benefit to cartooning from the rapid retreat from newsprint. In the online versions of the papers, they seem to be hidden away, and are stripped of context if you have the stamina to track them down. Cartoons are just as powerful as ever they were, but they are losing their prominence in an industry that can hardly afford to burn such talent.

And the talent has also undergone a sea change. The cartoons in these two collections include almost nothing by the great generation led by Petty and Spooner (retired), or Tandberg and Leak (deceased), or Leunig (largely departed from topical cartooning). The major voices are Cathy Wilcox, Alan Moir, David Pope, Mark Knight, First Dog on the Moon, Warren Brown, Matt Golding and Jon Kudelka, with David Rowe in his own strange Goyaesque vortex of caricature at the Fin Review.

So we have a new generation of cartoonists speaking more directly to the concerns of a new millennium in its much more fractured mediascape. Curiously, there are no more women than in the 1980s, fewer even in percentage terms than female parliamentarians in the Nationals’ party room. Five out of seventy-five cartoonists on MoAD’s website is a risibly low proportion in the era of #MeToo, and not just a problem for Barnaby Joyce:

Cathy Wilcox, Fairfax Media, 6 March 2018

So why, despite substantial turnover in the ever-reducing number of regular jobs, are there still so few female cartoonists? That remains a question even if (or especially because) the ideological complexion of the cartooning tribe is such that Peter Dutton can anathematise “crazy lefties” who “draw mean cartoons about me”: “They don’t know how completely dead they are to me.” If you read carefully, the minister is not attacking all cartoonists, who present a somewhat broader spectrum of political views than this suggests. But the point that they are generally of the left is fair enough. Unlike journalism, satire cannot aspire to be balanced, and satirical animus in Australia has tilted left for at least half a century.

Mind you, if the Coalition keeps committing such baroque self-harm as it achieved in 2018, it will be a while before the scales of ridicule have much cause to swing back. Perhaps if you change the government, you change the cartoonists (to mangle Paul Keating). The 2019 collections will almost certainly let us test that hypothesis.

Finally, far and away the most notorious Australian cartoon of 2018, Mark Knight’s internationally incendiary image of Serena Williams at the US Open, appears neither in Radcliffe’s book nor MoAD’s exhibition. I doubt that anyone involved wanted to reheat that debate so soon, and I certainly don’t blame them. But in the long run this will look like a notable omission. The fact that Knight’s controversial image bestrid the world in hours indicates how something fundamental has changed about the place of cartoons in media. No longer do they belong primarily on newsprint in a defined area (a city, state or nation). They can be taken anywhere through social media, and J.K. Rowling in Edinburgh can criticise Knight without becoming much of a Herald Sun reader.

This is real change, and has to be worked around rather than bemoaned. Many cartoonists use Twitter and other platforms to test ideas and images, for example. But it is a significant revision of the rules of the game for satirists, for whom context is a defining feature of what they can say and how it will be received. Add to this the ease of outrage provided by online communication, and it seems to me that twenty-first-century cartoonists will need a thicker skin or a softer pen than their forebears in the age of mass media. When your work can fall into a tiny niche or almost planet-wide notoriety without much warning, making us laugh over our morning coffee is becoming a very risky business. •

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Russ Radcliffe has been doing political cartoon collections for over a decade, and he has finally cracked the problem of providing enough context for images no longer current without laboriously explaining the joke. This is the Lasseter’s Reef of cartoon commentary. Turnbull has left many well-turned sentences on the record since he conquered journalism in the 1970s, and Radcliffe has taken quite a few of them down to use in evidence for and against him. Add a few quotations from rivals and (curiously a smaller group) supporters, and you have a nice set of ironies to contextualise the cartoons in. And the cartoons, as ever, take you to the heart of the matter. Remember the brain snap from 2009 known as the Grech affair?

David Pope in the Canberra Times, 2009

Now you do. What was he thinking?

The cartoon history of Turnbull starts with the republic debate in the late 1990s, his first great crash after a seemingly inexorable rise to national prominence. His power as chief republican seemed personal and charismatic, attached to a cause rather than to a party or interest groups. Then he made the mistake of underestimating John Howard’s cunning; many have died on that hill.

The cartoonists have shown a wonderfully ruthless eye for both his habit of occasional self-immolation and his amazing powers of resurrection. The final cartoon in the volume, from one of the earlier aeons in this eternal election campaign, is by the great Alan Moir. It is a hope, a fear, and a prediction:

Alan Moir in the Sydney Morning Herald, 2016

When since Whitlam have we had such a combustible combination of grandeur and flakiness? As the pedestal beneath the collapsed statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem says, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

So, buy this book. It tells the story of our times and our volunteer messiah brilliantly and economically. That’s what we have come to expect of our political cartoonists, even as the newspapers that support them sink and hide the cartoons in isolated galleries a dozen clicks behind the front page of their websites.

Now for the complaint, and it’s more about the cartoonists than the book. Even after two decades in the public eye, there is no abiding cartoon image of Turnbull. No Howard lip, no Easter Island Fraser; does anyone remember anything about Billy McMahon apart from his ears? All we have yet for Turnbull is that hat, even in the very good cartoons reprinted above.

My problem with the top hat is that Turnbull never wears one. Indeed, he almost never wears a hat at all. Type “Malcolm Turnbull hat” into Google images and you get a straw hat he wore once, a yellow floppy hat he wore when he was kayaking on the harbour, and an Akubra that proves he has once visited a Nationals seat. The top hat is really just lazy cartoonist shorthand for toff, and even toff is not a direct hit, because he wasn’t born to all that much money. I’ve been researching cartoons since the 1996 election campaign. I’ve seen them murder Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Abbott in turn. Even attendant lords with an amusing gimmick like Downer and Cormann have done better in the caricature stakes. The bestiary of Barnaby is already a large and varied freak show.

There seems to be something Teflon-coated about Turnbull that resists caricature, certainly compared to the hairy and lycra-clad Abbott. He always looks a little dapper in cartoons, as in life. For a while in late 2015, I thought this may be because the cartoonists shared the widespread desire to see in him a change from the fractious and often infantile politics of the past decade. Even if that is so, the grace period should be over now that the new prime minister has made at least his share of errors and equivocations. It’s time for someone to “own” Turnbull in the same way Ron Tandberg could call up all the moods of Malcolm Fraser in half a dozen spare lines.

This collection tells the story of Turnbull’s stuttering rise to power with wit and economy. But it also shows that no cartoonist has yet found the core of ridiculousness in Turnbull, or of extremity. He is shorter and pudgier than George Clooney, but he “looks the part” nearly as well as him. No persistent metaphor of absurdity has entered the public mind.

But there is still time. •

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