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.

But while others were revelling in their favourite memories of Edna Everage, Les Patterson or Barry McKenzie, I took myself off in a different, quieter direction: to 36 Gallipoli Crescent, in fact, a street fictitiously located in the real Melbourne suburb of Glen Iris. This was the home of Sandy Stone, the most subtly drawn of all Humphries’s characters. I had no strife finding a “pozzie for the vehicle,” as Sandy often said of his own parking misadventures, because comparatively few people remember this boring old beggar (a polite euphemism for bugger in Sandy’s day).

Humphries, born in 1934, grew up in nearby Camberwell, where his father became a prosperous master builder. Eric Humphries built three houses for his family in Christowel Street, numbers 30, 38 and 36; the last was where they settled for good in 1937. Sandy and Beryl Stone’s imaginary house at 36 Gallipoli Crescent was built on these memories, although whether the style was mock Tudor, mock Elizabethan, neo-Georgian, Spanish mission or Californian bungalow Sandy doesn’t say. Eric Humphries could build them all. There was a driveway for the vehicle, a shady porch, and a tradesman’s hatch at the side. Sandy and Beryl called it “Kia Ora,” a Māori phrase for “hello.”

The Stones’ life together began just as the Depression was easing. On Sunday afternoons, while Kia Ora was being built, they would come and sit on the joists with a thermos and a pile of Australian Home Beautifuls. It’s never clear what sort of job Sandy had, but the couple were comfortably off and could afford the sorts of conveniences much prized by Humphries’s desperately aspirational parents. They had an electric refrigerator instead of an ice box, an electric stove and oven instead of an Early Kooka, and an indoor toilet instead of an outdoor dunny covered in morning glory.

In Sandy and Beryl’s garden there were “rhodies” and “hyderanges” (rhododendrons and hydrangeas), a silver birch and maybe a “jaca” (jacaranda), but probably no roses (Humphries’s mother thought them “a bit old-fashioned”) and certainly no shaggy eucalypts. Eucalypts, as well as paling fences, chicken coops and any structure with a corrugated iron roof, were considered emblems of the working-class existence Humphries’s parents had managed to escape. After their wedding, Eric and Louisa Humphries had moved from the less respectable suburb of Thornbury, but, as it turned out, only a bluestone lane separated the houses in Christowel Street from a remnant pocket of poverty in old Camberwell.

“We stared at each other sometimes, the poor and I,” Humphries later remembered, he on a ladder propped against the back fence, the poor children, with their bloodied knees and runny noses, staring back from their derelict backyards.

The Sandy Stone monologues were written either for sound recordings or as the “adagio act” in Humphries’s live touring shows. He published the collected scripts in 1990 under the title The Life and Death of Sandy Stone, edited by his friend Collin O’Brien. A television series of the same name was broadcast that year by the ABC, recorded in front of a studio audience whom Sandy addresses from his patterned velvet armchair. He is always styled as a middle-aged-to-elderly man, in a dressing gown and slippers, cradling a hot water bottle.

Often Sandy pauses an anecdote to note with deep approval that someone was a “Returned Man,” once a common term for someone who had fought abroad in one or both of the world wars. There was his friend Pat Hennessy, who’d recently had occasion to bury his wife and who was so lost without her that in three years he’d not cleaned the S-bend in his toilet. He was a returned man. So was their local postie, and so was the specialist who broke the news to Sandy and Beryl that they could never have children. As for the vestryman up at Holy Trinity church whose son was a hippie: although not actually a returned man, he was “one of the nicest people you could ever wish to meet.”

My parents and I never missed an episode of the ABC series and my father delighted to imitate the exact note of serene reverence in Sandy’s voice when referring to a “returned man.” Dad’s father George really had been a returned man, a quiet sort of chappie, Sandy would have said, and to look at George nobody would have thought he’d been a prankster and a scallywag before enlistment. But after service on Gallipoli and Pozières he returned silent and deeply introverted, happy to accept an office job and a peaceful life in the suburbs. But he did retain the impish sense of humour that has become a family trait, hence my father’s rich appreciation of Sandy Stone.

With Barry Humphries’s death I thought back to those evenings in front of the telly with my parents and became curious about Sandy’s actual returned status. I found it surprisingly ambiguous. Sandy is a regular at his local RSL, and when he needs to have a surgical operation — a “little op” — he is entitled to have it done at “the Repat,” which as his Melbourne audiences would have known was the Repatriation General Hospital in Heidelberg. (The general term “repatriation” has fallen into disuse but was once a uniquely Australian descriptor for the return of Australian men and women after war service, and their further support through pensions and benefits.)

Sandy has obviously served in some capacity, but what? He first appeared in 1958 in a sound recording, “Days of the Week,” written as the B-side for a 45rpm record. (Mrs Everage took the A-side.) Also in 1958 Humphries published a short story entitled “Sandy Stone’s Big Week” in the Canberra student magazine Prometheus. Nothing happens in Sandy’s “big week.” A pot-bellied Sandy is discovered in his garden in the early evening watering his shrubs. As the light dims, all that is visible of him is his white shirt “and the white arc of water from his garden hose.” Called inside by Beryl, he goes in, switches on the wireless, seats himself in the patterned velvet armchair, rolls a cigarette (later he is a non-smoker) and thinks about the events of the coming week. The highlight will be an RSL meeting on the Friday night at Gallipoli Hall. That’s it.

Nothing much ever does happen to this emasculated Anzac. He makes a trip back to Gallipoli in 1968 with a group of cobbers and a Turkish guide (who spoke “perfect Australian”) and writes a painfully dull letter from the “Istanbul Hilton” to Beryl about the few hours they’d spent stumbling around the peninsula getting souvenir snaps. Perhaps this monologue was prompted by historian Ken Inglis’s reports for the Canberra Times of the 1965 RSL pilgrimage to Gallipoli, but Humphries ultimately rejected the idea of making Sandy a first world war man, and this piece, “Anzac Sandy,” was never performed.

Instead, the second world war became Sandy’s war, although, as Humphries himself admitted, Sandy’s military status was still nebulous. The development of the character coincided with growing scepticism among some Australians, bordering on hostility, towards all things Anzac in the 1960s, but Humphries avoided using Sandy as a vehicle for the kind of biting critique that Alan Seymour explored in his play The One Day of the Year, first performed in 1958. Nor was Sandy a violent, war-damaged tyrant like the father in George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964). And again, Humphries was uninterested in the public debate over the system of repatriation that was satirised in John Whiting’s polemical novel Be in It, Mate! (1969).

Sandy was never about any of that. The point of Sandy was to be boring. His creator’s declared aim was to see how far he could bore audiences before they rose up in revolt. Acknowledging the influence of Samuel Beckett and the avant-garde art movement known as Dadaism, with its explorations of nonsense and irrationality, Humphries wanted not to please his audiences but to provoke and shock. Gradually he alighted on the idea of boredom as the way to do it and, turning inwards, found all the material he needed within the suburban wasteland, as he saw it, of his youth.

Hence Sandy’s maddening, circumlocutory monologues punctuated by pointless pauses, digressions and repetitions. His attention will get snagged on a point of inconsequential detail and audiences watch, transfixed, as he struggles to free himself. This, for instance, from “Shades of Sandy” (1981):

Little Gwennie’s husband, Jack, went to his Reward about two years ago. Yes, it would be two years since Jack went to his Reward. It would be a good two years. It would be all of a good two years.

Also in that monologue is Sandy’s immortal critique of the domestic pop-up toaster, specifically the Morphy Richards model that threw Beryl across the room one day when she tried to dig a crumpet out with a fork. No matter the brand of toaster, the crumpet is never taken into account. “You slip one in and half an hour later, if you are lucky, it glides to the surface, as white as a lily.” But sometimes the opposite happens:

Flames leap out of the toaster. You’ve got to bash it underneath with a broomstick, and then you’re on the kitchen floor trying to find it, and over the sink, scraping off the black fur till there’s nothing left but a couple of crumpet holes. A black crumpet hole is no use to man nor beast.

There is a little knob on the side of the toaster, Sandy continues, to indicate light to dark. Easy to miss. Beryl missed it for years and then, when she found it, she couldn’t leave it alone. But the interesting thing, he concludes, is that “it’s not connected to anything” (Sandy’s emphasis). “It’s got a mind of its own.”

Ruminating in 1990 on the origins of Sandy, Humphries recalled how, after having dropped out of university, he succumbed to parental pressure and took a “real” job in the city with the EMI record label. On his morning commute, always running late, he often met his neighbour Mr Whittle, a childless man of his parents’ age who would invariably greet young Barry with “a polite and old-fashioned little squeeze” of his grey trilby hat. For Humphries, this man came to epitomise not just his parents’ generation, but “Respectability Itself”: punctuality, industry, courtesy, thrift, temperance, niceness. “I despised him.”

In 1956, desperate to escape, Humphries got married and snatched an acting job in Sydney. He was unhappy there too, especially in the depressing old boarding house near Centennial Park where he and his wife Brenda were staying. Breakfast was had in a shared kitchen with other tenants, mostly aged and itinerant men, all lonely. Walking along Bondi Beach one blustery winter’s afternoon, Humphries encountered a wiry old fellow of about sixty-five with thin sandy hair, finely capillaried cheeks, a two-tone cardigan and “freckled, marsupial paws.” When Humphries asked the time, he was told: “Approximately in the vicinity of half past five.”

In that moment, he had the last pieces in place to create Sandy Stone, including the sibilant “S’s” caused by ill-fitting dentures, and the thin, dry voice Humphries recognised as “the antithesis of the rugged Australian stereotype.”

What unified these men in Humphries’s mind, I think, was not their ex-digger status but his perception of them as lonely, ageing men. Confused and anxious about his future, perhaps his greatest fear was that he would end up like them. True, Mr Whittle did wear a returned serviceman’s badge on his lapel, but Humphries was careful not to overplay that. Sandy could not be a war bore because he would have had to bore audiences on subjects about which Humphries knew little.

Instead, Humphries turned to a subject on which he was an expert, life in the Australian suburbs. To express his rage and frustration at the tedium imposed upon him in his youth, he needed a technique that would be, he said, “monumentally, grindingly prosaic.”

The most interesting occurrence in Sandy’s life is his death, which occurs in his sleep while Beryl is absent on the Women’s Weekly World Discovery Tour that she had been hankering to do for years. Death frees him to return as a ghost.

He enjoys watching his own funeral and the wake afterwards back at Kia Ora. He watches as Beryl puts the house up for sale and disposes of his effects, assisted by their neighbour Clarrie Lockwood from 43 Gallipoli Crescent. Clarrie heaves Sandy’s armchair into his Vanguard ute along with various other bygones of Sandy and Beryl’s life together, and takes them to the Holy Trinity opportunity shop. It is obvious to everyone except Sandy that Beryl is more gleeful than grief-stricken, and after the house sells she moves to Queensland, where she and Clarrie later marry.

Kia Ora is bought by Mr and Mrs Cosmopolis, “a delightful multicultural ethnic minority Greek couple,” who are expecting a baby. Mrs Cosmopolis notices Sandy’s armchair in the op shop and buys it, and so, in Sandy’s final monologue, “Sandy Comes Home” (1985), we find him back at 36 Gallipoli Crescent, still in his old armchair, watching his house being renovated.

This monologue cracks open the racism that Sandy has been putting down in layers since the 1930s, when fruit and vegetables were delivered to Kia Ora through the tradesman’s hatch by the “yellow hand” of the “little smiling Chinaman,” Charlie O’Hoy. Sandy could bestow a tolerant glow over Charlie, and the Greek couple who operated the local fish and chip shop, and even the Angelo brothers, Italians who as terrazzo specialists did most of the porches in the street.

But when in 1938 an “Israelite” couple named Eckstein moved into the first block of flats in Glen Iris: they were the “thin end of the wedge” as far as Sandy was concerned. They opened the floodgates and then it was “Come One, Come All.”

The Stubbings’ beautiful home at number 52, for instance, was bought recently and remodelled by a Vietnamese couple called Ng. That’s their name, Sandy tells us, incredulous, and “you could smell their cooking on the bowling green.” Number 37, the home of Vi and Alan Chapman, was bought by Bruno Agostino and his family of eleven.

Once they moved in, that once-lovely home was swarming with dagos night and day. Talk about build. They built on the back, they built on the front, they built on the left, they built on the right… they built a balustrade right across the front of the home, with fountains and statues and lions everywhere. It was like a cement safari.

The Agostinos dug up all of Vi’s “magnificent” garden, including the pin oak Vi bought as a seedling years before from the Methodist Church fete. It resisted the bulldozer for the best part of a day, until the “Eye-ties” got a block and tackle to it and finally it came down “with a groan you could hear up and down the crescent.”

Only as they chopped it up did the Agostinos discover a bit of rotten wood nailed on to one of the branches, which was all that was left of the treehouse little Neil Chapman had played in before the war.

Of course, little Neil was beheaded in Borneo. Some Jap with a sword said “Neil!” [kneel] and he did, and that was that. It’s terrible to think that your destiny can be in your own name.

Sandy gives no pause here, but rambles on remorselessly as he always does, leaving audiences, I’m sure, wide-eyed and silent. The monologue ends with Mrs Cosmopolis bustling in to clear away the last of the things that Beryl hadn’t bothered with, including Beryl and Sandy’s wedding photo and a lock of his mother’s hair, which he’d been keeping in a cigarette tin.

“Sandy Comes Home” appears to be the last Sandy monologue Humphries wrote, and was the longest. By then audiences had been allowed to develop a certain affectionate sympathy for Sandy, which made his racism even more shocking. Humphries always enjoyed the deep hush that greeted Sandy’s anti-Semitism. “Perhaps,” he mused in 1990, “we had not until then fully apprehended that we, who had invented Niceness, could also be very nicely anti-Semitic. It was a salutary discovery.”

Sandy’s ex-service status was just a device to tie him to the past and associate him with the most conservative element in Australia at the time, the RSL. The young Barry Humphries had spotted a much older man — his neighbour Mr Whittle — and despised him for his “respectability.” For comedic purposes he was uninterested in the idea that people of Mr Whittle’s generation had lived through and suffered much. But after two economic depressions (1890s and 1930s), two world wars and a cold war, small wonder that they took refuge in suburban routine and hard-won material comforts.

Humphries himself became rusted on to his long-held desire to shock, and over many years must have developed an ability to avert his gaze from the real pain he could inflict. His transphobic comments in 2016 seem to bear this out.

A word about Mr Whittle. Kenneth Roy Whittle was born in 1897, trained as a surveyor and became a public servant. He and his wife Alice moved into 42 Christowel Street, Camberwell in the early 1930s. He was not an ex-serviceman; there is no evidence he enlisted or attempted to enlist in either world war. Nor were the Whittles childless. Their only child, June Elizabeth, died in 1933, aged two, the year before Barry was born. Had she lived they might have been playmates. •

The post What did you do in the war, Sandy? 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.

Should we be surprised to learn, then, that Cicero was known as consularis scurra — translated by some classicists as the “stand-up consul” — when he ruled Rome in 63 BCE?

So let’s hear one of the jokes that built this 2000-year-old reputation for wit. (A warning: please don’t get your hopes up.)

In the street one day, Cicero overheard a would-be politician canvassing for votes. This man’s father was a well-known cook. Cicero interrupted the man’s political spiel and said, “Roast assured — I’ll support you!”

So there you have it. The dad joke was invented over 2000 years ago by the greatest orator of the Roman Empire.

The problem with Cicero’s joke is partly explained by another — thankfully, not one of Cicero’s. A Roman senator is running fifteen minutes late to the Forum. When he arrives, Cicero has the floor. The senator quickly takes his seat and whispers to a fellow senator, “Have I missed much?” The other senator whispers back, “Not much. He hasn’t got to the verb yet.”

In Latin, of course, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence. And that’s the problem with a lot of Roman jokes, Cicero’s included: if they fail to land today, as the comedians say, it might just be that they’re funny in Latin but need explaining in English. As the American humorist E.B. White famously pointed out, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.”

For several years now, Princeton University Press’s “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series has been reducing classical texts to bite-sized chunks for the lay reader — in many cases successfully, both in the marketplace and as books. The series skilfully reworked Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, for example, into a quick take on bad emperors that cleverly drew our attention to the many flaws of modern-day leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.

The latest in the series is How to Tell a Joke: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor, a collection of Cicero’s writing translated and introduced by Michael Fontaine, professor of classics at Cornell University. It isn’t as accessible as many of its predecessors in the series, or as much fun as its title suggests, but there’s never any harm in revisiting Ancient Rome.

Fontaine’s book draws on two sources: Cicero’s De Oratore (On the Ideal Orator) and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (The Education of the Orator), a book inspired by Cicero but written a century after his death by one of his greatest fans. Neither is about how to tell a joke; each is a textbook on the art of oratory and persuasion.

Members of the Roman elite like Cicero and Quintilian were interested in humour as a rhetorical device — a weapon in the orator’s arsenal— rather than as a source of entertainment. But there’s a good reason why Cicero has popped up several times in the Princeton series: the arc of his life and reputation — as politician, philosopher, orator and writer — was so extraordinary that there is a tendency to over-quote and over-praise him. He also wrote more than three-quarters of the surviving Latin texts from that period, so it should come as no surprise that his reputation has lasted.

So, yes, he was a great man who wrote beautiful Latin and died nobly at the hands of assassins, but we don’t have to see him as a sort of Roman Jerry Seinfeld as well.

Many other important writings from Ancient Rome haven’t survived, and these lacunae — that beautiful Latin word used to describe an absence in the textual record — are all tragedies for human culture. Take, for example, the Roman performer Decimus Laberius (105 BCE–43 BCE), who was a contemporary of Cicero. He was a mimographer, which basically means he was a professional funny man. Mimes in Ancient Rome weren’t early-model Marcel Marceaus; they were more like Latin-speaking John Belushis: raucous, caustic, satirical sketch comedians who told jokes for a living to audiences made up of ordinary Romans.

Laberius was determined to be a professional jokester. By becoming a mime, he was forced to forfeit his equestrian rank (the same rank, incidentally, as Cicero’s). But all that is left of his work are the titles of forty-three mimes and a total of 178 lines. It probably goes without saying that Laberius didn’t have a slave like Cicero’s Tiro to manage his archive. Who’s to say that Decimus Laberius wasn’t the funniest Roman of them all?

Towards the end of his career, Julius Caesar made Laberius an offer he couldn’t refuse. Having vanquished his enemy Pompey the Great, Caesar became dictator of Rome in 46 BCE. To celebrate his ascension to absolute power, he forced Laberius to engage in a humiliating competition with another comic, Publilius Syrus, to see who was the funniest.

Laberius began his performance with a dignified prologue that has come down to us from antiquity. In it he addresses Julius Caesar directly — and prophetically — with the line: “Needs must he fear, who makes all else adread.” The plucky performer obviously knew that there are many reasons to tell a joke, but the best reason is simple, and dangerous: speaking truth to power.

In the end, Julius Caesar judged Syrus to be the better comic but restored Laberius to the rank he was born into. Was this a magnanimous gesture on Caesar’s part? Maybe. Or maybe it was a show of power: “Get back to your own kind, sunshine. Don’t disrupt the proper order of things.”

Some of Cicero’s many jokes were directed at the powerful too. Indeed, Plutarch argues that Cicero’s gag-happy style alienated many important Romans and contributed to his downfall. But many of his other jokes were designed to achieve power. He didn’t get to be consul of Rome just by asking.

At ninety-five, the American stand-up comedian Shecky Greene hasn’t worked for a while, but he’s still famous for two things.

He once drove his car into the fountain at Las Vegas’s Caesars Palace — appropriately, given our subject — then turned on the windscreen wipers and waited for the cops. When they arrived, legend has it, he rolled down the window and said, “No wax, please.”

Greene also had a famously fractious relationship with that equally fractious showbusiness legend, and friend of the Mafia, Frank Sinatra. In fact, it was a bit like the relationship Laberius seemingly had with Julius Caesar.

After getting beaten up by mobsters in the foyer of Florida’s Fontainebleau Hotel, Greene found the one-liner that will almost certainly be inscribed on his tombstone.

Not long after the attack, he was back on stage in Las Vegas, still bearing the scars of his recent ordeal.

“Frank Sinatra saved my life once,” Greene told his audience, “He said, ‘Okay, boys. That’s enough.’”

I like to think Decimus Laberius, as a professional comedian himself, would have appreciated the gag. •

How to Tell a Joke: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Humor
By Marcus Tullius Cicero | Translated with commentary by Michael Fontaine | Princeton University Press | $29.99 | 328 pages

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Monkhouse’s two-liner is a fitting epigraph to Terry Eagleton’s Humour, an enquiry into the labyrinthine question of what makes us laugh. The distinguished literary critic and cultural commentator navigates through this minefield with elegance, skill and quite a few good jokes to break up the journey. He is open-minded about what is funny and what is not, and equally open-minded about the many theories that seek to explain humour. In the end, though, he decides that the incongruity theory is “the most plausible.”

Incongruity is admittedly a big tent — it contains disparity and dissonance and disruption and bathos — and ambiguity, as Eagleton points out, is also a form of incongruity. No doubt it can be argued that irony is too. Common to all the best jokes that exemplify the theory is a moment of delay — it can last from a nanosecond to what seems like forever, depending on how on the ball we are — before the incongruity clicks and we get it. That’s how we experience Monkhouse’s joke about an audience that is both laughing and not laughing.

In many ways “incongruity” seems exactly the right word for the moment we are living in, which perhaps helps to explain why comedy is currently riding a wave. In fact, once you start looking, incongruity is everywhere, fuelled by the information revolution and its capacity to generate contradictory evidence or an opposing opinion about just about everything.

In the face of this dissonance and disruption, it’s tempting to double down, ignoring or blocking anything that disputes our preferred view. But comedy, with its reliance on contradiction and incongruity, offers another way of dealing with situations that otherwise seem immune to resolution. We can acknowledge the contradictions, and laugh. Which is all well and good, but can comedy actually change anything?

Eagleton is clearly attracted to the idea of comedy as a form of reconciliation, of people as well as contradictions. Jokes give us pause, inviting us to take another look, both at others and, often, at ourselves. Wit dissects and potentially disarms. Humour, “if it can censure, debunk and transform… can also dissolve essential social conflicts in an explosion of mirth.”

But as Eagleton’s reference to that rather temporary-sounding “explosion of mirth” implies, just how long conflict dissolves for depends very much on its nature and intractability. Humour may unite, but it can also divide. You might find that joke funny, but I don’t. The language of comedy can just as easily be used to shut out alternative views as to admit them, and getting it or not getting it can be regarded as a clincher in any ideological dispute. They get it, as we say approvingly of the people who agree with us, and the others just don’t get it.

Whether comedy unites or divides is very much a live issue. Every so often a small storm erupts when a comic is accused of going too far, by advocating violence perhaps, or mocking the vulnerable. But what does “too far” mean when comedy, or a characteristically contemporary version of it, thrives on exaggeration and excess? These small storms are nevertheless significant, not so much in themselves but because they go to the question of context. What may be funny in one setting is not necessarily funny in another.

The problem today is that context has become rather more free-floating than it once was, in line with the unstoppable blurring of public and private. What may be funny between friends or colleagues is not so funny when the video is posted on YouTube. A joke can provide “a brief vacation from the oppressiveness of everyday meaning,” as Eagleton puts it, but if given a public life beyond the private moment it can seem callous and cruel and unfunny in the extreme. Black humour, for instance, a source of much-needed if momentary relief for those toiling on the front line of life, doesn’t generally withstand wider scrutiny.

Much is now made of how offence, allegedly anyway, is more easily taken. New sensitivities, or old ones more confidently expressed, are said to be hobbling the practice of comedy and circumscribing what it is possible to make jokes about. Some will argue that this tide of sensitivity must be resisted — that the best comedy should cross boundaries, and if it isn’t offending somebody then it isn’t working.

Eagleton seems to see this as the trickiest issue of all. It may be that the whole sensitivity thing is exaggerated, but even so, what if the “solidarity of the audience” — all laughing as one at the comedian on the stage — depends on the knowledge or indeed the hope that others outside the circle will be hurt or shocked or outraged? There is no shortage, for example, of online clips showing audiences falling about at the hilarity of the Holocaust.

Then again, the audience for comedy is often made up of people who are moving along with their society in the direction of a more sympathetic (indeed more sensitive) approach to difference, whether of gender or ethnicity or species, and their ideas of what is funny are changing too. If we accept, for example, that animals have feelings, then a creature trained to ride a bicycle is no longer funny, or at any rate not as uncomplicatedly funny as it once was.

Whichever way you look at it, the question of what is or isn’t appropriate to laugh about is ultimately political. In his final chapter, “The Politics of Humour,” Eagleton zeroes in on Trevor Griffiths’s 1975 play Comedians, which is set in an evening class of aspiring comics taught by a retired professional, Eddie Waters. Through Waters and his students, Griffiths tackles questions that anticipate current preoccupations. If the objective of comedy is to be “transformative,” to encourage the audience to view the world, and themselves, more sympathetically, then comedians, according to Waters, must have the courage to look at themselves rather than to go for the easier laughs that come from mocking others. Noble thoughts, but as Griffiths demonstrates and Eagleton allows, “there is no easy opposition between humour as transformation and humour as vilification.”

The current climate of uncertainty over what it is legitimate to joke about may impose constraints, but, like many constraints in art, those restrictions can lead to new creative directions. In the world of contemporary stand-up, some of the most successful practitioners have responded by incorporating a strong line in ruthlessly autobiographical, even confessional narrative to their routines, in effect telling their own stories with jokes, allowing others to see themselves in those experiences or at least to make connections they might not otherwise have made.

Theories of humour have limits, says Eagleton. No study of comedy can ever completely satisfy, because something always slips the net. For the jokes that get away, as it were, the ones that escape categorisation or that we find funny when none of our friends do, or that are funny one day and not the next, or hilarious when told by one person and a damp squib when repeated by another, an endless supply of explanatory clichés can be drawn on, stretching from it’s all in the timing to you had to be there.

Unlike tragedy, as it’s often said, comedy dates, but another way of putting it is that comedy evolves in tune with the times. We instinctively know that a good joke can tell us what is going on in the world more effectively than many a sober tract. That may be why, in the words of the influential comedy producer and director Paul Jackson, whose multiple television credits include The Young Ones and Red Dwarf and who knows a thing or two about comedy, “people follow the funny.” •

The post The jokes that get away appeared first on Inside Story.

It also offers a key to the power of Clarke’s satire: his brilliance in adapting forms, especially media forms, for satirical purposes. This can be seen in his remoulding of staple journalistic forms, ranging from standard news reports to sports commentary and the interview.

Clarke thought that a satirist should think about solutions as well as problems. He never kicked somebody because they were down, but he also thought there was little point kicking somebody simply because they were up.

If all Clarke did, though, was parody journalistic forms, his work would not have risen above the level of a television sketch show. Instead, he inverted these journalistic forms to ask questions and critique those in positions of power and authority. According to conventional understandings of the news media’s fourth estate role, scrutinising power and authority is exactly what journalists do. Clarke was not a journalist; indeed, the failings of journalism were a common target of his satire. Yet his adapting of journalistic forms carried the bite both of satire and of revelation.

His work was genuinely subversive, though he was careful never to advertise it as such. It took the trained eye of Barry Humphries to point this out. In a foreword to a selection of Clarke’s work, the creator of Dame Edna Everage writes:

John Clarke sees the skeletons in our closets, and I am amazed he has not grown very rich on offshore hush money. In Australia the Powers that Be are very powerful indeed and are protected by draconian laws of libel that would make an Australian Private Eye unthinkable. The press bullies, hoods and monomaniacs who hold, or have recently held, high office demand critical immunity. Fortunately for John Clarke he can always be dismissed as a harmless wag, an amusing ratbag and an anodyne parodist. If he told us what he sees and what he knows about Australian society in any other way but his Jester’s guise he would, long ago, have met with a very nasty accident.

From gumbooted clodpoll to national treasure

Born in 1948, Clarke grew up in Palmerston North, a small town in country New Zealand for which he had fond memories but which, as he used to say, was “not exactly Vienna at the turn of the century.” At university he took to writing and performing in revues, where he slowly developed the character of Fred Dagg, originally a gumbooted, singlet-wearing clodpoll who spoke plain truths about those in power. He described the conservative NZ prime minister in the 1970s, Robert Muldoon, simply as a “well-known gross national product.”

Dagg became extraordinarily popular in New Zealand, but Clarke found the experience suffocating and migrated to Australia in 1977. Here, he spent time learning about the country before offering his work anywhere. “As a satirist I wanted to have a grip on things before I opened my mouth,” he said. When he did, Dagg had been transformed from a physical presence on television to a voice on radio. In the process, the contrast between the gumbooted yokel and the pithy truths he spoke became a contrast between a broad Australian-accented voice and a collection of truths expressed far from pithily. Instead, the language was by turns indirect, ornate, blunt and inventive, as this 1981 Fred Dagg commentary on home buying makes clear:

Like so many jobs in this wonderful society of ours, the basic function of the real estate agent is to increase the price of the article without actually producing anything, and as a result it has a lot to do with communication, terminology and calling a spade a delightfully bucolic colonial winner facing north and offering a unique opportunity to the handyman.

Operating out of the mythical Dagg Advisory Bureau, Clarke’s ninety-second monologues were soon syndicated across the ABC’s many local stations. They ranged from topical comments on, say, progress or lack thereof at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, to dissections of particular industries, such as advertising (“We kicked off with a light lunch that lasted about five hours.”). At the height of its popularity, however, the segment was taken off air by ABC management for reasons that were not at all clear but clearly infuriated its creator.

Clarke nevertheless became one of Australia’s most successful satirists, much loved by audiences and revered by peers. His work appeared in newspapers including the Age (his mock newspaper quizzes) and the National Times (in a column entitled “A Month of Sundays”), the Bulletin (early versions of his question-and-answer interviews) and Brian Toohey’s Eye, where he adopted Damon Runyon’s style and argot to portray politicians as gangsters. Much of his work has been reprinted in books and on his website. He was part of the pioneering satirical television series The Gillies Report, which broadcast in 1984 and 1985. In recent decades, he was most often identified with the mock question-and-answer interviews he produced with Bryan Dawe, which first appeared in print and on ABC radio in the late 1980s and were then aired on television, on Channel Nine’s A Current Affair between 1989 and 1996 and on ABC television, mostly on 7.30, since 2000.

Apart from writing and performing his own material, Clarke worked with many other artists: as an actor (with Sam Neill in Death in Brunswick in 1990), as a collaborator (with Paul Cox on the Australian Film Institute award-winning feature film Lonely Hearts, in 1981), as co-author (with Ross Stevenson of the stage production A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy, in 1991), as an adaptor (of Aristophanes’ The Frogs for Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney, in 1992), as dramaturg (for Casey Bennetto’s Keating: The Musical, in 2006) and as the creator of documentaries (such as Sporting Nation, in 2012). Sometimes, he worked on the writing, producing and performing of a program, as in the mockumentary The Games, which examined bureaucratic ineptitude and political chicanery during the two years of planning for the Sydney Olympics. He and Andrew Knight also co-wrote a satire, Blockbuster, about how films are funded in Australia; not altogether surprisingly, it found little favour with film-funding bodies and has never been made.

The Clarke technique

The breadth of Clarke’s career is clear; what is less evident from this brief summary is the nature of his humour and how it sits in the broader Australian tradition. Though he rarely discussed his ideas about satire, he did open up in Wanted for Questioning, a 1992 collection of interviews with thirty Australian comedians by Murray Bramwell and David Matthews, perhaps because the authors were academics and he judged the book would be read by few. In any case, what he said is worth quoting at length:

You could argue, as I have done, that Australians are very pungent, disrespectful of authority… and that they give the people in power a constant caning… But you could argue that the government in this country, by and large, is not that powerful and that there have been a series of recent prime ministers who have been failures and tragedies of almost Shakespearean dimensions. That the real power in Australia is held more obviously by a small group of billionaire bullies than is the case in Britain – and they are not the people that get the caning. So it could be said that satirists, about whom it is often said that they are such great snipers, are constantly shooting the messenger.

Clarke is referring partly to the entrepreneurs who made a killing after the Hawke Labor government deregulated the financial system in Australia in 1983, but primarily he is talking about the concentration of media ownership in Australia, which in many ways has become worse, not better, since that interview. What is also clear in the quotation is his high ambition for satire. In a review of The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, Clarke criticised the editor, Frank Muir, for describing Jonathan Swift as a bitter character who “could hardly be called a humorous writer.” For Clarke, Swift was among the greatest satirists because “he attacked greed and corruption wherever he saw them and he smote the authorities hip and thigh” while Muir “does everything he can to defuse any effect humour might have other than to amuse the clergy.”

In Clarke’s view, satire needed to have a social purpose. It should go beyond a prime minister slipping on a banana skin, and shouldn’t simply blow raspberries at those in power. “I think satire is helpless if it doesn’t have a positive aspect,” he told Bramwell and Matthews. The book’s title was Clarke’s but readers didn’t know that, which illustrates not only his subversive wit but his generosity and tendency to small-note himself. (That’s a grateful homage to Mr Clarke, by the way, who taught me the bite of inverting a common phrase.)

Clarke thought that a satirist should think about solutions as well as problems. He never kicked somebody because they were down, but he also thought there was little point kicking somebody simply because they were up. “I do think there are issues and paradoxes and I think it is hard to express an idea without conceiving its opposite.”

One-time collaborator and long-time Clarke friend Andrew Knight once told me, “I think the yardstick of any satirist is how much they are disliked [by their targets] but he is the most generous and encouraging person in an industry that is cancer-ridden with people who want to jump on you.” The wonderful humanity attested to by Knight and many others this week does not mean Clarke viewed the world’s woes with bland equanimity. Andrew Denton, himself a well-known satirist, has said, “At the heart of all great Australian comedy is a red hot kernel of anger.” He could have been speaking about Clarke who, to meet – and I met him and wrote about his work on several occasions – could seem like a roiling well of outrage.

Clarke shied away from direct confrontation, however, which to him “is very often an affair where people repeat their positons and become polarised, which makes it difficult for either party to back down.” Instead, he expressed his “red hot kernel of anger” about the world indirectly through satire and, within that, indirectly through elaborate metaphors. Unlike, say, John Oliver or The Chaser team, who attack their subjects front-on and at full throttle, Clarke compressed and recalibrated the intense emotions he felt into satirical conceits that appeared to have no animus, as Barry Humphries has written, but still knocked the target akimbo.

Paradoxically, despite the range of roles Clarke played and projects he participated in, he almost always presented a version of himself. He was not a character actor. Whether he was playing Alan, a stage hand for a decidedly amateur theatre company in Lonely Hearts, or Dave, Sam Neill’s offsider in Death in Brunswick, he was pretty much the same: deadpan of face, laconic of voice, alternately world-weary and stroppy (Alan) or world-weary and stoically wry (Dave). For The Games, he dispensed with all pretence. His character, head of the Logistics and Liaison team, is called John Clarke and was, by turns, world-weary, stroppy, stoically wry and knowing. The other characters in The Games retained their own names, too, which added to the frisson of national anxiety that Australians felt about staging a global event such as an Olympic Games.

But while for The Games’s Gina Riley playing a version of herself was an exception – she is best known for playing Kim in the satirical comedy Kath & Kim – for Clarke playing himself was part of a continuation. You might deduce from this that Clarke was not a good actor, but he has said that in his childhood, when his mother used to take him along to an amateur theatre company she belonged to, he developed a suspicion of actors being actorly; he much preferred his mother when she was being herself. He was actually a very good performer but he insisted, consciously or otherwise, on doing it on his own terms.

Upending the question-and-answer interview  

Just what were Clarke’s own terms? Well, you can see them most clearly in the mock interviews he did with Bryan Dawe. The Q&A interview is a journalistic staple in which politicians, celebrities and sportspeople have been trained – usually by former journalists – to avoid journalists’ questions or to verbalise at length. It has been pretty much spun dry. Where Clarke’s former colleague Max Gillies made his reputation for the uncanny precision of his impersonation of former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and other politicians, Clarke never made any effort to impersonate the politicians and celebrities he satirised. Instead, he fielded questions from Dawe, as himself, while maintaining he was someone else. In the 1980s, the initial surprise at seeing a middle-aged, balding man wearing no make-up or wig speaking as if he is British prime minister Margaret Thatcher or actor Meryl Streep was funny enough in itself, especially when the latter engaged the interviewer in chit-chat about the “natural” colour of her/his hair and whether “Meryl” would wear a wig for her role as Lindy Chamberlain in the upcoming film Evil Angels.

More importantly, though, the decision not to impersonate the subjects allows us to focus on what they are actually saying. For example, in an interview in 1990, Clarke, as Bob Hawke, is asked about the science and technology minister, Barry Jones, who had just lost his place in the ministry because he did not have the backing of Labor Party’s factions.

Dawe: The Hobart conference seems to have gone very well.

Hawke: Fabulous success, standing ovation I got; they all got on their feet and ovated, right at me…

Dawe: How did the Barry Jones decision this week help with that healing process?

Hawke: I’d like to say something about Barry Jones if I may. He’s a very remarkable fellow. He it was who warned ten years ago that we had no manufacturing basis in this country and that the sunrise new technology industries gave us an excellent opportunity to get one. He it was who also warned of the greenhouse effect.

Dawe: Did we get any of those new technology industries?

Hawke: No, but the countries who listened to Barry Jones did…

Dawe: So how did Mr Jones help with this healing of the wounds within the party?

Hawke: By standing aside for a dumber man.

The first thing to notice is Clarke’s attack on Hawke’s vanity, underlined in the use of the arcane word “ovated.” The second is that good policy is no match for factional alignment (crystallised in the acid line: “By standing aside for a dumber man”) and the third, at the distance of twenty-five years now, is just how prescient Jones – and Clarke – were in identifying the importance of new technologies and the need for Australia to take action on climate change. Nor is this prescience an isolated event. Clarke’s commitment to examining issues in detail before satirising them means he consistently shot up warning flares.

Running to about two-and-a-half minutes each, the mock interviews usually contained one main satirical point that is prosecuted throughout. There is no space for digressions and no interest in providing a rounded or balanced view of the subject or issue.

Some of the most successful mock interviews turned on a comic conceit, such as one with Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a National Party figure who owed his longevity as premier of Queensland to an electoral gerrymander and a garrulously folksy manner that cloaked a ruthless political warrior who had courted property developers and sent police on to the streets to crush any political dissent. In 1987 Sir Joh finally and fatally overreached, launching an ill-conceived tilt at transferring to federal politics that succeeded only in derailing the election campaign of his federal National colleagues and their coalition partners, the Liberal Party, as they sought to win office. Bjelke-Petersen had long been regarded (and underestimated) as something of a buffoon but, instead of making that obvious joke, Clarke’s satirical conceit was to write a script for “Sir Joh” as if he had always aspired to a career in the front rank of comedy.

Dawe: Are you the sad clown? The commedia dell’arte clown?’

Sir Joh: Well, I think I’m a very Australian clown. I think I’m a very Australian clown. I’m not immune to life’s bleaker side, obviously, but I don’t think I’m consumed by it either. I frequently find, for instance, the things which worry people a lot… I find very funny. personally, I find them very, very funny, and I wouldn’t want that to sound as if I don’t care.

The interviewer then presses “Sir Joh” to nominate a favourite joke he has played on the Australian public. For sheer laughter and audience response, “Sir Joh” can’t go past his “Joh for PM” campaign.

Dawe: Why do you think it actually worked as well as it did?

Sir Joh: Various factors. First of all, let me say that it had been done before. It wasn’t an original idea, people had been…

Dawe: But you brought something to it didn’t you?

Sir Joh: Well I like to think so. I had a lot of luck with the timing. For instance, for a start I announced I was running for prime minister when there wasn’t an election on.

Dawe: Yes.

Sir Joh: Pretty funny. Pretty funny.

Dawe: Yes it was.

Sir Joh: Right from the kick-off, I mean that is pretty funny. Then, an election was called, and where was I?

Dawe: Disneyland.

Sir Joh: Pretty funny. Pretty funny. Pretty funny. You’ve got to say that’s pretty funny. I had a lot of luck with the timing. It couldn’t have been better for me. There I am running for prime minister when there’s no election and then there is an election and I’m at Disneyland, being photographed with big-nosed people in the background and speaking of my personal… I mean it was pretty funny.

Dawe: Couldn’t believe your luck.

Sir Joh: Couldn’t believe my luck. On a plate. Literally on a plate.

Dawe: Sir Joh, thank you very much for your time.

Sir Joh: Thank you, you’ve been a wonderful audience.

Pretty funny indeed. You notice how Clarke mimics a conventional chat-show style so that the interview gradually becomes a conversation which leads us to notice the contrast between the smoothness of the chat and the stumbling circumlocutions we were used to with Sir Joh. And, finally, we see that the mock interview does not aim to capture Sir Joh’s character but draws our attention to the impact of his behaviour on ordinary citizens.

Just as it is commonly said that newspaper cartoonists can achieve with a few brush strokes what it takes journalists hundreds of words to say, so the same has been said of the mock interviews. For the everyday person who alternates between feeling powerless to influence governments and anger at being told lies about what they have done, there is something particularly satisfying in satire such as Clarke’s. Either the politicians’ dissembling is pierced by his laser-like scrutiny or they become puppets controlled by the satirist and made to reveal their behaviour.

So, when Australia’s federal treasurer in the 1980s, Paul Keating, a man who had long been on very good terms with himself, led Australia into what he described as “the recession we had to have,” he was made to say in a mock interview the very words he would never have uttered: that the state of the economy was his fault and “Tell the people I’m sorry.” This is a distinct advantage satirists enjoy over journalists. As Peter Meakin, former head of news and current affairs at Channel Nine, once commented, “When Ray Martin [then the host of A Current Affair] is interviewing Paul Keating, he is dependent on what Keating says.”

The unionisation of childhood or the childishness of unions

If Clarke’s inversion of the question-and-answer interview is his best-known satire, and his invention of the mythical sport of “farnarkeling” one of his most loved creations, I’d like to finish by reminding readers of his reworking of the standard news report to portray the particular pleasures and perils of raising children. The impersonal style and formal tone of the news report have long been the subject of parody and satire; Clarke’s contribution was to use it to report the activities of the Federated Under Tens and the Massed Five Year Olds. Writer Shane Maloney has said these pieces of Clarke’s are a commentary on the childish behaviour of many trade unions, which is certainly plausible, but for me the tone is of an exasperated but loving parent rather than an aggrieved citizen. As you will see, I trust.

Australia ground to a virtual halt on Tuesday when the Federated Under Tens’ Association withdrew services, stating that in their view it was an unreasonable demand that they wear a sun hat in the sun. They further suggested that the placement of sunscreen lotion on or about their persons was an infringement of basic human rights and was “simply not on.” Wednesday saw the dispute widen when an affiliated body, the Massed Five Year Olds, showed their hand by waiting until management had about a hundredweight of essential foodstuffs in transit from supermarket to transport and then sitting down on the footpath over a log of claims relating to ice cream. The Federated Under Tens, sensing blood in the water, immediately lodged a similar demand and supported the Massed Five Year Olds by pretending to have a breakdown as a result of cruelty and appalling conditions.

The problem had been further exacerbated by a breakage to one of the food-carrying receptacles and some consequent structural damage to several glass bottles and a quantity of eggs, the contents of which were beginning to impinge on the wellbeing of the public thoroughfare.

As far as I know, only three of these short monologues have been reprinted in Clarke’s anthologies, but what is striking about them is the precise use of jargon (industrial in this case), the satirical conceit (of parenting as a never-ending negotiation) and the deliciously chosen words (“beginning to impinge on the well-being of the public thoroughfare”). With a topic like parenthood, which taps many people’s deepest feelings of love as well as frustration, Clarke doesn’t express his feelings directly but deflects and reshapes them into monologues that convey, albeit indirectly, something essential and well-nigh universal about how it feels to raise children.

This appraisal has covered only a portion of Clarke’s work and does little more than begin mapping his satirical brilliance and influence. If it is undeniably tragic that he died at such a relatively young age, it is equally true that his forensic intelligence is needed now more than ever. The bullshit-detection business has lost one of its finest exponents. •

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“The truth is I did die,” he says, “and it’s my ghost that’s talking to you now. But you can’t pull the same stunt twice. You see the problem?”

James has become a presence so fragile you fear he may become transparent under the glare of the cameras, until that smile lights up, and something shines right back – something that does indeed seem almost beyond the constraints of mortality. He is no supernaturalist, but it is as if he has tapped into some arcanum about humour and the vital spark.

A virtuoso of the gag line, he now says he doesn’t like jokes for their own sake. When I had another look at some episodes of his early series Clive James on Television (1982–89), I was struck by how sparing the gags are. The series was based on the principle that there is no better TV comedy than television trying to be serious – advertising paint colour charts on a black-and-white screen, selling decoy duck telephones, or demonstrating Captain Power guns that fire invisible beams at the television set (a ground-breaking early experiment in interactivity). And nothing could be funnier than the Eurovision Song Contest. For Clive James the TV critic, it had pride of place in the calendar.

Someone who takes the Eurovision Song Contest seriously is Stephen Oliver, writer-producer of Stop Laughing… This is Serious, a three-part ABC series that offers a brief history of Australian television comedy. Oliver’s 2011 documentary The Secret History of Eurovision set out to show the real political significance of a kitsch-fest whose evolution is “the story of Europe itself.” It was a well-conceived documentary and you’d certainly learn more about Eurovision from it than from James’s facetious tours de force in the UK Telegraph, but viewing The Secret History again I am struck by its lack of any instinct for the facetious. In Stop Laughing, this comes across as a rather earnest way of looking at the business of comedy.

“Kel! Kel come and watch this show it’s a f-fascinating documentary about Astrayn comedy.” Jane Turner speaks this opening line to camera in the first program, flat-voiced and without any of Kath’s look-at-me hair and make-up enhancement. The upwardly mobile Kath and Kel would of course take their ABC documentaries seriously. The series alternates between clips from defining examples of Australian television comedy, and commentary from some of the best-known personalities involved. It’s deftly edited and moves along briskly, but the voiceover script (delivered by Eric Bana) is curiously pedantic.

“We Aussies are masters of finding humour in diversity,” he solemnly tell us, and “we especially respect fearlessness in the face of authority – however serious the situation may be.” This comment introduces Norman Gunston’s finest moment, as he infiltrates the scene of Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975. Gunston starts by moving in on Bob Hawke, who pushes the microphone away: “No, look, it’s a bit too serious for that.” “It certainly is,” Gunston chimes in, then edges further along, coinciding with Gough Whitlam on the steps of Parliament House. It’s a photo-bomber’s dream, and for a couple of seconds Gunston fronts the cameras, mugging and mouthing, with Whitlam in the frame behind him.

Then we cut back to the talking heads, who understandably are blown away all over again. Steve Vizard is beside himself. “And who is standing there at the top of the steps? Norman Gunston. A fictional reporter, and he’s participating in that seminal moment in Australian history.” We knew that. “He was standing right there,” says Tim Ferguson, “breathlessly commentating.” Andrew Denton follows up, “That was so Australian.” Enough already.

We move on to a stunt that turned serious in rather more consequential ways: the Chaser team’s infiltration of the 2007 APEC summit in Sydney. It was an extraordinary incident, and well worth seeing again, along with the perpetrators’ retrospective account delivered on their trademark studio couch. “It was the biggest lockdown operation this country’s ever seen,” says Julian Morrow, “and yet there were holes in the security wide enough to drive three trucks, two motorcycles and four secret service guards through.”

This was the Chasers’ do-it-yourself motorcade, which received VIP treatment from all police and checkpoint guards along the route, including courteous assistance at the point where Morrow, walking beside the car as its officer-in-charge, decides it might be time to do a U-turn and go back. “The road is yours,” he’s advised. But the Chasers change their minds and carry on through. Morrow is eventually apprehended while Chas Licciardello gets out of the car dressed as Osama bin Laden and strolls towards the group of leaders preparing for a photoshoot.

The APEC stunt deserves a program of its own, and was dealt with rather too briefly here. It was an act of debunking that served, as Andrew Denton claims, to puncture the propaganda balloon that was the “war on terror.” If the commentary on the Gunston affair is superfluous, here there was a missed opportunity for a few more points to be made. Like the fact that the NSW police minister, David Campbell, declared himself “not amused” at this sabotage of “the most significant security event in Australia’s history.” The charges brought against the Chaser team were, he said “extremely serious.” Even more bizarre is the fact that they were dropped at the April 2008 hearing on the grounds that the team had “an honest and reasonable belief” they wouldn’t get through the cordon, having been told precisely that by a security expert at an ABC briefing the week before.

It is a wonderfully literal example of “crossing the line that no one else will cross.” Moving from there to clips of Graham Kennedy debunking the SAO biscuit is a bit of a comedown in terms of acts of rebellion, but one has to allow for the principles of diversity and inclusion. Recurring appearances by Barry Humphries serve to remind us that at some level this is all about jeu d’esprit.

Episode two, titled “Look at Moi, Look at Moi” in tribute to Kath and Kim, is a celebration of the ordinary. “Television’s marvellous, isn’t it? It’s such a lovely piece of furnitiure,” as Edna Everage proclaimed in one of her very first appearances in living rooms around the nation. Perhaps only those old enough to remember the early days of television have a sense of its intrinsic absurdity, as an object and a medium. There it was, the new focal point of domestic life, looking out at us, just as we were looking into it.

A step through the looking glass was surely inevitable, and so the people watching became one of the funniest things about television. “Humour is here,” says Humphries, “Under your very nose. It might even be you.”

But I wonder if, in that respect, things might have changed. In the lead-up to the Easter break, Channel Ten’s The Project ran a “silly selfies” fundraising competition, inviting viewers to mug for their smart phone and send in the images to raise money for the Clown Doctors. Laughing at the results was visibly exhausting for the panel, but they stoically pressed on to exceed their target of $500,000. With our pervasive screen-consciousness, are we really as funny as we used to be? The truth is that ordinary people are only funny when their behaviour is refracted through the art of the comedian. Comedy is a weird and subtle business. It involves spontaneous inventiveness, timing, observation, physical precision and so much else.

The big weakness of Stop Laughing…, apart from its determination to knock nails on heads until they disappear into the woodwork, is an overplayed set of assumptions about what is Australian. The commentators – who include Garry McDonald, Andrew Denton, Magda Szubanski, Jane Turner, Adam Hills, Judith Lucy, Dave Hughes, Graeme Blundell, Wendy Harmer and Paul Hogan – keep insisting that we are somehow unique in our propensity to make comedy out of battlers and bogans. Do they think that British comedy stopped with Oscar Wilde? Have they never seen Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, or The Young Ones? And lunacy in suburbia is not an Australian discovery. It has been an American speciality since Lucille Ball turned her kitchenette into a scream therapy parlour in the 1950s.

Most of the characteristics identified here as “Australian” go back more than a century, to the multicultural, multinational traditions of stage vaudeville. Why are we so fixated on being Australian anyway? Stephen Oliver might have got better value from his line-up of contributors by asking them to reflect not on what is uniquely Australian, but on what is particular to television as a medium for comedy. Nevertheless, it’s a treat to revisit some of the best moments, and I look forward to part three, which is about Australian comedy going global. I do hope Clive James gets a look in. •

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Indeed, Feiffer claims to have invented the Jewish Mother Joke, and one variant of it from the Village Voice is a good introduction to his work for anyone unfamiliar with it. It is a strip cartoon in which the panels show only the face of the mother in question, a face redrawn ten times over with small variations in expression. As is customary in Feiffer’s cartoons the drawing is balanced, at first glance over-toppled, by a substantial text, here nearly 200 words – so many that one might think that it was in the words that all the work was being done. The penultimate panel upsets any such idea. There the mother’s eyes engage silently with our eyes, as we weigh up the implications of all that has been said.

One of Feiffer’s variants on the Jewish Mother Joke, which he might have invented • Click to enlarge

The subtle changes from one drawing to the next – “moment-to-moment” rather than “action-to-action” transitions – draw our attention to character, mood, motive and predicament rather than to situation, deed, narrative and comic payoff: in fact there is a payoff, and a good one too. But, as so often in Feiffer’s work, instead of dismissing us into laughter it invites us into thought.

Feiffer must have drawn nearly two and a half thousand cartoons like this, more if one counts his work for other publications like Playboy, the Observer – Feiffer had an early success in London – and latterly the New York Times. But his heyday was undoubtedly the ten years between the mid 1950s and the mid 1960s. It was then that he refined his peculiar mixture of angst and kvetch, material that now discloses itself as the negative space, the psychic dark energy, of America’s affluence, self-confidence and hegemony over its half of a bi-polar world.

He covered everything: male inadequacy, the pretensions of modern dance, the battle of the sexes (pre-feminism), the bomb, the new narcissism, the organisation man, psychosomatic stomach aches, phoney Village bohemianism, through a series of dramatic monologues in which the speaker arrived at a much worse position than where he or she started. These confessional strips were first collected in the best-selling Sick, Sick, Sick (1959) – a phrase that described not Feiffer’s kind of humour, but the people he depicted, and the society that produced them.

Backing into Forward is Feiffer’s lively, funny, fresh, frank, informal memoir, comprehensively illustrated, and beautifully produced in the manner of the best American publishing – an inviting dust-jacket, stylish but restrained layout, elegant typeface, high-quality paper, deckled edging, copious illustrations, a credit to the Nan Talese imprint from Doubleday. Feiffer deftly switches his attention back and forth from life to times to career and one of the book’s many virtues is the way the author helps us grasp the ceaselessly alternating flow between all three.

Backing into Forward also reminds us on every page that Feiffer’s gift is verbal as much as pictorial. His modesty is particularly appealing: advised by a well-meaning uncle that he mustn’t put all his eggs in one basket, Feiffer observes that the trouble is he has only one basket and in any case only one egg. Loosely chronological at first, the book becomes more associative in its organisation, leaping from one topic to another. The story is told in a series of vivid, short chapters that are verbal equivalents of the cartoonist’s clearly delineated panel: “Idol” (artist Will Eisner), “Camp Gorgon” (the army), “My Candidate” (a vignette of Democrat Gene McCarthy at the 1968 California presidential primary, preferring to trade lines of poetry with Robert Lowell rather than take a campaign-boosting interview with James Reston), and so on.

Feiffer was a child of the Depression whose parents – Dave (passive) and Rhoda (aggressive) – were genteel-poor, lower-middle-class Jews from the Bronx. A failure academically, he defends himself from the local toughs by chalking up drawings of Popeye bashing up… local toughs, and indulges his secret taste for radio serials and action comic books – the work of Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond and others celebrated in his The Great Comic Book Heroes. (Backing into Forward includes samples of the author’s early work as well as that of his favourite illustrators.)

The politics of Feiffer’s generation were uniformly left-wing: Feiffer’s sister, Mimi, is a Stalinist, Feiffer himself a socialist, and both quarrel with the local Trotskyites. He brings his ideological disposition into the McCarthyite fifties and has some informative tales to tell about the betrayals of playwright Clifford Odets, director and choreographer Jerome Robbins and director Elia Kazan. With no obvious career in sight, he parlays himself into an unpaid “job” as a gofer in Eisner’s studio, where he discovers he can’t draw figures, can’t draw backgrounds, and can’t letter. He does, however, eventually persuade Eisner to let him write the storyline for his comic strip, The Spirit.

There follow some dispiriting years in the army and some equally dispiriting years in an East Village bedsitter, where he struggles unsuccessfully to make his mark in the art departments of advertising studios and magazines, and even in animated cartoons. Finally he presents himself at the Village Voice (then a year old) and repeats the Eisner episode. The editors look at his drawings, inform him that they will publish anything he brings them, but won’t edit him and certainly won’t pay him. They don’t pay him for the next eight years, the years of his astonishing early fame. So ends Part One, “Gunslinger.”

Particularly interesting in Part Two, “Success,” is Feiffer’s account of working on the various productions of Little Murders with Robert Brustein and Elliott Gould (he has his share of failure and rejection, and the chapter on the play is simply titled “Flop”), and with Mike Nichols , Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel on Carnal Knowledge. Here – perhaps inevitably – the story tends towards anecdotes about the great and famous, with whom Feiffer now starts to hobnob. He has his criticisms to make – of Woody Allen’s late-developed taste for “conspicuous shyness,” for example – but he never conceals his wonder at where his talent has taken him. At one dinner party he listens to Kenneth Tynan explain to Marlene Dietrich how he and Ernest Hemingway are no longer on speaking terms. Dietrich shakes her “no-less-beautiful-because-of-the-years-head” and like a very convincing Dietrich imitator huskily croons, “Oh no Ken. No no no, Ken. We can never be mad at Papa.” Ken! Marlene!! Papa!!! Feiffer cannot believe what the boy from 1225 Stratford Avenue, Bronx, is witnessing.

Any artist has to make it new not just in material but in form and Backing into Forward is most interesting in showing from the inside the formal revolution that underpins Feiffer’s work. Simplifying a little one can say that this occurs around 1950–51 with the shift from Clifford to Munro. Clifford was the hero of a comic strip that Eisner allowed Feiffer to draw for the last page of The Spirit lift-out syndicated across US newspapers. Munro was the hero of the first truly Feifferesque comic story, dreamed up during Feiffer’s miserable time in the army in 1951, a story he couldn’t get published for eight years.

Clifford stands somewhere between Pogo and Charlie Brown. That is to say, he is a standardised, cute, lovable child cartoon character of the period. He is delineated in the crisp, professional style favoured by the Eisner studio – deftly inked-in, or brush-flicked, character outlines set against a realistic background. His story is told in a series of nine or so bordered panels with conventional speech bubbles filled with lettering probably done by a lettering specialist and the rapid action-to-action transitions characteristic of the classic comic strip. It is droll, but controlled, conventional and off-the-peg.

Action and reaction: Feiffer’s Clifford (left) and Munro.

Munro, a four-year-old boy drafted into the army, is idiosyncratically and authentically Feiffer. He is drawn in an exhilarating free and informal style that owes something (Feiffer tells us) to the effect on him of seeing the work of Saul Steinberg, William Steig and André François. What Feiffer liked about Steinberg was the cultural critique Steinberg’s art implied (his line “indicted,” he says; it was a form of cultural anthropology); what he liked about Steig (later the author of Shrek), especially the Steig of books like Till Death Do Us Part, was the fusion of Freud, Reich and cartooning; what he liked about François was the careless, improvised, confident freedom of his line:

It was François’s sense of the moment… immediacy on paper… drawing as if it were coming from inside the page out, a scrawl by an invisible hand announcing itself on the page without consciousness of layout, composition or design… art that just happened… that’s what I was after.

It is an apt description of where Feiffer ended up. What he contributed was that overabundance of words – the narrative of inner states of being.

“Munro” represents a complete rejection of Eisner’s cartoon world: both as to draftsmanship (Feiffer comments admiringly on Eisner’s mastery of anatomy, pose, expression, point-of-view, his melodramatic contrast of light and shade, but admits these effects are quite beyond him), and as to subject matter (in Eisner’s case a noirish, melodramatic, quasi-allegorical storyline, for which Feiffer substituted an acute psychological realism).

One gradually comes to see Eisner as Feiffer’s “strong predecessor,” an artistic father figure whom he had to confront, overcome and repudiate. His success depended, as so often, upon a combination of rebellion, self-acceptance, and innovation. Feiffer’s strengths never lay in the direction of his heroes like Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond and Will Eisner: in the tough, disciplined world of professional cartooning Feiffer was a flop and he had to give up his investment in it. He couldn’t even draw a convincing gun; “my guns were made of melting butter,” he confesses. His breakthrough came when he took that melting-butter style, accepted it as his own, and applied it to the depiction of the mid-century unhappy consciousness.

CRUCIAL to Feiffer’s story is the story of his mother, Rhoda Feiffer. Rhoda is the cartoonist’s antagonist in this book; although she has been dead for many years you sense that much of the book is directed to her, that the quarrel, the need to defy, justify, explain and reject is still strong in him. (Dave, gentle, irritable, ineffectual, is dispensable.) Rhoda is affectless, accusatory, dominating, lacking maternal warmth: “Not a hugger, a holder, a kisser, a squeezer, or a pincher. She didn’t go in for bodily contact, certainly not with my father. I’ve suspected for a long time that mine was a virginal birth.” She was, he says, “a control freak… a micromanager who managed ineptly,” who sought some perverse justification for her position by welcoming acts of defiance by others: “endless letdowns, betrayals… weakness on the part of men who left her holding the bag…”

Among many stories of betrayal, Feiffer relates the story of his adored dog, Rex, whom Rhoda gives away to a “fairy tale farmer and his daughter” without telling Jules what she is doing (he is at school when the dog is taken), on the grounds that while the boy might take care of the dog for the moment he will eventually “fall down on the job.” Feiffer remembers the phrase, says that Rhoda “patented it,” and, after all these years, still flinches from its assault.

Feiffer’s sense of his mother’s implacable hostility to her children continues to the end of the book. In Feiffer’s account she engineers her own death with one eye on how it will affect her children: “It was her breath. I believe she was driven to hold it. ‘I’ll show you, I’ll hold my breath till I die.’” She did show us. ‘I’ll die and then you’ll be sorry!’ She died. We weren’t sorry.” Near the front of the book is a cabinet photograph of Jules, aged nine, a beautiful, adored child – but we see the photograph has been folded, torn, and ripped: we can only guess at the history of that disfigurement, and guess too at the circumstances of the photograph’s rescue.

Rhoda’s sad story is a Depression-era counterpoint to her son’s Age of Affluence success. The child of immigrant Jews who settled in the mid-West, she returns to New York conscious of her superiority to the shtetl Jews around her – unlike them, unlike Dave, the third-best man she settles for as a husband in the name of security, a man who mixes up his double-u’s and vees, she speaks in a perfect “accentless English.” Rhoda has talent, artistic taste, ambition. She hopes to succeed as a fashion stylist, a term she believes she invented. Her aim is to get her designs adopted by dress manufacturers, and when Jules sets off on a coming-of-age trek across America he travels with samples of her designs in his rucksack to show to dress manufacturers en route. They throw him out and copy the designs. Success eludes her. All that remains is her resentment, her sense of entitlement, her fierce ambition, qualities that Jules himself, for all his nebbishness, his hatred of his mother, has inherited, along with her artistic talent.

What else drives him to present himself, unannounced and barely nineteen years old, at the door of Eisner’s studio to ask for a job? To work for Eisner just as, later, he works for the Village Voice, for no pay? In both cases he is convinced he has something – something – to offer, not as the inheritor of Eisner but as the founder of a new comic style. This could be presented heroically of course, but more modestly, alert to the role of accident, chance and contingency in even the most driven personality, it is for him just “lucking into the zeitgeist,” or the “backing into forward” of his title.

Rhoda is a monster, and a late chapter details a truly astonishing incident late in her life concerning Feiffer’s younger sister, Alice. But she is also the book’s tragic, unlovable, off-stage anti-heroine, her fall the counterweight to her son’s rise, and for that son, you feel, a piece of unfinished, and unfinishable, business. The stories of Jules and Rhoda go together and give the memoir a satisfying if discomforting coherency – negative space again – and exemplify, comically, tragically, triumphantly, D.H. Lawrence’s observation about the huge mountain of failure that American success is built on. •

Backing into Forward
By Jules Feiffer | University of Chicago Press | US$19 | 456 pages

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