Ode To Santa Rosita
A Poem
The pilot lies
Senseless
Among the cocktails
As faces freeze with fear
In the cockpit
Far below
A dentist hurls his strength
Against an iron door
The despair on his face
The exhaustion in his limbs
Co-mingling
To let him know
His life has come to this
By the side of a dusty road
A man pokes an Englishman in the eye
Dreams of reliving the Revolution
Dancing in his seaweed-addled brain
He does not hear the screams
Of the Jewish mechanics
As their world is destroyed
By a mad removalist
Their prayers go unanswered
By an unfeeling God
While tears stream down the cheeks of the lifeguard
Whose mother even now
Cannot reach him
On the phone
Sergeant Bilko sinks to the bottom of the river
And the captain calls
For a sundae
In Paradise
The double u
Awaits
The Weekly Movie Thingy
As you may have guessed from the above poem, I recently viewed Stanley Kramer’s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for the nth time. Having been watching it on a regular basis since I was about eight, I don’t think there’s much new for me to notice with each new viewing, but what did strike me on this occasion was just how well done it all is. Apart from the ropey effects in the fire ladder climax, everything is executed so perfectly. The action sequences, the car chase, the plane shots, the destruction of the hardware store - it is all so beautifully choreographed. And the cast is a galaxy of stars firing on all cylinders. Not that stars have cylinders. But then people don’t have cylinders either, and we’re happy to use that metaphor for people. So why can’t a metaphor be twice removed?
In the modern day, you don’t really get those movies anymore - the ones that were big in the fifties and sixties where everyone in it is super famous, where major stars all agree to share the screen with each other and the producers manage to overcome all the arguments about salaries and billing and scheduling and actually pull it off - not to mention the dozens of cameos. I guess the Ocean’s movies were like that, so maybe we could get a modern Mad, Mad if George Clooney decides to call all his friends again. Incidentally, Carl Reiner is in the Ocean’s movies AND It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. So that’s kind of cool.
I don’t know what a modern Mad, Mad would look like. Maybe there couldn’t be one, because those sort of comedy personalities aren’t really around. Showbiz is too atomised, you don’t have TV comedy megastars like Milton Berle and Sid Caesar anymore, and it’s hard to see twenty different comedy box office bankers coming together, even if there are any. Anchorman - 1 and 2 - had a bit of the spirit didn’t it?
I don’t know if this is a reason to lament: it’s perhaps a niche fetish of mine to want to see movies with casts full of gigantic stars. What if Ricky Gervais and Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Will Ferrell and Bill Hader and Jack Black and Amy Schumer and Melissa McCarthy and Nathan Fielder and Zach Galifianakis and Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell and Tiffany Haddish and Dave Chappelle and Sharon Horgan and Ed Helms and Aunty Donna all did a movie together?
I’d make it a live-action Wacky Races.
The Weekly Barry
Thinking about comedy giants - REAL comedy giants, not just famous comedians, not just good comedians, but the ones who bestride comedy like a colossus. The creators whose mass is great enough that they actually bend and shape the comedy universe around them. The upper echelon of the upper echelon of comedy legends.
They’re the rare ones in history. In the UK I think of Spike Milligan, Peter Cook and John Cleese. In the US I think of Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Groucho Marx (Jewish people do seem to be funnier, don’t they? How may anti-Semites are just acting out of jealousy that they’re not as good at telling jokes as Jews are?). Maybe we could throw in Victoria Wood, Steve Martin, and Lucille Ball (I was never a huge Lucille Ball fan, but only a moron would deny the impact she’s had). You get the picture. The royalty of funny.
There are even fewer of them in Australian comedy history. I put Shaun Micallef on that level, and in the patriotic tradition of stealing New Zealanders for ourselves, John Clarke. But although both of those men are titans and have produced prodigious amounts of quite stunningly good comedy, even they did not carry Antipodean comedy to the world the way Barry Humphries did. Only Barry not only smashed it out of the park in terms of making comedy - and distinctively Australian comedy at that - but also sold it to to audiences around the globe and saw them lap it eagerly up.
He was a spectacular talent, an indisputable original and a man who combined a gift for the viciously satirical with an ability to never take his eye off the main aim of making people laugh - both qualities that legions of professional comedians have always found difficult to master. If you think he was just Dame Edna, you’ve missed a lot. But even if he had been just Dame Edna, he wouldn’t have been just Dame Edna - that character alone was a towering enough achievement to make him a legend. The fact that she was only a fraction of his complete repertoire is mind-boggling.
I think it’s a shame that upon the passing of this undeniable titan, the tributes and reminiscences were mixed with just a hint of controversy, as some took the opportunity to do the “he wasn’t all that” routine and declare that what Humphries was, in fact, was a bigoted prick who deserved no respect.
I don’t really want to wade into the debate over Barry Humphries’s character, firstly because it makes me sad that the debate is even happening, and secondly because the main point of contention is comments he made about transgender people, and I am not so much of a lunatic masochist that I am going to start writing essays about gender issues. My views on gender are available on request, probably heavily encrypted and only if you promise not to get mad.
Anyway, my belief that Humphries’s passing merits full-throated tributes and joyous celebrations, as well as modicum of sadness, from the public and those who have followed in his footsteps, does not, I think, depend on my trying to debate about anything he said. Maybe some might consider that I am mounting a defence of the indefensible here. I respectfully disagree - I can only cross my fingers and hope that the “respectfully” part is reciprocated.
What I want to say is not that there was nothing wrong with anything Barry Humphries ever said, or that nobody has a right to object to it.
What I want to say is that while there have undoubtedly been true monsters exposed in the entertainment industry - high achievers, showbusiness legends, who turned out to have done genuinely horrific things that, when they die, will unavoidably be front and centre of any overviews of their lives - I don’t think Barry Humphries qualifies for that category. I don’t think there’s anything in the life of Humphries that means he should be the subject of an argument as to whether to include him in the gallery of such monsters.
What I think is that Barry Humphries made more people laugh in his 89 years than almost everyone else in the history of the world. I think his contribution to comedy and culture is immense, and I don’t think anyone can reasonably deny that. I think that, like those other true titans of comedy, he was responsible for creating greater amounts of joy in the lives of millions than most of us could ever hope to be. And that’s before we even consider how many people were inspired by his example to try to create a bit of joy themselves, and how many went on to make a pretty decent fist of it.
I also think he upset a lot of people from time to time, and fair enough. But if I were to die having done as much good as Barry Humphries, while also having done nothing worse than what we consider to be his worst moments, I think I’d have done OK.
Without wanting to make the measure of a human life simply a matter of putting Good Stuff and Bad Stuff on a pair of scales, I think it’s worth thinking about the net positives of a person’s existence.
All I’m saying - and taking way too long to say it - is that I have no doubt whatsoever that the world we live in is a better one because Barry Humphries was in it. And that is worth celebrating when the man moves on to the great Establishment Club in the sky.
The Weekly Plugs
Plugs For Myself
As it’s Anzac Day, grab a biscuit and enjoy this blast from the past: a piece I wrote about Anzacs and related issues for New Matilda in 2014. Featuring lines I’m still pretty proud of such as “Thanks to Anzac Day, we are now generating ghosts at a level appropriate to a middle-power.”
Plugs For Someone Else
On the issue of Barry Humphries, read this piece, filled as usual with intelligence and humanity, by Sammy J, on the question of the removal of his name from the Melbourne Comedy Festival’s best show award.
I confess that although I find the arguments put forward by Sammy convincing, the decision to rename the Barry, as it always has, still rankles a little with me. Part of the reason for this might be in the words of Susan Provan in this news piece, wherein she notes that the Barry was not named after Humphries per se - “It was more about ‘Barry’ being a funny and iconic Australian comedy name – Barry Humphries, Barry McKenzie, Barries everywhere”. I think that’s at least partly why it irritated me that they got rid of it - it’s such a good name for an Australian comedy award. Humphries aside, “The Barry Award” is just so perfect for such a prize in this country, that it is a shame the award no longer carries such an evocative moniker. It would’ve been far less of a blow if the award had been named after Derryn Hinch.