The Late Late Show

Mortality is a bitch

Twelve years ago I performed my first ever show in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It was titled “Ben Pobjie’s Funeral” and was inspired by the idea that I would like to have my funeral held before I died, so that I could hear everyone say nice things about me before it was too late.

In the end, the show was mostly a collection of the pieces that I’d developed over the previous few years, tied loosely together, and I use the word “loosely” loosely. It was kind of funny, but disappointed me a bit because I hadn’t put together the show I’d envisioned when I first came up with it (a recurring theme in my career, I later discovered).

I would like to put on “Ben Pobjie’s Funeral” again, in a very different form, and really dig into the theme better. Because I still very strongly believe a pre-mortem funeral is an excellent idea, and I still want very much to have one.

I kind of hope that if I put on the show, someone might throw me a funeral.

A funeral, more than a birthday or a wedding or a christening, is a celebration of a person, their life and their best qualities. And maybe it’s just me, but more than anything I want people to celebrate me.

This may mean that I am a pathetically insecure yet egomaniacal person beset by incurable and crippling emotional neediness. So in your eulogy, I would request that you leave that bit out.

But really, the elements of my personality that make me yearn for a funeral are the same ones that make me want to write and do comedy. I want people to tell me I’m good. I want people to be interested in me. I want people to stand up in front of crowds and make long speeches about how wonderful I am.

I know that this sort of admission does not paint me in a flattering light. So feel free to include something about my disarming honesty and bracing self-deprecation in your eulogy.

Absent an actual funeral, though, why can’t people at least contribute a little to inflating the easily-collapsible balloon of my self-esteem? Why can’t they ask to paint my portrait? Or interview me and all my friends for a feature article about me? Or at least invite me onto their podcast?

I mean, sometimes people DO invite me onto their podcast, but not nearly often enough, and when they introduce me they could stand to be a little more worshipful.

Ideally, of course, what would be really good would be if someone made a documentary series about me, or wrote a book. But if you’re going to go to all that effort, why not just bite the bullet and throw me a funeral?

Look, it’s up to you. Whatever form your enthusiastic outpouring of affection for me takes, it’s your call. I don’t want to dictate your style to you. But whatever you decide to do, please get on with it.

My levels of self-love are dangerously low. I need a bit of other-people-love to top me up.

The Weekly Creativity

The Casebook Of Caligula Coleridge,Undercover Poet - Continued

Wednesday, January 23^rd, 1952

            And so here I stood. On the docks, breathing in that peculiar mix of sea salt, hair oil, and homosexuality peculiar to this heady bay. My ship was about to leave, and in a careless, lazy manner, I climbed on board. I did not want my enemies to know how much I cared about being on this boat. After all, without the vital advantage of being on board a ship, my whole plan of sailing to India would fall apart. And to India I must go. To find Sir Gimli Greystoke, father of Boots. To discover and vanquish the legendary Poetical tribesmen of Bengal. To find...yes, dammit, why not say it? To find, perhaps, with an ounce of luck and half a pound of shortening, the Limerick of Taga-Phou! Then I could die happy. Presuming I was dying somewhere comfortable and with no penetrative weapons invading my flesh.

            Eventually, the ship pulled out, reminding me of that fateful occasion when I had failed to do the same, and I looked upon the shrinking shore with a mixture of disgust, longing, and itchiness, like a man who has his faced rubbed in the viscera of a stomach surgery patient by a beautiful woman. I both hated and loved my home town, and though happy to leave it in one sense, in another sense I wanted to kill myself. This I attempted by hurling myself into a smokestack, but it was to no avail. The smokestack was fake, and I was doomed to a long sea voyage.

            Later on, I discovered the itchiness was caused by a tick in my underpants.

            That night, lying alone in bed, smoking a reflective cigarette, drinking a reflective brandy, eating a reflective meat pie, and making love to a reflective prostitute, I composed a poem on my mental typewriter. As soon as the prostitute, a charming girl named Rhoda, had left, I transposed the poem onto my physical typewriter:

Knockily knees come down from the trees

Your hearts are in danger of burstin’

Knockily knees return my best cheese

Because it’s for that I’ve been thirstin’

Knockily knees release Elsie’s bees,

They’re buzzing around the old table

Knockily knees it’s like a disease

Get back to your knockily stable

Knockily knees stop shooting the breeze

It never did nothing to hurt you

Knockily knees I finally sees,

The reason I must now desert you.

            The simple piquancy of my verse made my heart ache like some beautiful attack of angina, and I lay on my bed for hours, moaning, howling, spitting, vomiting, clicking, buzzing, gurgling, burping, and finally collapsing in a boneless, jellylike heap on the floor. This was just what I needed, and I leapt to my feet full of a new vigour. I ran to my portable bamboo desk and began my plans for the investigation of what I had come to call The Strange Case of the Disappearance of Sir Gimli Greystoke, the Pride of High Wycombe Probus Society (copyright C. Coleridge). Opening up my carpet bag, I produced my faithful servant Selfridge, and applied the appropriate fluids with an eyedropper to restore him to full efficacy. I ordered him to go to the bar and get me a jug of ice for the long night ahead.

            The next six hours were filled with the glorious precision of geometry, as I measured angles, drew diagrams, studied maps with painstaking care, took notes on the known habits of Poetical Tribesmen around the world, played the piano in the ship’s restaurant, gave myself a haircut, taught Selfridge how to play Euchre, chewed ice, and struck up a lifelong friendship with a capital fellow named Keith. At the end of the night I was spent, and I slept like a baby until noon, when I turned over and slept like an otter. After five hours of that, I took a quick half hour of sleeping like an iguana, and woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to attend the ship’s ball.

            The ship’s ball was surprisingly uneventful, and apart from a lengthy saga involving dry-cleaning bills and genetic testing, nothing much happened.

            The ship sailed on...on to India and...who knew?

            I remembered the last time I was in India. Sweet Bombay nights. A curry house on Mafeking Street. A mysterious man in blue. A mysterious woman in yellow. A mysterious cow in the middle of the road. The romance of the Old Orient. Had it changed much? Was the air as thick and spicy, were the people still so friendly and dishonest, were the lepers still as amusing; were the beggars so endearingly legless? Only time would tell. I could only hope that nothing had changed, for it was only that sense of indefinable wonder and mystery about the place that kept me going on the long journey. Fevered nights of dreams of Boots Greystoke and her feather boa, fevered days of listening to medical horror stories about fat women’s children by the side of the pool. Sitting in my room charting my route across the subcontinent, distracted by Selfridge’s incessant opium smoking and his terrible attempts to play the mandolin. By the time we drew within sight of that wise, ancient, vast, beautiful land, I was just about ready to stick drawing pins in both my eyes.

            Finally, though, we disembarked, and I drew a great sigh of relief, followed by a hacking cough. I had forgotten just HOW thick and spicy the air really was. With a word from me, Selfridge leapt upon my shoulders and I began jogging through the dockside crowd, searching for an elephant-hire service in order to penetrate India’s dark and secret dark secrets. Coming upon a souvenir stand, we stopped to buy four postcards and a commemorative pewter monkey, and pose for a photo.

            ‘Make sure you get my little friend,’ I said to the grinning, fez-laden urchin I had enlisted for photographic purposes. I pointed to Selfridge, clutching my skull.

            ‘Yes, Sahib,’ he replied in what I thought was a needlessly melodramatic fashion. He raised the camera to his eye.

            Next thing I knew, Selfridge and I were sitting bound and gagged in a cattle truck rattling through the Calcutta streets. I had a large bruise on my forehead, a pain in my ribs, and what I suspected to be the early symptoms of cirrhosis of the liver. The cattle were proving a nuisance as well. And as for where we were going...who could tell?

The Weekly Plugs

Plugs For Me

SPACE AND BEYOND continues - let me know what page to turn to next.

Read my Q&A with the legendary Indira Naidoo.

Plugs For Other People

You may not be aware - in which case I have shamefully neglected my self-promotion - that I work as a quizmaster at pub trivia nights. My employer, Quizzame Australia, is on the hunt for new hosts. If you’d like to give the quizmaster game a go, get in touch.