Gag on this

A very old joke recounts the resolution of a talent quest aboard a sailing vessel bound for nineteenth century Australia. The prize for the winner, a farthing, and for the runner-up, a kiss from the captain’s daughter. Today, of course, the punchline would be well beyond the pale. What patriarchal toxin is that, your standard issue ABC/comedy festival ‘entertainer’ would sniff?

‘Lookism’ that rates a woman’s appearance as less valuable than the smallest coin!

A female prostituted — rape culture! rape culture! — for public amusement by her privileged father!

A shipload of pale invaders en route to visit genocide on First People/Indigenes/Kooris/whatever the latest revision to the Left’s ever-updated nomenclature of colonialist oppression might happen to be!

Can’t have any of that, the Leftist funnybone shrieks, favouring didacticism and personal attack above humour. Oh, the audience will laugh alright, no worries about that — it’s just that they’ll be laughing by implication at the unenlightened knuckle-draggers who miss the humour in shouting ‘Little Johnny Howard’ or ‘Onion-breath Abbott‘.

To really crack up the crowd, what about a comedian of colour imagining how white Australians regard him as something not too many rungs above a dog on the evolutionary ladder?

For those with a genuine sense of humour, it can all be a bit baffling, like observing surgeons who know nothing of anatomy while insisting that looking the part, suiting-up in gowns and masks, is sufficient in itself to demonstrate competence. Surely such a sub-culture is worth exploring, as Quadrant readers — especially those with a tolerance for gratuitous obscenity — might care to explore on September 22, when the Green Left Comedy Night takes the stage in revolutionary Leichhardt. As the publicity material puts it:

Opening with a progressive choir, it features a great line up taking aim at hypocrisy, injustice, racism and the absurdity of a system threatening us all.

Apart from that “progressive choir”, do you know what would be really funny, what would be a fine joke indeed: If conservatives were to call the venue and threaten violent protests unless the event is cancelled immediately, as hard left activists do whenever conservatives gather to launch a book, discuss matters of public policy or utter sentiments at odds with their port-canted catechism. And then the police could deliver the punchline by sending a bill to organisers for the leftist crowd’s protection. Ho ho ho, what a thigh-slapper that would be!

Not that conservatives would ever do that, of course. Laughing at — not with — the likes of those whose schticks are linked above is reward enough.

For more on Leichhardt’s weekly exercise in revolutionary mirth, follow this link or the one below.

— roger franklin

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