Best Australian Comedy Writing

by Luke Ryan

  11:30 PM - 29 Dec 2014

  Stop calling me your ‘spirit animal’! I don’t believe in spirituality and animals are for eating. I will NOT be your God food!

  3:01 AM - 10 Jan 2015

  Who hasn’t had gay thoughts?

  2:52 PM - 14 Feb 2015

  Let’s face facts, TV presenters and newsreaders are just people who wanted to be famous but couldn’t act or sing.

  3:27 AM - 9 Feb 2015

  Art is essentially masturbation, ultimately useless and selfish.

  11:44 PM - 31 Dec 2014

  Your baby isn’t special, it’s just a poop machine that’s a drain on our resources.

  6:14 PM - 22 Nov 2014

  ‘Why don’t you love me?’ – every man who’s ever spoken to me.

  12:46 AM - 14 Sep 2015

  First leaks, now spills? Someone needs to teach this government how to drink #LeeLinforPM #libspill #auspoll #primechinister

  2:47 PM - 5 Apr 2015

  People seem to think that I’m some mythical comedy unicorn. They are correct.

  ANDREW HANSEN

  Termination Hotel

  ❛It had happened so fast, the images were all jumbled in his brain. He thought he’d seen two flaming eyes staring into his soul, like a furious Julie Bishop, but surely that was impossible.❜

  I wrote this pisstake of English horror writer Robert Aickman to perform at Ghost Stories, a monthly show at Sydney’s Giant Dwarf theatre. I’m afraid this print version doesn’t include eerie lighting, fog, or a spooky soundtrack, so I recommend setting those up in your home or office while you read.

  The office manager was to blame. The office manager, who kept a pet tortoise. Morris had thought this odd, especially when she’d explained that it was not so much a pet tortoise as a personal guard.

  The tortoise-cradling lady had stood in the driveway to make certain that Morris set off by her strange short cut that, she pointed out, would save him three blocks of Sydney traffic* and was therefore equivalent to two-and-a-half hours’ driving time.

  The best that could be said about this short cut was that Morris was now 100 per cent lost in one of those immense new suburbs with quasi-poetic names, like Liberty Lakes or Golden Showers. Or Nugget Swallows.

  Driving along at sixty kilometres an hour, Morris looked at his watch. No mean feat for a man who kept his watch inside his shoe.

  He had been driving for hours. He should be almost home by now, but instead he was running out of petrol and rapidly running out of patience with the car radio, which was telling him about their ‘no-repeat workday’ – an ironic promise given how often it was repeated. The dashboard light, like reruns of Two and a Half Men, seemed even feebler than he remembered.

  It was dark. Out-of-date street lamps lined identical roads that snaked among towering trees and gates as broad and yellow as Gary Busey’s teeth. One suspected the road planners had deliberately avoided straightness, as in the selection of an Olympic swim team.

  Morris reached a bifurcation, which left him wondering not only which way to go but also what a bifurcation was. Should he furc left or right? Furc this, he thought, and got out of the car.

  He couldn’t see the moon or stars.

  Then he looked up, and could.

  It was silent – the houses were set too far back from the road for him to hear the blare of any televisions, which was a blessing, as it was about time for Bogan Hunters on 7mate. There were no pedestrians, no traffic, no sound of traffic, no sign of life at all. He couldn’t have driven as far as Hornsby, surely?*

  Troubled by the quiet, Morris proceeded a short way on foot. Finding that tricky, he switched to both feet. The manager’s short cut had sounded promising at the time, but then, lots of people had bought LaserDisc players too.

  The left side of the road was lined with weedy vegetation, and the right side with buff vegetation that obviously worked out at the gym. That buff vegetation is smokin’! thought Morris.

  Beyond the vegetation sat a row of hedges – some owners had trimmed their hedges, some hadn’t, while still others had given their hedges complete Brazilians.

  Walking further along the road would be useless, though the air was warm and fragrant – largely the result of Morris having eaten five Mad Mex tacos for lunch.*

  Without warning, something leaped at him from the hedge on his left. He must have royally pissed off a feral cat. The first warning he received was its claws, or perhaps teeth, plunging into his left nipple. He knew his mesh tank top had been a bad idea.

  ‘Owwwwwarrr! Awww-haww-haww-haww-haww! Aaaaarrrghhh, a-haaaaaarggghhhhh!’ he said.

  Wildly, Morris batted the cat off – that is to say, he hit the cat away, not that he batted it off. This was followed by a sudden silence. He must have hurled the cat a great distance, because there was no trace of the foul beast. It had happened so fast, the images were all jumbled in his brain. He thought he’d seen two flaming eyes staring into his soul, like a furious Julie Bishop, but surely that was impossible. Odder still, he felt it might not have been a cat at all, but … it couldn’t be … a feral tortoise?!

  There was no reason a pet tortoise couldn’t go feral in the same way a cat did, Morris reasoned. Could he have been savaged by a crazed, leaping tortoise?

  Morris faltered. His chewed nipple hurt like mad. He couldn’t bring himself to touch it, and he was usually quite fond of fiddling with his nips.

  He staggered back into the car and set off uncertainly down the road he’d just walked. A terrible thought struck him. What if the tortoise was venomous? It was not greatly enjoyable to imagine the kind of attenuated death that might result from undiluted tortoise venom.

  He switched the radio to AM. The road straightened a little, and the number of driveways diminished – though the trees, like the presenters on 2GB, remained dense.* Street lamps were fewer, too, but Morris saw that one of them bore a hanging sign of some sort. It wasn’t likely to show a practical destination, but Morris stopped to examine it because, like Steve Price on the radio, he urgently needed a clue.†

  The sign was shaped like a sign, and read:

  ‘TERMINATION HOTEL. GREAT MEALS. GOOD SERVICE. OKAY ACCOMMODATION’.

  Morris made a decision. He was hungry, lost, nearly without petrol, and had what he still suspected were toxic tortoise tooth marks on his tit. He would ask for dinner and, if he could phone home, maybe stay the night – though he had neither pyjamas nor razor nor Pillow Pet. Morris drove through the massive iron gate, the kind of gate he imagined would front an industrial farm, or Bob Katter’s brain.

  The ugly driveway was riddled with potholes, as if heavy trucks came in often, or perhaps professional pothole diggers. Morris’ headlights swayed and bounced – not because of the potholes, they were just very cheap headlights.

  Suddenly, there on Morris’ left, he saw it: his left shoulder. He also saw, beyond the shoulder, the Termination Hotel. Thanks to a large floodlight mounted on the building, Morris spotted a large floodlight mounted on the building.

  Was this place really a hotel? Maybe a club of some kind? Surely it was too modern to be one of those B&Bs that looks romantic at first but turns out to be a cramped, badly decorated doll’s house that you’re forced to share with three awkward couples and the quirky retiree owners whose dream was to open a cute guesthouse but because they’ve never done two minutes of hospitality training and have a genetic aversion to taste it’s like being imprisoned in one of Barbie’s cheese nightmares.

  Whatever the story, he was going to find out. Morris locked the car. Bit of a mistake, as he forgot to get out first. Ah, he always did this. He unlocked the car, got out, locked it again. Realised he’d left the headlights on. Unlocked it, turned off the headlights, locked it. Damn, he was inside the car again. He unlocked it, got out, got back in, got out again, stood there for a bit, got back in, locked it, unlocked it, got back out, realised he’d lost the key. Got back in, found the key, locked it, turned on the headlights, climbed out the wi
ndow, reached back in, turned off the headlights, unlocked it, got in, got out, locked it. Suffice it to say the tortoise venom was making Morris a tad vague.

  Morris pushed at the door of the house. It was a chunky old door that, like the girls he’d dated in high school, did not open.

  He saw a doorbell. He was reluctant to ring, but he rang. The doorbell shouted ‘doorbell’. Morris wondered if he was beginning to hallucinate.

  He didn’t much enjoy standing alone in an odd place under a bright floodlight not knowing what would happen next. Some people probably love doing that, but not Morris.

  Fortunately, the door was soon opened by a young, athletic man with blond curls and a blond face. He wore a blond jacket, and smiled blondly.

  ‘Dinner, sir, yes. I’m afraid we’ve just started, but I’m sure we can accommodate.’

  Before Morris had a chance to speak, the blond man had turned and was blondly ushering him along a corridor. On entering the dining room, it struck Morris as slightly too hot. Much too hot. In fact, it was almost as hot as having a sauna in Cairo with Ryan Gosling, which Morris had done once but nobody believed him. The apparently windowless room was lined with thick wall hangings, and the ceiling had been lowered as if to make things easier for any visiting electrician who’d forgotten his ladder and happened to be a dwarf.

  Perhaps the room had been designed to dampen the noise, yet the diners were exceedingly quiet. They were crammed together at a single long table running down the centre of the room. God, do I have to sit with them? Morris thought. This is like one of those awful hipster share-plate restaurants.

  But he didn’t. There was a separate table along the wall, and the blond lad seated Morris blondly at it. It was a huge table, but only set for one person. Which must be how Gina Rinehart eats dinner every night … thought Morris, unkindly.

  Morris looked at the other diners and noticed a very peculiar thing. Underneath the long table, a metal bar ran its entire length. One elderly guest was attached to this bar by a thick chain wound around his calf.

  The old man spoke to Morris, pointing at the bloody wound around Morris’ nipple. ‘I see our little hunter found you.’ At this, Morris saw that the old man and all the other diners were each nursing a little bundle – their very own pet tortoises. Each diner was allowing their little tortoise to eat morsels from its owner’s plate. The tiny grey heads appeared ravenous as their wrinkled mouths chewed at the raw-looking meat.

  From somewhere upstairs, Morris heard a muffled scream. His vision swam and he fell from his chair.

  As he lay there, paralysed, he could just make out a woman standing over him. ‘It was the venom that guided you here,’ she said. It was Morris’ office manager, the lady who kept a pet tortoise and had recommended this godforsaken short cut. ‘And if there’s one thing we promise our pets here at Termination Hotel, it’s okay accommodation, good service … and great meals.’

  As one, the hungry tortoises leaped.

  * Sorry about the local reference, but this story was performed in Sydney. For readers not living in Sydney, simply replace ‘Sydney’ with the name of your home town, and ‘traffic’ with ‘traffic’.

  * Again, for those not in Sydney simply replace ‘Hornsby’ with any other dull but harmless suburb.

  * Are Mad Mex tacos a local reference? Quite possibly. If you haven’t heard of them, just swap in your local mid-quality Mexican chain. Happy José’s etc.

  * Oh god, another local. My sincerest apologies. Replace 2GB with your local all-white, all-male, hate-filled talkback station.

  † Steve Price is a talkback radio host on 2GB. Just replace him with any radio personality you especially dislike. Yes, this is another local reference. At this rate I should have just asked you to write the story yourself.

  SAMI SHAH

  I, Pervert

  ❛Overnight, Pamela Anderson and her cohorts jiggled and bounced their way into our lives. Parents suddenly had to vigilantly guard children from the television, and children had to guard against their parents catching them watching said television.❜

  I’ve always had a strange relationship with porn. I talk about porn in my stand-up, but then you’d be hard-pressed to find a comedian who doesn’t. When I first started writing jokes about porn and masturbation, I genuinely thought I was breaking new ground – a perverted Neil Armstrong sticking his penis into the moonscape of Pakistan’s collective unconscious. It was only after moving to Australia and meeting other comedians in open-mics and comedy clubs that I realised how ubiquitous the topic of porn is. Male comedians, at least, rarely consider their set complete without a healthy ten-minute chunk on masturbation. But, in my solitary experience as a stand-up comic in Pakistan, I was convinced that I was challenging the status quo in some way.

  I received an email from an Australian once that showed me how strangely the rest of the world perceives Pakistani attitudes towards sex. This was around that time when I had been invited to attend the comedy festival on Sydney Harbour. Until the Australian embassy decided the national security of their nation could not be risked by allowing a skinny Pakistani comedian entry, a poster with my name and email address had been plastered all over the festival website. Most of the emails I received were fairly sweet and innocuous – sincerely surprised Australians writing to tell me they didn’t realise there was stand-up comedy in Pakistan, which is a reasonable reaction.

  Then I got one from a woman that convinced me people outside Pakistan have no idea about the country. The writer had followed a link to a YouTube clip of me performing some of my searingly innovative porn-based comedy in a Lahore college auditorium. She wrote: ‘I didn’t realise Pakistanis had sex.’

  First, let me dispel any further confusion: Pakistanis do, indeed, have sex. We do not rely on some black market cloning technology for reproduction purposes, nor do we spawn from magical pools of amniotic goo, like the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, some Pakistanis have quite a bit of sex. Others not as much as they would like to. The men have sex with women; the women have sex with men (although I doubt their experience is anywhere near as satisfying). Sometimes the men even have sex with other men, although discussing or acknowledging that probability is actively discouraged.

  In rare cases (but not rare enough), they have happily stuck it in animals as well. Some years ago, the national newspapers reported that a man had been discovered in the act of lovemaking with a donkey. Unfortunately, the donkey belonged to his neighbour. Because this took place in a village, a tribal council was quickly convened, and both the man and the donkey were judged guilty of dishonouring themselves. The donkey was, in keeping with rural customs, killed; the man escaped. I wish I was making some of this up – I remember being quite depressed about the poor donkey’s tragic death, although not as depressed as the man must have been.

  Social and governmental prohibitions have tried desperately to limit and control all discussion of sex. Pakistan has an extremely Victorian sensibility about the carnal acts: while we are aware that people regularly get naked and push their genitals against each other, we don’t think it’s something that we need to be reminded of. Much like nose-picking, sex should be done in private – preferably at home, with no one watching. And never in the car.

  All attempts at censorship are a futile enterprise, though. Lust, particularly male lust, runs to depths that can never be plumbed. Women may think they have an idea of how deep it goes, but they don’t. Even we men don’t. Our hunger for sex goes so deep, it frightens even us – past where even the light can reach, below basic lechery and urges, below even the fetishes and standard deviations, it is at such a depth that the pressures crush all comprehension and coherent thought. That is where monsters dwell. Horny creatures that can never be catalogued or understood. Frightful denizens of our lusty ocean floor. And so, even in the most constricting of societies, sex finds a way.

  All the way up to the late 1980s, sex was cut out of every Hollywood movie before the Pakistani public could be truste
d to view it. Not even a kiss made it through the censors. The hero and heroine would lean towards each other, lips parting and eyes closing … then suddenly they were enjoying a post-coital cigarette. What happened in between was a mystery. However, extreme violence was left uncensored. We were believed to be more capable of dealing with a heart being pulled out of a man’s chest than lips brushing. That is why we Pakistanis are quick to violence and slow to love.

  While I was growing up, there were barely two TV channels to watch. One was the state-run channel, PTV, which was fanatically regulated. During the dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq, a woman couldn’t appear on screen unless her head was covered with a modesty-exuding shawl. Even in dramas that included scenes of women waking up from sleep, the characters apparently went to bed with scarves firmly fastened around their heads.

  Then, during Benazir Bhutto’s prime ministership, the shawls loosened and moved further back on the head, puffs of hair emerging from underneath. When the more conservative government of Nawaz Sharif followed shortly afterwards, the shawls crawled back up to their original places. It got so that you could tell who was in power by the way the PTV female newscasters wore their hijabs.

  The other channel at this time only broadcast in the evenings, but, when it debuted in 1990, it was seen as a revolution in TV programming. The entertainment-deprived children of Pakistan got to watch a half-hour of cartoons uninterrupted. Every day brought us the adventures of anthropomorphic warrior cats or space-faring cowboys, followed by ancient British comedies and topped off with an hour of the most notorious failures in US drama history.

  But we were not ungrateful. To us, shows like Manimal (a man who fought crime by changing into either a panther or a falcon), The Wizard (a midget who built toys that always matched his adventurous needs perfectly) and Street Hawk (like Airwolf, except with a motorcycle) were the greatest things we had ever seen. We spent hours discussing the practical logistics of how Manimal could change into an elephant if need be; to this day, if you see any motorcyclist driving too fast in Pakistan, people refer to him as a ‘Street Hawk’.