Best Australian Comedy Writing

by Luke Ryan

  ‘I’ve spoken to my guru!’ she announces joyfully, extending her arms for an embrace. ‘And she has had a vision that you have come to tell the world about her!’ I look forlornly over her shoulder, trying to calculate my chances of escaping unhugged. Sandy is older than me, but has the agility and alarming upper-body strength of the yoga-fit, so I decide against trying to fight.

  ‘Okay,’ I acquiesce. ‘This guru of yours, what does she do exactly?’

  ‘Oh, everything,’ Sandy assures me, in a tone of breathless joy I last heard from a pimp in a morally unsound part of the world. ‘Astrology, tarot and psychometry, and she’s a clairvoyant! What’s the matter? You look like you need a squeeze!’ Sandy tightens her dictatorial embrace and drags me, more or less willingly, to see her Psychic.

  The Psychic starts our spiritual connection by handing me a pamphlet. It’s printed on pink paper and lists the psychic and spiritual services she offers, and it notes that she is ‘available for parties and private readings’. Her skin is sun-damaged, her jewellery gaudy, but her smile is unexpectedly warm and her manner sharp. I was expecting some kind of new-age dipshit, and I was braced for a tone-deaf lecture on permaculture and soul-attunement, but The Psychic seems extremely switched on.

  We talk for a little while about her powers and how they work, then she offers to ‘do a reading’ on me. Before she begins drawing the tarot cards, she lays down some fundamentals: ‘The cards show only what the possibilities are. They show you a path you can take to achieve the best from life.’

  The first card is Death. It tumbles out from the deck as I cut it and falls across the table between us. The angle it falls on means that the cowled figure of Death, as he rides into frame on horseback, has a rakish tilt. The Psychic doesn’t miss a beat. ‘Death represents the end of a cycle, and the transition into a new state of regeneration and growth.’

  ‘So Death doesn’t mean, you know, death?’

  ‘No, no,’ she says. ‘It means that you’ve been hanging on to trauma.’ She takes my hand and squeezes it. ‘And it’s time to let that go.’ Despite itself, my calcified little heart warms to her.

  I don’t want to like The Psychic. I mistrust spiritualists. Not because I don’t believe in earth visitors and soul retrieval and all the rest, but because they have fostered an industry of hucksters and frauds who prey on the feeble-minded, the gullible and the mad. As a child of the counterculture, I was often surrounded by the kind of grimy, dishwater Buddhists who twice a year attend ConFest (a bush party billed as ‘Australia’s largest outdoor alternative lifestyle festival’ and possibly the southern hemisphere’s greatest convergence of naked white skin, dreadlocks and giardia) in order to meet new generations of naive teen hippies who will pay them $120 to clean their aura and later relieve them of their virginity in a tent. Like knowledge, like power, a little mysticism can be a dangerous thing.

  When The Psychic asks me if I believe in reincarnation I tell her no, which she bulldozes right over without acknowledging that she’s heard me. She tells me I’m holding a karmic debt from a past life in which I had great power and used it selfishly; I was a great intellectual or a priest, and, also, ‘probably a paedophile’.

  Because of this, I have several dark spirits that follow me through life, although she tells me not to worry, because I have light spirits too. The trick, apparently, is to manage this pantheon through ‘kind and positive action’. ‘Have you fathered a child recently?’ she asks. ‘That’s the fastest way to heal your karmic imbalance and banish the dark spirits.’

  Several times she mentions that once I’ve banished my dark spirits, my ‘powers will become unlimited’ and a new ‘carefree gypsy life will begin’. I ask her if I should father the child before or after my new gypsy life begins. ‘Immediately,’ she insists. ‘Father the child immediately.’

  ‘Should this be with my current partner? Because I won’t see her for a few days.’

  ‘What’s her star sign?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s her birthday?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  The Psychic pauses, looks up and breaks character.

  ‘Oh, god,’ she cackles. ‘How long have you been with her? Three years? That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard! Learn her fucking birthday!’

  After the reading, The Psychic gives me a final affirmation and assures me that my time is coming, ‘in a very big way.’ When I ask her if I should worry about my dark spirits, she shrugs. ‘We all have travelling companions in life, good and bad. The important thing is to do good in the world,’ she says. ‘And find out when your girlfriend’s birthday is.’

  Back in Melbourne, writing the story for the Very Important Magazine, I feel as though I’ve absorbed some of The Psychic’s optimism. As I work on the piece, one affirmation, that my time is coming in a big way, keeps returning to me. As I write, I start to feel better and better about the piece, better than I have writing other stories, more sure of my abilities than I’ve ever been, as though some kind of ethereal travelling companion is along for the ride.

  A light-headed giddiness that’s been with me since Nimbin grows stronger as my fingers fly over the keys. My anxieties about living up to the Magazine’s standards fade, and I grow more and more at ease with the hours spent writing, sloughing off evil spirits with an almighty loofah of self-belief. I spend days straight at the computer, as my commissioned five thousand-word article becomes eight thousand, then ten thousand, then fifteen thousand words. I spend so long typing that my left eye starts twitching, and several times when I get up from the desk, my knees give out and I stumble. At one point, I trip and fall down the back stairs. No matter; I dust myself off and return to work. The only distraction is an itching ache just above the nape of my neck that grows more pronounced as the days pass.

  Then, after about a week, I file the story for the Magazine and scratch the back of my head, and my hand comes away covered in blood.

  At the doctor’s, the GP checks my vitals and asks if I’ve been feeling funny lately. I tell him about the confusion, weakness and disorientation. An X-ray reveals that I’ve fractured my ankle falling down the stairs – I’ve been walking on it, oblivious, for days. He asks if anyone noticed that my speech was slurred, and if not, why not. I’m not sure how to answer that. Didn’t my increasingly erratic behaviour over the past week raise alarm bells? Do my loved ones just expect me to slur and babble and pratfall occasionally? If so, it’s hardly fair that they get mad when I forget their birthdays.

  The doctor does a few more routine checks – reflexes, heartbeat, eyes, nose and throat – then looks at the back of my head and screams, not something you want your doctor to do, necessarily. There’s a moment of silence, and he says, ‘I think we’re going to need a second opinion.’ I wait patiently in the room for a minute, listening to hushed voices in the hallway, before two other doctors enter the room. The second looks at the back of my head and, after a moment’s thought, says, ‘I’m going to have to google that.’

  After a few minutes, during which several doctors enter the room and huddle around a computer monitor gasping and giggling, and I manage, even through my tranquillised state, to become embarrassed in a panicked kind of way, one of them approaches me with a scalpel and a cup of dry ice. As he works, he makes conversation.

  ‘Have you been out bush lately?’

  ‘I was in Nimbin,’ I admit. The tip of a pair of forceps grazes my scalp.

  ‘Have you been near any livestock?’

  ‘No. Yes,’ I admit. ‘I hugged a pony.’

  ‘Yes, that would do it.’

  There’s a wrenching pull to the back of my head, and then the doctor brings the forceps around to show me the tick that’s been burrowing into my brainstem for the past week.

  For the next hour, the doctor uses dry ice and a pair of magnifying goggles to clean and disinfect the back of my head, and removes the family of ticks that have colonised it. The Psychic would be proud. I have not
only fostered a child but raised an entire brood.

  In the following weeks, I will require surgery to remove a cyst, an immune reaction to where the tick’s bite – in addition to releasing paralysing neurotoxin straight into my nervous system – has created a near-fatal bacterial infection, which has, unbeknown to me, distracted by the deadline for the Very Important Magazine, knocked out the lymph nodes on one side of my body and strayed dangerously close to entering my brain.

  While the doctor works on me, across the city, the editor of the Very Important Magazine is reading my piece of tick-addled gibberish, and deciding to spike it. When I get home there will be an email letting me know they aren’t running the piece I’d pinned my dreams, financial and otherwise, on, and offering me a kill fee.

  But I don’t die, so The Psychic’s sunny optimism was not all misplaced. And I can’t feel anything – literally, I’m partially paralysed – but relieved, as the doctor shows me my new travelling companion, my little spirit animal, and crushes it between his fingers.

  From Mistakes Were Made by Liam Pieper

  (Penguin Australia Pty Ltd 2015)

  REBECCA SHAW

  10 Films to Watch While the Patriarchy Burns

  ❛One day, while trying to make Tony smile, she shows him an iron. He has never seen one before and thinks it is hysterical, along with poor people in general. But when he picks up the iron, his laughter dies. It feels … right.❜

  127 Hours of Mansplaining

  Erin Ralston is a legendary explorer who goes canyoneering alone in order to escape what she calls the ‘MENdane’ city life. We know something bad will happen to her, because that is just too clever for her own good. She is rappelling through canyons in what is an obvious metaphor for vaginal birth, when suddenly she slips and falls and a huge boulder falls on her arm, trapping her. We don’t know what this is a metaphor for.

  After two days of captivity, there seems to be little hope that she will ever free herself. She names the boulder ‘The Patriarchy’ and makes a joke about it ‘crushing her’. This is so clever that now we know she is surely going to die. Suddenly, she hears a man’s voice! For once in her life, Erin is overjoyed to see a man, especially because this one is carrying both water and a jackhammer.

  As he begins freeing her, the man – let’s call him Chad – starts to explain things to her. Chad tells her where canyons come from, what canyoneering is, and what boulders are made of. He explains to her what America is. As he launches into a detailed explanation of how she ended up trapped and why this is definitely her fault, Erin deliberately pulls the boulder down onto her own head, killing herself instantly. This is widely regarded as her cleverest move yet.

  TransformHers: Age of Extinctmen

  It’s five years after the battle between Deceptivemen and Fembots levelled Chicago and made everybody super-suspicious of their cars. The government now believes ALL robots are a threat (somehow not convinced by the #notallrobots hashtag created by the male robots who totally started the battle) and secretly dispatches a crack squad of CIA agents to destroy every last one. Cade Yeager, somehow a real character name not made up for this parody, stumbles upon OptiMs Prime disguised as an old truck, and together they set out to eliminate the robot hunters as well as the Deceptivemen who have taken over the government. They also destroy the rest of men on earth just to be safe. Cade, seeing the beautiful utopia this creates, decides to sacrifice himself for the greater good. The way he achieves this is too horrendous to depict on screen, but from that point on his method is forever known as the ‘Yeager Bomb’.

  Finding Men? No!

  A community of beautifully animated clownfish enjoy a simple, care-free life in the beautiful surrounds of the Great Barrier Reef. Everything is going swimmingly until a team of scuba divers capture all of the male clownfish and take them back to a pet store where they are sold to ungrateful seven-year-olds who really just want a puppy. The female clownfish shrug their fishy shoulders and continue going about their fishy business. The clownfish population slowly begins to die out, but they all agree: it was totally worth it.

  Not All Men in Black

  After being spotted at a Richard Dawkins fan event, James Edwards – AKA Reddit user ‘Fedora the Explorer 6969’ – is recruited by the secret government agency Not All Men in Black, which was set up to police conversations between women all over the world. The newly monikered Agent J becomes one of the NAMIB’s most prized agents, known for his incredible ability to derail any conversation two women are having simply by ignoring their personal experiences and thoughts.

  But things go awry for Agent J when he makes the fateful error of accidentally listening to a woman’s point of view and experiencing what he later discovers is ‘empathy’, which he works out by typing the words ‘feelings’ and ‘others’ point of view’ into Google. The NAMIB internet monitor reports him to his superiors, and he is quickly neuralised. Empathy is for chicks.

  Guardians of the ‘Gal’-axy

  Massive dickhead Peter ‘Starlord’ Quill finds himself the object of a galaxy-wide bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan Keating, the leader of Boyzone. Boyzone is a planet where women aren’t allowed, conquered in 2014 by the participants of Gamergate when society unreasonably demanded that they treat women as if they were human. Neither of the men actually knows what the orb is for, but they still want it with every fibre of their being because another man covets it, and it is shaped like a breast. In order to fight Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy alliance with a big guy, a raccoon guy, a tree guy, and Gamora, a woman he wants to sleep with because she is literally the only female character in the film.

  Ronan and Quill fight over the orb, eventually causing it to split open. They realise too late that it contains within it the power of every woman in the cosmos and it immediately destroys any man who is too weak to handle their strength. Ronan and Peter both die, along with every person on planet Boyzone. The tragedy is deemed an overall success.

  Afterwards, Gamora is given her own movie that depicts a world where women are given the lead in superhero movies and have their picture on all the merchandise, but it is deemed ‘too farfetched’.

  Dawn from Baby-Sitters Club of the Planet of the Apes

  War has broken out between a community of genetically evolved apes living in San Francisco’s Muir Woods and the few remaining human survivors of a virus pandemic. A peaceful resolution cannot be reached because the apes have evolved to exactly match the intellectual imprint of a human male: the ego. Alternate Officer of the Baby-Sitters Club, Dawn Schafer, is parachuted in because she is originally from California, a fact that she never shuts up about. She is wearing the outfit that the other members of the Baby-Sitters Club insist on calling ‘California Casual’, even though they are definitely just regular clothes.

  After she arrives, Dawn first sees if she can babysit her way to a peaceful solution. She cannot. Then, as a last resort, Malcolm (the human leader) and Caesar (the ape leader) are locked in a room with Dawn. For hours she lectures them about recycling and world peace and the importance of pesco-vegetarianism until they both agree to do whatever she wants, whatever anyone wants, please god just let them out of there. A truce is reached.

  Ironing Man

  It’s been six months since the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which the Avengers figured out how old Ultron was or something – I don’t know, that movie was like super boring. Bereft of a world-ending catastrophe to worry about, Tony Stark is going through an existential crisis. Like most middle-aged men, he doesn’t know if being a genius billionaire philanthropist inventor superhero is enough to keep him fulfilled. He feels as empty as the explanation of how the Hulk’s pants stay on when he transforms from a thirty-inch waist to a two hundred-inch one in the space of about three seconds.

  Pepper Potts is worried about Tony and about the likelihood that people are laughing at her name behind her back. One day, while trying to make Tony smile, she shows him an iron. He ha
s never seen one before and thinks it is hysterical, along with poor people in general. But when he picks up the iron, his laughter dies. It feels … right.

  He begins to iron every piece of clothing in their house, even Pepper Potts’ Pleated Purple Pencil Pants, a notoriously difficult item that she is also convinced people may be laughing at. But Tony is a natural, and he loves it. In fact, he refuses to call it an ‘ironing board’ because he knows he will never be ‘bored’ again. Pepper runs his company while Tony is happy to stay at home and destroy the concept of gender roles, just like he once destroyed three-quarters of Manhattan.

  Boylent Green

  It’s 2022, and the masses now subsist on a plankton-based product called Soylent Red. Huge babyman Detective Frank Thorn complains the loudest because he isn’t getting enough protein to build huge arms that will impress other straight men at the gym – essentially a living nightmare.

  One fine day, while watching the movie One Fine Day and not crying at all, Thorn sees an ad for a new protein-heavy product called Soylent Green. Its tagline is ‘Soylent Green, ProTeen’. With both suspicion and interest piqued by this fun spelling of ‘protein’, Thorn decides to investigate, just like his hero Jessica Fletcher would have. Grabbing his best crime-solving hat and favourite Angela Lansbury mask, Thorn stows away in a garbage truck (where all men belong) on its way to the Soylent factory.

  Once inside, he discovers the horrific truth: Soylent Green is made out of 100 per cent real teenage boys. Before he has time to post about it on Tumblr, Thorn is captured by the feminazis running the factory. As he is carried away to be fed into the meat grinder, he screams, ‘YOU MUST TELL EVERYONE! SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE FROM BOYS! AND IT SHOULD BE CALLED BOYLENT GREEN, WHICH IS MUCH CLEVERER!’