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You can’t teach a new dog old jokes April 11, 2007

What role has comedy played in human history? It’s a fascinating question, one that mankind has been pondering for five, six, at least seven seconds, ever since I started writing this sentence. Well, with the Melbourne Comedy Festival happening at the moment, I thought it would be the ideal opportunity to give a pocket history of humour, from the earliest ape-like forms of man, all the way through the millenniums, to Robyn Williams, the most recent ape-like form of man.

THE STONED AGE
Approximately three million years ago, at around 8pm on a Tightarse Tuesday Open Mike Comedy Night, the first primitive cavemen started dabbling with humour, but because they were so hairy-faced, and badly dressed, and had a poorly evolved voicebox, they found it easiest just to do drug jokes. They’d stand in front of their tribe, holding a handful of coca leaves and a pot of cava, and just mumble stoner-routines about how they were sitting round with Macca all day, licking poisonous frogs, then they went outside and tried to ride a mastodon. If the tribe liked the act, they’d stamp and cheer with delight, and if they didn’t, they’d yell “Not funny! You’re crap! Australopithecus off!”

THE IRONY AGE
Carved into the side of an ancient Mesopotamian temple wall, archaeologists have uncovered 4000-year-old hieroglyphs which have turned out to be highly sophisticated ironic jokes: for instance one riddle reads “Owl, basket, boat with sails, flat hand?” and directly underneath, the punchline, “Ibis”, which is so funny and clever, because you’re expecting “Curly snake”. Another joke goes like this: “Eye, river currents, small bird, small bird”, which manages to be hilariously suggestive, without resorting to a single crude “Vulture”. Unfortunately, just like today, nobody really understood ironic humour, so most Mesopotamian comedians just went back to smoking hemp and doing drug jokes.

THE ANCIENT GREEKS
By the 5th century BC, Greek civilisation was flourishing, and Greek humour was all the rage: some of history’s greatest playwrights, including Sophocles, Aristophanes and Giannopoulos, were writing comic plays like You Can’t Teach An Old Wog New Tricks, Where did the Daygo? and When You’re Dancing, Greek to Greek. However soon this ethnic humour became wearisome and repetitive and audiences stopped buying tickets, so the great Greek playwrights turned their attention to more serious dramas about metaphysics, democracy, and human tragedy, except for Giannopoulos, who kept going with How Much Is That Woggy In The Window?

THE JOKE-OBEANS
During the reign of King James the First, the wittiest and waggiest English joke-tellers emerged: Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, and John Donne were wowing the comedy clubs of London, take note of this classic John Donne routine: “If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee”, which has not been surpassed in poetic excellence, at least until Rodney Rude’s “Heyyyy trendsetters, I just rooted ya mum, it was like ridin’ a giant turtle, hehhhhhhh heh-heh-heh!” Interestingly enough, Francis Bacon’s essay, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane, was originally titled 1001 All-Time Funniest Golf Quips and Quotes.

THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS
Cezanne, Degas and Renoir led an exciting new comedy movement in the late 1800s, delighting audiences with impressions of Parisian celebrities and famous politicians, and Renoir did a very funny Eiffel Tower, just standing really still for hours, letting ants run up his face. Manet and Monet did such terrific impressions of each other, that even to this day, nobody’s really sure who is who. But by the end of the 1800s, impressionism had lost its sparkle: the public had grown tired of countless hackneyed Napoleon routines and Toulouse-Lautrec sketches, and started booing impressionists offstage, yelling “Non amusement! You’re merde! Pissarro off!”

THE MARXIST REVOLUTION
With the dawn of the 20th century, a comedy phenomenon arrived, known simply as the Marx Brothers: Karl, Lenin and Mao, sometimes they were joined by their fourth brother Trotsky, but he wasn’t very funny with his outmoded Menshevik theories, and the ice-pick sticking out the side of his head. The Marx Brothers changed the face of humour forever with their inspired slapstick, wordsmithery and mass-torture, and audiences still flock to see their classic movies A Day at the Odessa Steps, Peking Duck Soup, and Wish Upon A Fallen Tsar.

MODERN COMEDY
Looking back over three million years, what a wealth of humour we have to celebrate: ironic humour, ethnic jokes, English wit, French impressions, and Marxist slapstick, so it’s great to see so many modern comedians today, borrowing from this vast comedic treasure trove, by getting up in front of audiences, and doing the same three-million-year-old drug jokes, with a hairy face, bad dress-sense and poorly evolved voicebox.

Creators row over German cartoon imp’s right to wed April 11, 2007

The writer of one of Germany’s best known fictional characters, an imp called Pumuckl, is heading to court to battle his illustrator over whether the red-headed mischief maker can marry or should stay chaste.

Writer Ellis Kaut is unhappy that illustrator Barbara von Johnson has given her support to a local TV show’s contest to design a girlfriend for Pumuckl. The winner will get to visit von Johnson’s Munich villa and take part in a “wedding” staged for the popular fictional character.

Von Johnson says Pumuckl deserves a girlfriend after more than 40 years of fooling around in books and on the radio and television. However, Kaut says the cheeky imp must stay true to his spirit nature.

“Pumuckl is a pure child of fantasy, a spiritual being, and he must remain that way,” Kaut said in part of a statement published by the Munich court where Kaut and von Johnson will go head to head.

“Fundamentally, spiritual beings have no discernable gender. They are not born … they do not grow old. They take part in good or bad frolicking, but frolicking without sexuality.”

According to his fans’ website Pumuckl is also known in Spain, Hungary and Greece. In the stories, the mischievous imp lives in Master Eder’s workshop in Munich and likes to make rhymes and get up to naughty tricks.