By Mark Rolfe Monday 29 December 2014
Photo: Opposition Leader Bill Shorten: are we laughing with him, or at him? (AAP: Dan Himbrechts, file photo)
Will 2015 see Bill Shorten rejuvenate his stale collection of one-liners, or will he remain the Lord of the Lame? Mark Rolfe considers the role of humour in politics.
Another Christmas is over in the Shorten household and I can imagine the excitement Bill felt on the day. I don't think it would have been only for the festive spirit with his loved ones. It would also have been for the chance to stock up on another year's supply of Christmas-cracker jokes against the government.
What could he use? Let's see:
Q: What's the difference between Abbott and Santa? A: Santa gives you presents you want.
Some people think Bill's humour can be traced to Dad jokes but I think these little Yuletide traditions have the same jocular DNA as this ripper from Bill:
Once upon a time, I thought denial was a river in Egypt. It's actually the attitude of the Abbott government.
Bill should be careful lest his jokes are carbon-dated and found to be older than the quips of Weird Al Moses who led a tribe of Jewish comedians through a parting of the Red Sea to their first comedy club.
Despite Shaun Micallef applying a comedic blowtorch to Bill Shorten's zingers in his TV program Mad as Hell, it seems the Labor leader is high-fiving staff in his imagination. Since that attention, says Bill,
people have been paying more attention to my metaphors. Which is pleasing, because all of us put a lot of work into them, whether it's writing them, delivering them...or explaining them afterwards.
He then finished with enough mixed metaphors to cause Shakespeare to chew off an arm and die of internal bleeding:
as I have consistently said, if you think we're not going to rule out never not being some kind of blank stamp or a rubber cheque for this government's broken lies and their smelly bag of fish budget...then you need to move into a house with mirrors and have a look at yourself - because a crocodile wouldn't swallow that.
I'll give you a moment to let your head stop spinning.
Apart from this typical display of his contorted style, Bill's reaction shows he can't tell the difference between people laughing at him or with him. The common thing to the jokes of both Bill and the Christmas crackers is the groan factor, not the laugh meter: we prepare ourselves for the badness of the joke rather than for its side-splitting hilarity.
If Bill continues down this lonely path to Pun-land, then people may prepare to groan when he appears rather than laugh at what he says. They may even run and hide their kiddies for fear of damaging side effects.
Bill should not be the target of ridicule; rather, his political victim should. That was the deft skill of more accomplished orators. Of course, Paul Keating comes to mind with his description of John Hewson in 1993 as "a shiver waiting for a spine to run up".
Gough Whitlam derided Liberal leader Billy Snedden with:
I want to assure honourable gentlemen that the bodyguards they see accompanying the Leader of the Opposition are not to prevent other people shooting him but to prevent him from shooting himself.
In other words, a good politician employs humour as a weapon to assert his superiority over an opponent who is thereby discredited as hapless and to persuade Australians of his fitness for political office. For a range of reasons, humour really is a means of persuasion, if people are laughing with you.
For the moment, Bill can get away as Lord of the Lame because in humour as in politics, it's a matter of context. He doesn't look so bad now because the Government isn't doing any better. Currently, it's looking like it desperately needs the services of a charity night from Comic Relief, or a SWAT team of emergency satirists.
Our Prime Minister's best conscious attempt was his description of the Gillard government as 'like the Irishman who lost ten pounds betting on the Grand National and then lost twenty pounds on the action replay". This had the same effect as the fiftieth replay of Are You Being Served?
His best unconscious joke was a 28 second vow of silence when asked by a reporter about his comments in Afghanistan.
For my mind, Christopher Pyne is the David Brent of Australian politics, oblivious to the shock-waves emanating from his statements.
Then, there is Kevin "Chuckles" Andrews who is to humourists what Death-eaters are to wizards.
The only government minister who competently wisecracks is Malcolm Turnbull, who has also derided the tendency to denial of opponents. In one committee meeting, Senator Stephen Conroy declared that Operation Sovereign Borders left us living in a movie and accused its head, General Campbell, of being another Colonel Jessup, the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men. "Well of course", cracked Turnbull, "this meant he was the incredibly handsome Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise. Well we can all see the resemblance". Turbull continued:
I think the better movie analogue is in fact Colonel Kurtz leading the Labor Party further and further up the Conrovian River into delusion and denial. And we remember the last scenes of that movie...what does he say as he's dragged from the ruins? He says: "I had immense plans, I had immense plans, I was on the verge of greatness!" Madam Speaker, the real summary of Colonel Conroy's performance are of course the most famous lines of that movie: "The horror, the horror!"
If others on the Coalition side could equal Turnbull, then the summation of public reaction to Bill as "Not laughing, groaning" could leave him "Not waving, drowning".
Mark Rolfe is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales. You can read his full profile here.
Bill Shorten and the funny business of politics - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
