How I Became Funny

I remember my first encounter with the world of comedy. I was four years old, and a clown came to the door of our house offering to wash our dog for food. I laughed at his funny red nose and bright purple wig, and then my father shot him, and that too was funny in its way. It was then I thought seriously about going into comedy myself, and by the age of five had written an eight-hour one-man show, entitled, "Laughter: The Harbinger of Death".

I performed this show daily in front of my parents for the next six years, and it was, I admit, a source of tension, argument and self-mutilation at the time. Nowadays we laugh about it, but at the time, the comedy was so bitingly real that my mother was at times moved to tears, and at other times moved to Calgary.

I gave up the one-man show at eleven, and began work on my sitcom. Amusingly, my dictionary was missing some pages, and so I gained a false impression of what a "sitcom" was. In fact, rather than working on a sitcom, I began working on a stegosaurus, which was a far more thankless task, and less funny than I had anticipated. It got even worse when the stegosaurus ate our gardener. I had thought stegosauruses were herbivorous, but then I found I had read the instructions wrong. It seemed that every book in the house was missing pages, and later on we found out my father had been eating them. I asked him why and he said he was trying to stop the cravings he had to eat the gardener. I suppose that in the end, my sitcom DID end up being quite successful, though not commercially.

In my teenage years, my love of comedy did not wane, but it did go in exciting new directions. I explored the possibilities of physical comedy, experimenting with comedic sexual intercourse and slapstick ethnic cleansing. But I soon grew tired of the cheap and easy laughs to be had by setting Koreans on fire, and by my graduation year was ready for fresh challenges and strange new worlds of humour.

It was at university that I began devising a surrealist, avant garde brand of comedy, beginning with jokes such as:

Q. What do you call a man with an octopus on his face?
A: Glenn

Q: How many ligtbulbs does it take?
A: Twenty-eight (laugh malevolently)

These jokes found great success among the cafeteria ladies, and emboldened, I set out to expand the themes I was working with, thus:

An Englishman, an Irishman and a rabbi walk into a bar. The Englishman says, I can't fall out of this plane, my goldfish are dead. How did the Welshman know?
A: The surgeon was his mother.

Sherlock Holmes and Watson are out camping, and Watson says, Why the long face, to which Holmes replies, I am a cocaine addict. He then makes Watson lick yoghurt off his violin until dawn. What does this tell you, Watson, he asks. Watson replies, Now comes the viola solo. (laugh malevolently)


Many people loved my new brand of comedy, and I found great acclaim among the Beat Generation, who were by then terribly old and mostly demented. However, the cultural elite did not, and there were calls in several thousand newspapers for me to be banned for life from all sporting events and chemically castrated. Years later I found out all of these newspapers were fakes printed on a home press by my mischievous prankster college roommate Fuzzy Slamwindow. How we laughed. But at the time I was most distressed and went into exile in Tibet, where I learned how to love again.

Upon my return, I set to work rehearsing for my most ambitious show yet, "Breasts: The Musical". The show consisted entirely of me standing on stage in a rubber catsuit showing slides of dead strippers and groaning rhythmically.

The show was a commercial and critical success, described by one eminent critic as "the funniest thing I have ever seen", and by another as "mmmmm". Although box office receipts were huge, I suffered from my poor judgment in signing a contract which guaranteed 80% of ticket sales would go to Richard Branson's Virgin Corporation, in return for which I would have a long needle inserted into my brain. Looking back, I'm not sure what I was thinking.

And so we come to today. I am not resting on my laurels, by any means. In fact, I just published my book, "Not Resting On My Laurels", which is a collection of humorous essays and line drawings of rabbit ovaries. I am about to release "Not Resting On My Laurels Too", a collection of the same humorous essays, but with a foreword by Kirstie Alley.

All in all, I have learnt a lot about comedy in my seven or eight years on this planet. What you need to remember is, it's all about the audience. You're not up there for your own glorification, you are up there to make the audience laugh, and if they don't laugh, to be honest, you deserve all the poisonous gases you get. So the lesson is: make them laugh at all costs. If that means that you have to take off your pants, or eat a small boat, or hang yourself from a tree, so be it.

Laughter is everything, and I assure you, when you hear a roomful of people laughing and clapping and gently tongueing your thighs, you'll know that it was worth it.

EXCLUSIVE: Red-hot Excerpt from John Howard's memoir, "Lazarus Rising"

I sat in my armchair long into the night, knocking back brandy after brandy, smoking endless cigarettes, wondering just how I got into this mess. Back when I first decided to try the Prime Minister game, it had all seemed so simple: the money, the power, the dames. It was only lately that I'd realised what a dirty game this "politics" was. It was full of lies and cheating and double-crosses, and it seemed damn unfair that someone was pointing that out at this late stage.

Maybe...I sighed, brushing ash from my Wallabies dressing gown. Maybe it was time to be a man. To stick to my principles, or at least to remember what they were. Peter had been good to me all these years, what with the budgets and the Guylians every Christmas...maybe it WAS time to give him a go, and devote more time to my true love: walking.

And that's when I saw her. Silhouetted in the doorway like some irresistible plum pudding. "Up late?" she purred, and I suddenly all the reason in me drained away like left-over pasta down a plughole.

She sashayed over to the armchair, her body swaying and slinking like a hydraulic cauliflower. That vegetable shimmy that had always gone to my head faster than a tabasco screwdriver and made me giddier than a cockchafer in an opium den. Whatever that means.

"Can I help you, Janette?" I asked, fighting to keep my voice steady and deep, as I had the first time I met George. He'd sure seen through me; I knew she would too. I knew that she knew that deep down inside, I was nothing but a scared little boy, playing at immigration policy to disguise the inadequacies that would see me laughed out of caucus the minute I let my guard down enough to allow Helen Coonan to pants me. The day was coming, I knew it, and I felt that certainty like an icy set of eyelashes butterfly kissing my heart.

"I don't know, John," she smiled sardonically. "Can you?"

I cleared my throat, trying to get rid of that damn greasy toad that squatted in my trachea every time this broad walked into the room. She put her hands on my shoulders, and my dog whistle went right off. "I've been thinking," I croaked. "I think I might hand over the leadership. To Peter."

Just for a second I felt her hands tighten on my shoulders, like a vulture with an ice-cream headache. Then she relaxed, and I felt her hot, spicy, parmigiana-tinged breath tickling my earhole.

"Peter?" she purred. "He hasn't got what it takes to be prime minister. He's not a," she drew in her breath with a shudder, "real man..."

She had me. I knew she had me. I had never been able to resist her incendiary rhetoric, since that first day when a young, dumpling-shaped ne'er-do-well had sidled up to my petrol pump, lollipop hanging from her lips, and fluttered her eyelids at me while she asked whether I knew anyone who could help her with a proposal for fundamental tax reform. That day my knees had gone from under me and I'd collapsed in a pool of lust and petrol, and I'd never really recovered. I'd always done her will, and always would.

She walked round in front of and, leaned over me, so close I could smell the Pantene in her irresistibly sensible hair. I could see the blazing, maternal fire in her eyes, and my fingers twitched with longing to reach out for the intoxicating flesh I knew was lurking just beneath that sturdy beige twin-set. She had curves in all the right places, and also quite a few extra ones, and all of my political career had been blessed and cursed in equal measure by my all-encompassing need to access that mesmeric acreage of womanhood and dance hungrily among those dimpled hillocks.

She was still talking, still murmuring into my quivering shell-likes. "I don't know if I could be with a man who...just gave up the prime ministership, John. I don't know if I could respect a man who did that. I don't know if I could...give myself...fully to him." I was beginning to shake, as she circled the armchair, one finger twirling playfully on top of my recently-varnished head.

"You see, John," she whispered hoarsely, "I'm a woman with particular tastes. I like a man who takes control, who seizes power...and KEEPS it. Like Menzies...he used to get me so hot..." It was true. In the early years of our marriage she wouldn't make love at all unless I pretended to check the bedroom for communists first.

"I need a prime minister, John. Nothing else will do for me. I need a man like Menzies. A man who can last. Can you last, John? Can you last longer than Menzies? I could really go for that..."

I was almost done. My resolve was jellied and in a jar on the shelf. "I just thought...Peter had done such a good job," I faltered.

She laughed, a hard, sharp laugh, like the laugh of an economically rationalist hawk. "Too bad, John," she hissed. "That's a real shame. But maybe I'll go round to Peter's place, see what he's got to offer. Or if not him..." she paused dramatically, "maybe...Tony."

That was it. I couldn't take any more. "No!" I cried, leaping from my seat. "I'll stay! I'll be prime minister as long as you want. I promise!"

She smiled, cruelly, triumphantly. She had won, and was revelling in victory like an alligator gloating over a pot-bellied pig. "Good," she purred, and stroked my cheek. "Then maybe we can get down to discussing...workplace reform?"

I gasped. As those words puffed from those perfect, fig-shaped lips, and we melted into each other's arms, I felt the margins suddenly tighten in my southern electorates.

Lazarus was rising. In fact, Lazarus was positively throbbing. And there was only one woman who could truly satisfy him.