LitFuse

For light reading on a plane trip to Central Queensland from Adelaide, I took with me “Smithereens” by Shaun Micallef. It was the only book in the newsagency I felt comfortable in taking. I could have gone Clarkson but risked being yelled at out of the pages. I didn’t want a ‘real crime story’, a romance or sci-fi and the new releases were too risky. If you don’t like it, you cannot get up and have a bracing walk. It is ‘Two and a Half Men’, easy listening music or old jokes. None a pleasant alternative. Smithereens is a collection of short comedy riffs of two to three pages, collected into a single source for the readers enjoyment.

The book is updated from an earlier version, apparently with ‘added smithereens’, so I felt I had received excellent value for the purchase price.

Shaun’s humour is not for everyone. It is for smug, overly educated and intelligent urban elites such as myself. The jokes are all ‘in’ and require a thorough grounding in grammar, the classics, history, politics, literature and crass popular culture. If you do poorly at Trivial Pursuit (the adult one, not the kids version), this book is probably not for you.

A snapshot:

“The Al Jolson Story

You ain’t heard nothin’ yet

Assuring the audience that they have not as yet heard the absence of something is hardly revelatory, and the implication that they would, upon commencement of some singing, hear nothing would have merely bamboozled them was it not so expertly masked by poor grammar. This, then, was Jolson’s true skill as a performer”

Demonstrating the absurdity of pedantry is not new as a form of humour, but it is performed expertly by Micallef in this book. There is some wonderful satire, for example poking fun at Miss World Contestants (a seemingly never ending well from which one can draw gags) and the normal tongue-in-cheek self-depreciating humour that is Micallef’s trademark. Mostly what I like about Micallef’s writing is that the humour relies heavily on the use of language – right down to the timing inferred by punctuation. It is old style comedy somewhat reminiscent of the Goons and Monty Python, layered with puns, double entendres and squeezing the last laugh out of every joke. There are no ‘one-liners’ in this book (actually there might be a few, but really, not many at all).

To wit:

“Now it had come to this. Writing for television. Me, who had shown such promise as a child that the word ‘prodigy’ was bandied about our house like a high-velocity super ball. True, the word often had a question mark after it, followed by a peal of laughter and a slamming door, but what did my parents know of genius? I preferred my own company anyway. Locked in my room (from the outside), far away from their clucking tongues and talk of urgent Ritalin prescriptions I would beaver away at a concerto here, a novel there, and vice versa. Nothing was beyond my fingertips, except perhaps the ends of my own nails”.

Ave Shaun, Ave

Written by Paul Dalby, 14 April 2011

~ by litfuse on April 14, 2011.

Posted in LitFuse