EPISODE 239: BILL MURRAY'S AUSTRALIAN COUSIN
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
This week I’ve been listening to a memorial service for John Clarke, aka this guy:
If you’re not from Australia or New Zealand, you’ve probably never heard of John Clarke. Imagine if Bill Murray were still Bill Murray (aka magic and delight for everybody) while also being a satirist who made his career deflating arrogant, unfeeling institutions and public figures.
Or imagine what if David Letterman was the David Letterman we know and love, witty and insightful and foolish, but also on a fundamental level content. (No late night host that I know of, other than maybe Conan O’Brien, has judged themselves as harshly as did Dave.)
At Clarke’s memorial the image that people keep turning to try and understand him is Lear’s fool. “He was as smart and unruly as the fool in King Lear,” said one. “Laughter was how the humanity got in, how the truth bobbed up.”
“His humor,” said his longtime comedy partner Bryan Dawe, “emerged from the revolutionary notion that servants are smarter than their masters.”
“He hated the bastards who bullied, and he loved the brave and good hearted....He wrote sentences that included us.”
And yet, like the fool (or Murray), somehow his comedy delighted rather than burned. The comedian Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna) said he was “devastating and yet kindly.” Another speaker said, “John was an acid satirist who cheered us up....Making us laugh was how he forgave the world for not doing better.”
(That has to be my favorite description of someone in quite some time.)
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I discovered Clarke in the strangest of places – the Australian nightly news. As part of my training as a Jesuit I spent eight months in Australia in 2008; and while there I took to watching their nightly national news program, which at the time was called The 7:30 Report. We Americans don’t really have a parallel to 7:30; in just thirty minutes Monday through Thursday it finds a way to investigate national issues in a serious way (a la PBS’ NewsHour); interrogate prime ministers, members of their cabinet, and any other national figure, with extraordinary levels of access (imagine if Meet the Press was able to get the President on television at least five or six times a year, and members of his Cabinet almost every week); cover international news, including American politics and culture, British politics and culture, and the many stories of the Asian region (an extraordinary undertaking); and tell stories about such things as science, the arts and nature in a way that was thoughtful and thought-provoking (like other programs on PBS).
In America, I’m not sure we realize just how poor most of our television news serves us; watching 7:30 every night I certainly saw how much more is possible. (Also how a proper news organization doing its job helps a society stay aware of some of its biggest questions, like the lives of indigenous people, questions about refugee policy, and the environment. It wouldn’t take much of a Google search to discover some ways in which Australian policy on such issues is at least as screwed up as in the States; but unlike the U.S., in Australia people are always talking about these issues. They are top of mind. And some of that is because some Australian news organizations, particularly the Australian Broadcasting Company, regularly return to these issues, offering further stories and perspectives.)
In addition to all this, 7:30 had one other completely unexpected element to it: every Thursday night, the last two minutes of its broadcast would be dedicated to a sketch from comedians John Clarke and Bryan Dawe.
The format was very simple: sitting in coats and ties before a plain black set, Dawe would play the role of interviewer, and Clarke the interviewee, often some politician or other public figure trying to pull one over on the country. They started doing these bits in the 1989 and were still doing it in April of 2017 when John unexpectedly died.
From week to week the sketches could be as ridiculous as Monty Python or as cutting as John Oliver.
Take for instance, this quiz-show-themed sketch in which Dawe interviews everyman-Clarke about Australia’s decision to send back anyone coming by boat seeking asylum. (Australia has had a policy for some years now of refusing to accept any refugee who comes by boat, whether they are deemed to have a legitimate claim or not. They have been repeatedly denounced for this by the United Nations, Amnesty International and others.)
Or there’s Dawe pushing reporter Clarke to make a big deal about the announcement of a royal wedding in the midst of Britain’s financial crisis.
Or there’s this piece from the 90s in which Clarke plays a government minister trying to explain an oil tanker which split in two, spilling tons of oil off the coast of Australia. (Truly, Monty Python could not have done this better.)
In this quiz-show bit the two manage in just 150 seconds to both skewer journalism’s ongoing coverage of conflicts in the Middle East and offer a primer on the conflicts more cogent than most hour long news programs.
One more: In this parody of a documentary on former Prime Minister John Howard’s years in office, Clarke plays a variety of former associates of the P.M. who alternate between trying to distance themselves from the party’s failures and repeating the party line.
You’d think if you don’t the players or the documentary, the humor wouldn’t translate. But just watch the character who keeps being made to admit how the government lied and cheated and then giggling about it – that right there, that’s the heart of John Clarke. An acid satirist who somehow also cheered us up; making us laugh as an act of forgiveness for not doing better.
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There's a character in the New Testament, Simeon, an old man, “righteous and devout”, who cleans the Temple, and has been told by the Holy Spirit that he won’t die until he sees the Messiah.
He’s there along with the prophet Anna when Mary and Jesus show up with the baby Jesus for his purification ceremony. And when they see Jesus they both start praising God. “Master, now you may dismiss your servant in peace,” says Simeon. “For my eyes have seen your salvation.”
When I first heard that story as a novice in the Jesuits, for some reason – probably because I am dark and broken inside – I wondered to myself, What if Simeon didn’t die soon after he’d met Jesus? In fact, what if he lived years and years? At some point, wouldn’t he start to wonder what the deal was, why he was still here. God, I got it. I met him, we’re good. You can send the balloon for me now.
And what if his real story started there, living after he’d met Jesus but before anything of substance actually happened. Seriously, a baby? How is that our salvation? There's a great dark and twisty story somewhere in there about the real challenge and practice of faith.
But after listening to this memorial I found myself whether John Clarke isn’t another image of Simeon after Jesus. A man who saw the truth, as bitter as it could sometime be, and had no trouble speaking it, but who was no longer pulled down by it, who now knew a broader perspective and lived out of that.
And in doing so he (and others like him) help us see the possibility of living that way too.
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I’m deep into 11/22/63, Stephen King’s relatively recent tome about a school teacher who stumbles on a way to go back in time to 1958 and decides to try and stop the Kennedy assassination.
There are so many reasons I shouldn’t like this book, starting with I don’t have any interest in learning about Lee Harvey Oswald and also, there’s no way this guy is going to succeed, right, but that’s the part that would be interesting. #ParallelUniversesAreMyJam
Turns out, King remains kind of a genius, and the book is worth reading just to see how he avoids all the pitfalls of his premise (including how to deal with a villain who is pretty much awful and tedious). Suffice to say I was sitting in a cafe this week reading 11/22/63 and found myself suddenly choked up by it. (And I haven't gotten anywhere near JFK yet.)
It’s a really great read.
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While I move through the tail end of my Kingathon (just two or three more books to go!), I’ve had a growing list of books in my Kindle which I am desperate to jump into. At this rate I might not get to any of them until the new year, but here’s a couple I’m especially anticipating:
The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage – Philip Pullman returns to the world of the Golden Compass trilogy with a new trilogy that somehow is both a prequel and a sequel. I have no idea – I just love the original series. Lots of interesting religious stuff in it.
Babylon’s Ashes – Volume six of the Expanse series, which is super-realistic scifi, set at a time when we are living throughout the solar system, but not beyond, and there are major conflicts between the “Belters”, who mine the asteroid belts and beyond and have far poorer and more dangerous lives, and those living on the inner planets, as well as a lot of hostility between Earth and Mars. The story begins with the discovery that one of the moons of Saturn is maybe not a moon so much as an artifact of some ancient non-human race. Hjinks ensue. The series is amazing.
Changing the Subject – A study of ten philosophers that looks at how each of them rejected some part of the conventional wisdom of their society, and that in doing so they helped people see that they didn’t have to accept everything that they were being told. Philosophy as an act of liberation, which sounds way more interesting than “philosophy as a thing they make you to take to get your humanities degree”, which I am more familiar with.
The Crown: The Official Companion to the TV Series – I loved the series so much I watched it twice in a row. Of course I have to read the companion book. I am nothing if not a completist.
Sandman – Okay this is not on my Kindle but on the floor beside my bed, staring up at me with wide puppy eyes, wondering if I am ever going to read it or whether I am instead a horrible person. Along with Watchmen, Swamp Thing and The Dark Knight Returns, Sandman is often cited as one of the most significant comic book stories ever told, one that invented the idea of telling one long form non super hero story in a comic book. I know very little about it, other than it concerns the god of dreams, and it’s written by Neil Gaiman. And it’s been over a year that it’s been staring up at me, and I think it’s getting angry.
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Are we all up to date with The Good Place? SKIP THIS IF YOU AREN'T.
Here's my question: if Chidi and company manage to help Michael become a better creature -- which to some extent it seems like they already have, despite the amazing trolley enactments last week -- do they still belong in the Bad Place? I mean, redeeming a demon -- that seems like pretty big points, no?
And if this does help them, does that mean that Michael has kind of sort of invented Purgatory?
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No links this week.
(Okay, maybe one: guy pretends to be an author struggling to come up with the final line of his first book. He asks Reddit for help. Hilarity/outrage ensues.)
Autumn is ending. Get outside and play in the leaves while you still can.