You had to be there: what’s funny now can soon fall flat

WRITERS who try for laughs using topical humour have a devil of a job. Today’s gag, based on the clownish behaviour of the current mob of politicians and other public figures, can fall very flat in a month or so when the topical reference is a mystery rather than an uptodate shaft of wit.

Let’s take an example. At least one subeditor known for seeking a laugh in every headline was ready for the birth of the Prime Minister’s first baby.

At the time, the muchpublicised shortage of midwives came as a gift from the gods and his heading, ‘‘Prime Minister Faces Midwife Crisis’’, might have brought him the chuckle he craved. But a year from now, the Prime Minister having poured millions of dollars into the birth business, the place will be awash with midwives and the humour of that headline will be lost. The joke will be simply no longer topical.

David Lange’s quip when it was announced that Prime Minister Muldoon was to be knighted, ‘‘After a very long year we’ve got a very short knight’’, will get a laugh only for as long as there are people around who remember that Muldoon was definitely halfback rather than lock material.

Even great humorists suffer from the tyranny of topicality. P.G. Wodehouse, crafter of hundreds of laughoutloud similes, is a victim. In the 1930s in one of his Mr Mulliner stories Wodehouse described a very loud crash as ‘‘a sound like G.K. Chesterton falling on to a sheet of tin’’ and his readers caught on at once. They all knew that Chesterton, one of the bestknown writers of the day, was about 6ft 4in tall and weighed over 20 stone. Today, Chesterton (who died in 1936) is betterknown as the creator of clerical detective Father

Brown rather than as a genial giant of London’s literary world.

Even Shakespeare has seen some of his best lines buried by the march of time. A couple of years ago, Sir Richard Eyre, former head of Britain’s National Theatre, admitted that, ‘‘many of Shakespeare’s jokes are simply not that funny to a modern audience’’. Falstaff is reminded by Prince Hal that, ‘‘a buff jerkin is a most sweet robe of durance’’. The groundlings at the Globe would have guffawed, knowing at once that a buff jerkin was the jacket worn by a constable and that a prison sentence (durance) may be in the offing, but today’s audience is baffled.

Thus modern editions of the Bard devote more space to explaining the jokes than is taken up by the jokes themselves.

I was reminded of this literary labyrinth the other day during a cleanout of old clippings. In the early 1990s, Stephen Stratford wrote a fine piece for Metro about Dunedin’s Writers’ Week. I found my name there as the runnerup in a Great New Zealand Novel Opening Paragraph Competition organised by

Roger Hall. Roger read out the winning entries at the awards function and presented winner Michael Henderson with a $50 book token. Such are the riches of writing. As runnerup my prize, and it was a pleasant one, was the audience chuckling at the punchline of my piece.

Now, almost 30 years on, I’m reminded that the humour was utterly topical and so, like Shakespeare’s editors, I’ll have to explain things. And nothing kills a joke more effectively than having to explain it. ‘‘Hate it when that happens,’’ was a catch phrase in some American comedy and I think it was being used in a commercial which was polluting our television in those days. Does it still work? I’ll leave you to decide.

‘‘Rangi knew this must be a special day. From his hiding place in the raupo he could see the Pakeha in their hats and everyone was most solemn. Even old Morgan the missionary was sober for once, his breathing laboured as he watched the Maori girls.

‘‘In the tent behind the table the white women were setting out sausage rolls and lamingtons. Rangi could hear their angry mutterings as the steam and smoke from the hangi drifted through and on towards the sparkling sea. Now all eyes were on the old chief, Rangi’s grandfather. He had watched in silence. Impassive as the other chiefs had moved forward and bent over the paper on the great table. The old chief rose. The time for talk was done. He had made up his mind. The grey heads of the elders nodded as the great chief walked to the table, the future carried on his firm, brown shoulders.

‘‘Then, suddenly, the chief turned and retraced his steps.

‘‘The tui in the rata were suddenly silent. The crowd watched the old man as he regained his place and spoke with a soft anger. ‘Pen ran out of ink without signing a thing. Hate it when that happens’.’’