BURTON SILVER

Professional leg-puller

The interview doesn’t start well. Burton Silver’s Wikipedia page says: ‘‘Silver was born in a pub.’’ His beginning was going to be mine.

But his opening line in the interview is a cheeky chuckle and an admission that it never happened. ‘‘Was born in Alexandra Hospital in Wellington,’’ he says.

Spanner. Works. But it’s ironic and maybe even appropriate that a man who’s built a career on poking fun at others, and revelling in the great spoof, should himself be the victim of parody, of someone else’s mischief.

It’s a mischief he’s brought to New Zealand and the rest of the world in

famous Country

Calendar spoofs, bestselling books about dancing, painting pets and genital ornamentation, and, of course, an iconic comic strip about a solitary woodsman named Bogor and his dope-growing hedgehog sidekick.

It’s a mischief the 72-year-old believes remains relevant and valuable in the modern fog of fake news and murky agendas.

For Silver it all began with his own confronting realisation. ‘‘I was an academic maladroit,’’ he says, ‘‘I couldn’t spell or read until much later and finished [Wellington’s] Northland School at the bottom of Standard Six.’’

What he lacked in academic prowess as a youngster he made up for in pratfalls and playing the fall guy. ‘‘I got reward for being funny and off the wall. When I was in Standard Three I would give off-thecuff talks, just make things up, and they were very popular. It was a riot.’’

There was no one laughing, however, when he and a high school friend headed deep into the forest to tramp and shoot. Silver loved the connection with nature. Still does, in his Wairarapa property.

‘‘We went into the Tararuas, we went into the Haurangis; we weren’t terribly good at it but they were seminal times for me,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s a vastness that draws you in; just being close to nature, and there’s a degree of battling with it, you’re beholden to it . . . the land doesn’t care about you.’’

Silver would jump into that battle time and again, in some of the world’s most remote locations.

Across the Tasman he developed his storytelling gift as a safari guide in the Northern Territory.

In Borneo he performed his best Wellington College haka to stunned villagers, who thought it looked a lot like the ‘‘type of dance they used to do before they would go and take heads’’.

It was late 1969 and a rumour had snaked its way through the tiny villages along Mahakam River to the remote Hose Mountains: man had landed on the moon. Silver entertained incredulous villagers with stories of rockets the shape of their blow-darts and explanations of gravity and space flight.

He would encounter even more remoteness – and an important step in his future path – during an ‘‘alone trip’’ to Australia. ‘‘It was essentially, you are alone, what’s inside you, what’s going on. It was a way of finding out who am I.’’

He and a friend settled on the Northern Territory and found a couple of good spots, well away from any settlements, even from each other. ‘‘We tossed for them.’’

Silver’s location was near Pine Creek, about 200 kilometres south of Darwin.

He had a few staples: rice, sugar, but not much else. ‘‘I had a rifle, would shoot a wallaby every 10 days, salt it down. I made biltong [dried, cured meat], and fishing was fantastic. Tried to grow vegetables, but they were eaten.’’

He drew on his outdoor experience to build a shelter. ‘‘It was cutting down young gums, splicing them together, with big sheets of plastic for the roof. Paperbark on top to keep sun out.’’

For the next five months, Silver didn’t see another person. But he wasn’t entirely alone.

‘‘One of the things that happens when you live alone like that, all your friends come and visit you . . . in your head.’’

The looming wet season and his dwindling food supplies brought an end to the personal exile but the beginning of an idea, the story of a man alone.

It was 1972. ‘‘[Poet James K.] Baxter had just died, Norman Kirk had just got in. I spent a lot of time at Jerusalem, up the Whanganui River. And it was, what do I do now?’’

That seed of an idea, of a man alone, who hugged the trees just as Silver had done with the Pine Creek paperbark gums when the wind blew, was fertilised by the reactions of people to his outback sojourn. And it grew.

Bogor was born, backed by new

Listener editor Ian Cross, despite some reservations about its depictions of drug use.

Cross was apparently furious that Bogor would grow marijuana and get stoned.

‘‘His decision was that the hedgehog could get stoned and grow marijuana because, and these were his words, ‘people would not emulate a hedgehog’. It was a wonderful decision because it set up a conflict between a hedgehog and Bogor where there had not been one before.’’

Silver had struck gold with the strip. It lasted 21 years. He contemplated introducing a female character – ‘‘she was going to be called Bigbit’’ – but by the

He was developing a penchant for parody. The boy who had loved to poke fun at himself had become the man who regularly, hilariously pierced the puffery of others. He conspired with the producers of

Country Calendar on spoofs about farmers who played their pipes and fences as musical instruments, and farm dogs run by remote control. That one was controversial. ‘‘Half of the people wrote in horrified that we had manipulated the dog, the other half wanted the device.’’

Then he took aim at the art world, collaborating with artist Heather Busch on a series of books that sold plenty and inspired an unlikely movement. Even a market.

‘‘Why Cats Paint was very much a parody on art writing, which I hate, because it’s always been obfuscatory, always been up itself, and the intent is to always make art sound like it’s very important. And you can only do that [parody] by taking cat art seriously.’’

Silver pushed his luck further, with books about the art of bird droppings, origami for genitalia adornment, and he created a Museum of Non-Primate Art, with its own website.

Many people were taken in by the serious, academic language and clever use of art-book format. They began looking at their pets with a new respect. ‘‘People believed that their cats could paint, they were paying significant amounts of money for cat painting.’’

A book on Dancing With Cats was picked up by The Daily Show in the United States. They too thought it was a serious publication and set about poking fun at this crazy Kiwi. They didn’t realise they were dealing with a professional legpuller.

Silver was on to them. ‘‘I introduced the story about a woman who was dancing with her cat, and she had rather profuse lower body hair and was dancing in the nude,’’ he says.

‘‘The cat leapt up and got its claws stuck and she was twirling around and the only way she could release it was by throwing herself on top of the cat, and then the police came . . .’’

Some people may be horrified that Silver has profited from such pranks. Still does, in fact.

He believes it is mischief with meaning. ‘‘I think you have to have your bullshit detector turned on, and that’s one of the reasons for doing spoof stuff . . . you don’t want people sitting and looking at television and thinking this is all true.

‘‘Now we have people talking about fake news. Parody is a great way of getting people to look, to really look, and say, should I be doing this, is this is a good idea; just because everyone else is doing it, just because it sounds right, is it right?’’

It’s also about new connections, new possibilities. ‘‘I got my jollies by drawing new connections between things, which is what humour is about – a way of looking at something.’’

Through eyes full of mischief.

''Parody is a great way of getting people to look, to really look, and say, should I be doing this, is this is a good idea ...?''