Cocktale hour
Simon Morley’s ‘dicktricks’ mark their 20th birthday at this year’s Fringe. It’s still great innocent fun, says Kate Copstick
t’ll be fine”, says Simon Morley, “as long as people are interested in looking at a 50-year-old penis.”
He speaks with characteristic Aussie understatement. In 1998 he unleashed his meat and two veg upon the world of entertainment, since when Puppetry of the Penis has played to acclaim and astonishment across 35 countries and in five languages, not including the International Language of the Little Guy.
Now, on its 20th birthday, the original show that turned Mr Happy and the Boys into international comedy superstars is back.
Going all origami on your twig and berries is, I discover, very much a ‘thing’ in Australia. Few males achieve Australian adulthood without the ability to turn Percy and the Piglets into a credible windsurfer.
“It is not so unusual for guys, after a few beers, to kick off their pants and entertain their friends, in fact I think you’ll find most men in the world have slipped out of the shower, looked in the mirror and thought … oh … now what does that look like?” says Morley. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Morley clearly remembers his first ever penis puppet: a hamburger. “Mindblowing,” he remembers.
Hewas17andthepuppeteerwashis12-yearold brother. “It was one Saturday afternoon in my mum’s house, I was sort of watching sport on the TV, and he’s like ‘check this out’ and I just gasped in shock and awe,” he remembers, fondly. “I mean, 1) he had his pants round his ankles entertaining me in our mother’s house and 2) he made a perfect little slider – it was amazing!”
For those of you lost by American culinary terms, a ‘slider’ is a tiny version of a hamburger. A cocktail version, one might say.
Morley is warming to his memories. “I thought, OK, what have I got for him. I came back pretty quickly with a windsurfer … a hot dog … and before you knew it we had a healthy repertoire. We were always sneaking round corners, popping our cocks out at each other.” He pauses “Which is a little weird when you think about it.”
But the genuine innocence, the lack of sexuality, is one of the marvellous things about what Morley calls ‘dicktricks’.
“What I have learned is that the male genitalia in its flaccid form is the most ridiculous part of the human anatomy ever,” says Simon, “but it turns into something very different in its erect form. No one laughs at my cock when it gets huge and angry.” I am not going to argue with that. “But when it is flaccid it is hilarious and harmless.” Not everyone is as wholly at home discussing Percy and His Pals as is Morley.
“In some parts of the world if you laugh at a man’s genitals you would be killed,” he says. “We didn’t know that when we started this.”
It is, I suggest, one of the fundamental tragedies of the human female, to have been given bits and bobs with so little comic potential.
“The main reason there is no female version of puppetry is men,” says the Geppeto of the Genitals. “We look at a vagina and go “whoarr!” He shrugs. “And I think it is not funny because we see so much of the female breast and vagina. Even in porn you see the erect penis but you never see flaccid male genitalia … and that’s what makes it funny.”
Puppetry always had female comics sup-