Farewell Strop, the hapless sidekick to Paul Hogan’s unworldly larrikin

In our ever-divided nation one thing we might agree on is that Australians have a keen sense of humour. Traditionally, we see ourselves as laconic larrikins, dry and self-deprecating.

No comedian has mined this idea (and sure, this vision of ourselves is as much a myth as truth) with greater success than Paul Hogan along with his sidekick, the hapless Strop, played by John Cornell, who died on Friday.

Strop and Hoges on The Paul Hogan Show.Credit: Channel Nine

It’s hard to believe that Cornell has died at 80 and that Hogan is now 81 because their characters always approach the world with a childlike wonder. Born in Western Sydney, Hogan went on to become a rigger on the Harbour Bridge. His first appearance on TV was on a talent show where he proceeded to make fun of the censorious judges. Accordingly, he was a massive hit with the audience. He’d found his niche; an ordinary bloke dispensing pub banter, telling a humorous, unadulterated truth to pompous authority.

Soon he was on A Current Affair poking fun at politicians. Cornell, who grew up rough in rural Western Australia, was a producer on the show and knew a star when he saw one. He became Hogan’s manager and eventually also ended up in front of the cameras as the gormless Strop, perhaps the only person who could make Hogan look intelligent.

Their humour stands firmly in a long line of great Australian comics stretching back to the colonial stories of Henry Lawson that found pathos and humour in the hardships of bush life. This fed into the laconic and anti-authoritarian vaudeville comedy of the 20th century and comics like Roy Rene’s “Mo” and filtered down again into the TV age with Kennedy and Bert Newton and then once more to the film world of characters like Darryl Kerrigan in The Castle.

Performing on The Paul Hogan Show in 1977. From left, Beryl Cheers, John Cornell, Paul Hogan and Delvene Delaney.

This cemented the idea that we (and I am talking about white Australians) had a dry sense of humour and called a spade a bloody shovel.

Today that style of comedy and that view of Australian masculinity seems incredibly old-fashioned and out of kilter with modern pluralistic multicultural Australia. And it is.

But by the 1970s, when Hogan and Cornell were starring on TV, Australian society was changing radically. The Whitlam government was elected, feminism was on the rise, strict attitudes towards sex were relaxed and censorship rules were liberalised. In this climate, Hogan and Strop looked like innocents cast adrift on the rough seas of change, trying to make sense of it all.

So, if you watch any old clips of the show you are struck not so much by the jokes but by how artless and unworldly both Hogan and Cornell appeared.

What they did was to rehabilitate the Australian larrikin – to show that yes, he might love the footy, a smoke and a beer, but he had a heart of gold. It is also clear that they loved their characters. In fact, Hogan and Cornell were their characters and this lends a sense of reality and warmth to everything they did.

“Hoges” and “Strop” on the set of Crocodile Dundee in 1986.

You can compare their rough comedy that springs from their own experiences to the, in my view, desperately unfunny Barry Humphries, the Melbourne Grammar boy who has made a career out of mocking working class people.

Today, when we quite rightly reject a culture of toxic masculinity, whether that’s men who boorishly mansplain everything (hello, John Coates) or workplaces where entitled masculinity seems to ride rampant (Parliament House), Hogan and Cornell represented a simple, good-natured antidote. They harked back to, not so much a more innocent time, but one where there was still an inherent decency.

Sure, you could argue that their sexual politics were not much more advanced than Benny Hill, except that they were not at all rapacious or malicious. They were mischievous but never mean-spirited.

As Hogan said recently, “I never put [women] down. I was putting down the lengths that boofheads like me would go to, to try to attract their attention”.

This idea of an unsophisticated but loveable scoundrel trying to make sense of a complex modern world was perfected in Crocodile Dundee (written, produced and starring Hogan and Cornell). If you think their comedy is behind the times you have to ask yourself why it remains the best known, most loved and most financially successful Australian film of all time.

So, vale John Cornell. And here’s cheers to Paul Hogan. History will judge them kindly as two of the greatest joyful scallywag comedians this country has ever produced.

Duncan Fine is a regular columnist.