Opinion: Queensland’s own Three Stooges more of a tragicomedy

I don’t know who is writing their material, but post-Covid-19, a career scripting comedy in Hollywood beckons, says Mike O’Connor.

When I was young I‘d race home from school to watch The Three Stooges. Now I tune in to the six o’clock news to watch the Anna, Yvette and Steven Show.

I don’t know who is writing their material but post-Covid-19, a career scripting comedy in Hollywood beckons.

My favourite Stooge is Steven, who had them rolling in the aisles when he announced that Scott Morrison “gave Delta to Sydney and now they’re trying to gift it to us”.

“I’ve been out a lot in Queensland and talking to Queenslanders, and what they tell me is that Delta is the gift they do not want from Scott Morrison,” he said. (WATCH ABOVE)

Just why the Prime Minister gave the virus to the unsuspecting people of Sydney, where his family lives, is unclear as are his motives in trying to gift it to Queenslanders.

Perhaps all will be revealed in an upcoming episode.

Steven might turn in some knee-slapping performances, but Anna has been giving him a run for his money, treating us to a hilarious performance in what is now known as The Gonna Episode.

“Where are you gonna go? Are you gonna go to India?“ she asked a perplexed media throng when questioned on the issue of Queenslanders travelling overseas, saying she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do so.

To escape The Three Stooges, maybe?

Viewers were left wondering just what particular Indian experience the Premier had endured which had caused her to suggest that it would be madness to entertain it as a destination.

A dodgy curry, perhaps.

India, then, is out which is a shame as the Taj Mahal alone is worth the trip but what of those Queenslanders wanting to travel to the UK, Europe, the USA and Canada where vaccinated and tested Aussies are now welcome? No comment on that one.

Then we had The Free Footy Episode. While Scott Morrison was allegedly trying to give away Delta with no takers, Yvette showed him what freebies were all about by offering free footy tickets to those being vaccinated.

The Three Stooges were great cream pie throwers and at this point, a metaphorical pie got Yvette right between the eyes when it was pointed out the such an inducement was illegal.

“It seems to be the better we do, the more we get criticised,” she moaned, “better” being one of the slowest vaccination rollouts in the country. Just why Health Minister D’Ath did not bother to check with the Therapeutic Goods Administration before hatching this bizarre scheme was not revealed.

Enter Stooge Steven, whipping out a pie and tossing it in the general direction of Canberra while declaring that the free footy ban was all part of a Scott Morrison conspiracy aimed at undermining the best efforts of him and his fellow Stooges.

“It seems to me the Prime Minister’s office’s campaign against Queensland and Queenslanders got truly bizarre yesterday, it jumped the shark,” he said.

Those unfamiliar with this piscatorial reference should note that it relates to television script writing and is when writers resort to desperate measures to maintain viewer interest.

It comes as no surprise that the Deputy Premier is familiar with it, for when it comes to desperate measures, The Three Stooges have been jumping tanks full of great whites since the pandemic began.

Those unvaccinated persons who missed out on the free footy tickets will, we can presume, now remain unvaccinated and wait until the next government stunt – free beer, free cooked chooks, boxed editions of every episode of The Three Stooges autographed by Anna, Yvette and Steven? Watch this space.

Anna was the next Stooge to cop the cream pie treatment, this one hurled by the ABC when it fact-checked her claim that Doherty Institute modelling predicted that even with 70 per cent of the population vaccinated, 80 people would die each day from Covid-19 once the outbreak reached six months after it started. “That is 2240 who will die each month.”

Ms Palaszczuk’s claim, the ABC said, was misleading.

It was an extreme outcome with low probability, with the death toll figures unlikely even in extreme conditions, it said.

That any responsible person would deliberately misrepresent statistics in a way that was likely to alarm the population beggars belief.

Jumping the shark, anyone?

A friend announced last week that he and his wife had been granted an exemption to travel overseas.

“What reason did you give?” I asked.

“I said I had lost all faith in the political process in Australia and wanted to leave,” he said.

As I watch The Three Stooges, I know how he felt.