Call me cancelled, but our po-faced progressives need a good laugh

The Australian Left were once a carnival of zealots fevered with Marxist doctrine and spouting spittle-flecked denunciations of anyone with a labrador and a hedge. Mundy, Ellis, Gallagher, Hawke, Grassby, Cairns, Whitlam, Keating – their campaigns against human nature and the status quo were generally fun, and the hypocrisy of the Left was a reliable hoot.

Like coroners, lefties rubbed Vicks under their noses to deny Joe Stalin’s stink before meeting him in black alleys at midnight to take his coin and receive his wisdom. And they pretended he was quietly, even if a little clumsily, engineering a utopia where equality was as ubiquitous and unremarkable as hoarfrost, and the word “comrade” meant “comrade” rather than “vassal”. But at least they laughed. Bob Ellis was their poet and his politics was a type of exultant contrarianism, a gleeful performance of baroque loathing – but at the end of the day, towards the end of an essay, he usually tipped his hat to the absurdity of the game itself, not just the Tory bastards. Where are the Left’s laughers now?

Credit: Robin Cowcher

Back then, progressive politics’ high priests might have been doctrinaire and humourless, but the bulk of the comrades used to swill beer like they were filtering it for plankton, and they wore lurid shirts and aubergine dacks, and threw their heads back and fully guffawed because they were boyos writing a bright new history, and you had to laugh even though the world was marinated in turpitude and overseen by penthouse weasels. Their greatest hero was a drunken lothario. No, not Bob … Lenin.

I’ll vote for the progressive side of politics when its aspirations are identifiably egalitarian – public housing, public health, an evenhanded distribution of wealth, etcetera. Only a selfish hound wouldn’t vote for all that. (And selfish hounds are a majority in any town, to borrow from Twain.)

But I’ve learned to distrust any ideology that censors its own laughter. And it seems to me the contemporary Left have become a bunch of po-faced martinets afraid to laugh because laughter’s spontaneous, having a wild jack-in-the-box instancy that can’t be vetted for variance. It bursts forth from a place of free thought and pre-thought and is therefore occasionally transgressive. To laugh out loud without cross-checking that impulse with the many standards and codes of your in-group has become a heedless act.

People these days will cancel comedians for transgressive jokes, and jettison their comrades for a transgressive tweet, not realising this is as dangerous for the cancellers as for the cancelled. Because if you can’t practise, or witness, transgression, you can’t think freely. To maintain strict observance of an orthodoxy is to continually decide, moment-by-moment, again-and-again, not to think for yourself – to surrender, every time, to commandments written by a loving, nurturing committee that knows what’s good for you – and is ready to ruin you for wrong-think.

Of course, not all transgression is worthwhile. But that’s the thing about transgression – you can only determine its worth by testing and tasting it. But we Australians are largely an obeisant people, whereas laughter is the talent of the unruly.

I can’t think of anyone writing politics with a hint of humour now, let alone exalting its absurdity as Bob Ellis or Mungo McCallum once did. Satire is a tool for change because laughter, as well as being enlightening, is highly contagious. Thus, its elimination is the first task of any Idi, Adolf or Vlad.

Does the fact that the right is more able to laugh spontaneously without weighing the “correctness” of their laughter hint at a looser engagement with compassion or a freer engagement with ideas? Both, perhaps. But I can’t help admiring a person who’s at the mercy of humour the way I admire a person who’s at truth’s command. And I’ll happily ignore the soothing fictions of party policy and vote for any mob that winks at me and acknowledges they’re blundering along in a Voltairean comique de geste.

Laughter emancipates endorphins from the prison of the pituitary. These are the fairy godmothers of thought, and upon release they go skipping through the brain waving their wands and casting spells, turning pumpkins into coaches, mice into footmen, our nemeses into nematodes and our anxieties into mild absurdities, improving our mood and stiffening our backbone. Who isn’t braver for having laughed? Who isn’t happier? It’s a drug our leaders haven’t yet found a way to tax. If they had, our wisest citizens would all be in debtor’s prisons.

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