The disappearing art of Australian religious vernacular humour

Illustration: Glen Le Lievre

The great G.K. Chesterton once remarked that there was one element of God which was so great that he kept it hidden from us, and that was his humour. Now, I yield to no one in my admiration of the great Chesterton, but I think he might have been mistaken there. It seems to me evidence of God’s humour is everywhere, right in front of our eyes.

One tiny but sparkling reflection of this is the sadly disappearing art of Australian religious vernacular humour. So much Australian slang is disappearing, perhaps through the standardisation of language emerging from the globalisation of media. Traditional Australian religious humour was not hostile to religion, but operated within the culture of a religious outlook as everyone’s context.

Thus as a perennially impecunious young man I used often to comment that I was as broke as the ten commandments. The famous cemetery in Sydney is known as Rookwood. Therefore, when you were unwell, you were as crook as Rookwood. Whereas when you were having a particularly good time, you wouldn’t be dead for quids.

Quids was slang for pounds and these of course disappeared in 1966 when decimal currency was introduced so that is a very old bit of slang indeed, although I remember it well from my childhood, only a decade or so of which preceded decimal currency.

Australian religious slang often exhibited a familiarity with God, which was not disrespectful. Thus, rain was so longed for in the bush that it would evoke the cry: “Fling it down, Huey!” This was a request to God to send yet more rain and a characteristically laconic, and at least partly ironic, expression of thanks. Along the lines of: we can’t get enough of this, thanks a lot!

My father was a splendid man with one terrible weakness – a love of puns, no matter how lame or strained. Thus he wrote to me once to inform me that he had discovered the law of the attraction of little things to big things – maggotism. He once found a dice in the bathroom at his office and deduced that someone had been “playing craps”.

The only person I’ve met as addicted to bad puns as my father is the otherwise estimable Karl Schmude, the guiding spirit behind the splendid Campion College. To appreciate the following Schmude pun, you have to know that: Thomas Aquinas was a great medieval theologian, he was very fat, his major work was called Summa Theologica.

Schmude recounts Thomas’s response to friends urging him to diet: You must realise, one swallow does not a Summa make! Groan.

Speaking of which, our finest poet, Les Murray, the greatest religious poet since Dante Alighieri, was also a devotee of puns, which he described as poems which know when to end.

His magnificent Black Belt in Marital Arts is both a tribute to puns and full of puns. Puns, he said, were too coherent “to bear by any groan person”.

You can’t tell me that God’s humour is not evident in that classic Murray locution. The flip side of all this was to sometimes be informed in youth that some standard Australian slang term was actually vaguely sacrilegious. Thus bloody was allegedly a shortened form of: By Our Lady, and Strewth a shortened form of God’s truth.

On behalf of Australian slang, to which I remain devoted, I reject the improper religious association.

One thing to remember about the religious life is that it’s there to be enjoyed. Religion is mostly great fun after all, or should be. So are religious jokes. Fling it down Huey!