RIP larrikinism? How ‘offence culture’ is killing all the fun
The irreverent wit of our Aussie comedy legacy, from Hoges to Bill Leak, is at risk of being killed off by the joyless march of political correctness.
Delvene Delaney is wearing cut-off denim shorts, high heels and a plunging crop top, all legs and yards of cleavage, as she walks past a group of elderly men playing lawn bowls.
She stops for a stretch and as she bends over and touches her toes, exposing her backside, the camera pans to Paul Hogan’s character — a grey-haired geriatric decked out in bowling whites, who breaks out in an enormous smile, clutches his chest and drops dead from a heart attack.
In the year 2020, few would be brave enough to pitch the above as comedy, rather an appalling example of the objectification of women and grounds for a social media campaign urging an advertising boycott if not the immediate cancellation of the show. In the 1970s, however, this was prime-time family entertainment. The Paul Hogan Show was a ratings juggernaut that helped define the decade in Australian comedy.
The program is just one of many Australian cultural markers that are explored in Tuesday’s Sky News special, The Death of the Aussie Larrikin?, in which Sky News Outsiders host and Australian Spectator editor Rowan Dean asks whether political correctness has killed our larrikin spirit.
Delaney is one of many performers and artists who appears in the documentary. Now 68, she says she feels no regrets or embarrassment about being the ditzy or sexy comic vehicle in many of Hogan’s sketches.
“It was fun,” she tells Dean. “I was quite happy to be the resident sex symbol. I never, ever felt disempowered then, and I still don’t today.”
It is rare for a documentary to become more urgent and compelling on account of unanticipated events that followed its production. But over the past seven days or so, the world itself has provided a dismally appropriate promotion for Tuesday’s special, with everything from Fawlty Towers to Little Britain and Australia’s Chris Lilley being subjected to bans on account of allegedly racist content. Hogan aside, the comic material amassed for the Sky documentary ranges from Barry Crocker as Foster’s-fuelled expat Barry Mackenzie, old Fast Forward sketches featuring Steve Vizard and Michael Veitch as gay flight attendants, quaint old Vince Sorrenti sketches that have been cited today as offensive, and the modern-day politically incorrect masterworks of Paul Fenech, whose programs such as Housos poke fun at everyone from western Sydney Lebanese gangsters to white Aussie bogans, dumb cops and public housing bludgers who deliberately handicap themselves to access the disability pension.
Fenech, whose early work was recognised for its serious and respectful portrayal of indigenous culture, says he finds the modern-day culture of political correctness so stifling that he feels compelled to take the piss out of everything.
Others in the program aren’t so sure. Tellingly, they even include Dean himself, who in discussing the furore over the late Bill Leak’s cartoon in the wake of the Islamic terror attacks on the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015, says Sky decided not to cause offence by screening a still of Leak’s cartoon that depicted the prophet Muhammad.
The most dispiriting feature of the documentary is its retelling of how Leak wasn’t so much hounded by ISIS for publishing the cartoon but condemned by Australian progressives, chiefly through the vehicle of social media, for being so culturally insensitive, many even concluding that with the Islamists quite literally calling for the cartoonist’s head, Leak was only getting what he deserved.
The hounding of Leak comprises much of the documentary, with his son, Johannes, now the daily cartoonist on this newspaper, documenting the emotional toll his father endured as a result of the state-sanctioned attacks on his work in the lead-up to his death.
Leak’s friend and colleague Warren Brown, the longstanding cartoonist for Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, notes that while Leak attracted a formal fatwa from ISIS for his original Charlie Hebdo cartoon, the modern phenomena of what Brown labels “the Twitter fatwa” means that so-called progressives can be just as aggressive and censorious as the most fanatical religious fundamentalist.
Johannes Leak told The Australian that his father had never been a political ideologue and used “his finely tuned bullshit detector to go after the pompous and powerful”.
“Dad was always more anti-establishment but I think that what happened is the establishment changed from being stuffy old Tories to this new class of busybodies who are all sitting around waiting to be offended by something and to shut you down when they disagree,” Leak says.
“As a result, I think Dad had a bit of a political shift late in life because he had made his living behind cheeky and edgy and funny, and then suddenly he was being told what he could and couldn’t say by people who regarded themselves as progressive.
“When people started to tell him that there was a new code for what could and couldn’t be said — and when they refused even to consider the nuance of his work or the humanitarian point he was trying to make — it pushed his buttons in a major way. And this is what we have seen over the past week — the formalisation of this trend where nothing will ever end up being approved if it is troubling, confronting or has the capacity to offend or upset someone somewhere.”
The Death of the Aussie Larrikin? premieres on Sky News on Tuesday, June 16, at 8pm AEST.
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