Best Australian Comedy Writing

by Luke Ryan

  The days and the months passed, and leaves turned from green to brown to rot, just like the left side of my face, and I grew fatter in dribbling self-acceptance. My friends got used to my expanding form and constantly having to pass me napkins to wipe away the litres of Long Island iced tea dribbling down my shirt. I even managed on one occasion to lure a drunk man, who probably had a thing for pirates, back to my spider web.

  And one day, in this state of inner peace, I walked into a Gloria Jean’s to buy a coffee.

  ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!’ A man screamed as I approached the counter.

  I was used to pity, but never before had my face provoked a response of unbridled terror in a fully-grown adult. And I shot him the most severe dirty look I was capable of.

  I went to leave, and then time froze. I couldn’t move. My feet were melding into the floor. Either I was having a night terror or Bell’s palsy had migrated to my feet.

  I did an inventory of my surroundings. The lights were off. There were no pastries in the darkened counter. I looked back to the entrance and I could see my own footprints. Was I going mad?

  I started to feel sick. Like my lungs were filling with chemicals. Which they definitely were.

  ‘What have you done?!’ screamed the screaming man with the singular devastation of someone who had, mere moments before, finished several days’ work varnishing the floor of a brand-new Gloria Jean’s, and now watched helplessly as someone walked in and completely ruined it in an instant.

  I looked at him he looked at me. I started to try to run, but very slowly like the sticky Pompeii victim I had become, and gradually progressed away from the screaming man who save from a fist shaking in the air, dared not move, lest he make things worse.

  I got outside and tried to walk away, casually, although my sticky footprints leading directly back to the scene of the crime made travelling incognito a challenge. So I called Mamma, who drove over and picked me up a short and sticky distance away from the incident.

  We were stopped in the car at a set of lights. Mamma looked at me and started crying. Great. This is just what I need for my inner peace.

  ‘Your mouth!’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No. It looks a little bit more normal!’

  I looked in the passenger mirror. It wasn’t exactly a TV Week smile, but there might have been some movement at the station. I looked at Mamma again.

  ‘You think it’s better?’

  She considered me for a moment and then started crying again.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I made a mistake. It’s still the same.’

  ‘Well … Damn,’ I said.

  I wound down the window and put my face to the wind and I just let it flap about however it wanted to.

  From Almost Sincerely by Zoë Norton Lodge

  (Giramondo Publishing 2015)

  PATRICK LENTON

  King of the World

  ❛As the years ground on, I began to realise the truth of the complex checks and balances required in the political stratosphere. There’s always something to consider – finances, zombies, the plotting of my opposition leader, One-Armed Jonathan.❜

  I wasn’t born a rich man. My father was a part-time oyster shucker who used to hang around restaurants offering to help rich patrons open their seafood. He had thumbnails as hard as roof slate, which he used to jimmy the sharp shells of mussels and scoop out the gelatinous flesh inside. I once saw him use them to slice open the face of a Latino gang leader, a fat thirteen-year-old named Caddy Shack Williams who was trying to expand his territory to the old rotting rowboat we were sleeping in. My dad and I slept in a new boat each night and dined on the molluscs growing underneath, which we cooked gently on a bed of emergency flares.

  ‘God’s a shark,’ my dad used to say as he pissed into the black water from the back of a yacht. ‘Sometimes a man is wading in the shallows, and starts feeling dizzy. When he gets back to the land he discovers a tiger shark has taken his leg, so quick and clean he didn’t even feel it. That’s called faith. That’s what George Michael sang about in that song of his, “Faith”.’

  My mum was a long-distance swimmer who I only ever saw once, covered in pig fat and swimming in a cage to Tasmania. My dad cried as she passed by, then grabbed me, looked into my eyes and told me, ‘Your mum’s with God now. I’m going to have to teach you how to strip copper cables from construction sites.’

  The point I’m trying to make, my loyal subjects, is that I was poor growing up. Not just economically, but spiritually. I felt I lacked the necessary components for empathy, but whatever, I don’t really care about that. So because I was poor, I have to say it never crossed my mind that I would be elected as King of the World. And now here I am, ten years into my reign. It’s like a dream but with about 30 per cent less zebra sex.

  When I was first elected, I thought I’d have all the sexy power of Thor. I thought that because I was the most important man on the earth, I’d be able to solve world hunger and ride a unicorn to and from the circus. Shit damn, was I naive.

  As the years ground on, I began to realise the truth of the complex checks and balances required in the political stratosphere. There’s always something to consider – finances, zombies, the plotting of my opposition leader, One-Armed Jonathan. Sure, maybe as a king I could have had a stable of beautiful pink unicorns, but I couldn’t because of policy announcements, superannuation, stocks and bonds, gorgonzola, Schwimmer fatigue etc. I don’t want to bore you with all my tiresome political jargon, but the point is I’m a much wiser person after my decade of leadership. Fatter, too, but my mentor, Two-Armed Bill, or ‘Simply Bill’ as he likes to be called, says that wisdom is often manifested by a gland problem.

  I’ll never forget the day that I discovered I was the new, and first, King of the World. It was unseasonably warm, the sun shining like a self-heating lubricant, the wind stirring golden leaves on the street, puffs of cloud meandering across the sky like old men’s heads, and zombies swarming through the cities in a ravening horde of madness and despair. It all seemed to make a terrible kind of sense.

  Only a few months earlier, before James Franco bit that ape and started this whole terrible undead shebang, I’d auditioned for a part in hit television show The Voice. My dad, who was dying in an old hospice, egged me on to do it.

  ‘What, are you some kind of dickless bird, flapping around in a little bird bath, too scared to sing to a panel of other, larger birds? Like, I dunno, some eagles? Is that it? You a dickless bird?’

  I wasn’t really offended, as medical nuns had recently castrated him because of his aggressive prostate cancer, so I knew he was probably projecting.

  ‘But I’ve never sung in my life,’ I pointed out. Growing up, if I made any noise over a hoarse whisper, my dad would immediately sink the boat we were sleeping in and make us move cities, convinced the police were onto us.

  ‘You’ve never sung in your life? Boy, do you think God cares if you’ve ever sung before? Do you think that would stop God? God would tear Delta Goodrem’s rotten face right off her neck, and God can’t even breathe on land.’

  He’d died not long after that, his face the colour of oysters and safety vests. I went to The Voice to audition the next day and sang ‘Bad Moon Rising’ in honour of my dad, who had been scared of the moon. I wasn’t successful, but it was nice to meet Seal, who was a gentleman. After my failure, it seemed only logical that zombies would swamp the world. It was as if my dad’s disapproval had come back in the form of a highly contagious undead virus.

  When the tide of infection hit, I was drinking away my Voice sorrows in my favourite watering hole, an illegal hooch bar named ‘Amy Beerhouse’. Beerhouse didn’t actually serve beer, just brewed three large bathtubs of eye-watering gin, which patrons scooped out with their hands. You could always tell a regular from Amy Beerhouse, because of their bleached fingernails and pruned palms, which smelled like juniper.

  The proprietor, an ancient Hungarian man named Jononothan, prono
unced Jo-nono-than, told everyone who visited the bar how he gave Sartre a blowjob in Paris, and how Camus just wanted to be spooned. Jononothan accepted piles of change and pocket lint for his bathtubs of spirits, and sometimes even bartered emotions. I remember seeing a young man who had just become a father trade the sense of panic and responsibility he was feeling for a double handful of gin.

  The night the zombie horde limped around the world, it was an uncommonly busy Friday evening at Amy Beerhouse. An indie magazine had recently reviewed the place and mistaken it for a small hip bar. So as well as the regular crowd of murderers and the serially unhappy, there were now middle-aged office workers desperately trying to justify not being asleep, and university students bartering the only two emotions they’d ever experienced, these being wonder and entitlement.

  When the zombies initially burst in, people thought it was another raid by the cops. But cops rarely chewed on the fleshy undersides of people’s arms, so the patrons eventually fought back. As I wasn’t near to an exit and was still sad about the verbal flaying I’d received from Delta Goodrem, I simply sat back and watched.

  When the few hundred jaundiced survivors of the zombie apocalypse decided that they needed an elected ruler, I originally didn’t think of applying. But then I remembered my dad scraping a layer of mercury from a clam and saying, ‘Son, this life is the golden balls. I’m free, don’t answer to nobody, and women love an entrepreneur. The only other job I’d ever consider would be the goddamn King of the World.’

  I was eight at the time and suffering tonsillitis of the dick, which is actually a thing, not just one of my dad’s fake medical diagnoses. I’d said, ‘I’d like to be King of the World, Dad.’

  He’d looked me up and down and replied, ‘Nah. You’ll probably just be a ball boy at the tennis.’

  My election platform in the first year was simple, my slogan being: ‘Vote for me, because my dying dad wanted me to perform on The Voice but I failed, but this would also make him posthumously proud of me.’ I think this was a pretty emotional time for everybody, because the majority of their loved ones had been eaten and civilisation as we knew it had ended, so people really fell for my sell.

  My opponent, One-Armed Jonathan, who at that time had two arms, really misread his audience when he announced his slogan, which was: ‘More 1940s era beans for everybody.’ It was essentially a platform based entirely on bean distribution.

  It’s very easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses, but I’m the first to admit I made a lot of mistakes in my first few years in power. I still stand by my decision to have a healthy focus on arts and entertainment. The live performances of episodes of the television show Friends that we presented on Friday nights were fun. I agree that my decision to pull the guards away from the southern perimeter so that they could fill the parts of the background characters in the coffee shop in the episode when Chandler proposes to Monica was probably short-sighted, despite it being a really important episode. Yes, I lost the majority of my constituents that night when the zombies overran our unmanned barricades. Yes, One-Armed Jonathan lost his arm. Yes, our nation’s innocence was lost. But more importantly than any of that, I lost my complacence.

  I heard my opponent, One-Armed Jonathan, giving a speech the other day. He was trying to convince people not to vote for me this year. He said, ‘There’s only ten of us left now. We’re dying in here, you fools, dying. We’ve run out of beans and our skin is soft and waxy like smegma. Doris has gone blind. My god, I’d rather get eaten than waste away in here. We have to get out, we have to get out, we have to get out.’

  If you can read through the false promises and political double­talk, you’ll see he’s never moved on from his original bean distribution platform. He’s also showing his characteristic pessimism – while he thinks there are 90 per cent fewer of us than ten years ago, I like to think there are 100 per cent more. Sue, for example. Sue is a classy lady. Nobody dislikes Sue. Surely this is a good thing? And while I admit that our current lack of beans is troubling, it reminds me of an anecdote from my teenage years.

  I was working as a secretary in a law firm, having split from my father a few years earlier. I’d gotten sick of feeling constantly damp and nauseated from the zinc build-up in my guts. I wanted to experience life on the land, to feel money in my hand and to avoid knife fights with transients where the only prize was a seaweed cape. It was barely my second week on the job, and I was staying back late to finish a report my boss wanted the next day. I was also surreptitiously learning how to read analogue time, because I’d never been taught. My dad sidled around the corner of my office, holding the rotting head of a swordfish.

  ‘Son, God came to me last night and in between chewing on the keel of my boat he told me you had to come home. Also, I just shat on the desk of your CEO, and they will blame it on you because we share the same DNA. They have the technology to tell that sort of thing. We have to run, boy.’

  We stole some of the thin, sour coffee from the office pots and drank it on a catamaran. My dad had never drunk coffee before, and it made him boisterous and his laugh like a foghorn. He told me we would sail to Vanuatu, Maui and Houston. He also told me about his own father, a celebrity bigamist from the 1940s. But the next morning, his eyes were red and tired, and in a flat voice, he confided that he was scared of the ocean, and also scared of the land, and that people who give up always have a home in the shallows, in the stinking bays and marinas that hug the coast.

  I think my point is that while my dad might have been proud of me for being King of the World, he would understand if I gave up and lived under a wharf, eating cockles and riding God’s scaly back into the sunset. So on that note, I quit. I officially resign my presidentship. Goodbye. God bless you all.

  From A Man Made Entirely of Bats by Patrick Lenton

  (Spineless Wonders, 2015)

  DAVID THORNE

  Number Plate People

  ❛Geoffrey’s idea of paying to have the car fixed had consisted of purchasing a bottle of Wynn’s Radiator Stop Leak and a new set of wiper blades.❜

  ‘We should go to Tasmania,’ Geoffrey stated.

  He turned his laptop towards me to present a photo of a woman posing on a trail in a rainforest. Geoffrey and I had been friends since working together at a printing firm years before. He was currently employed as a tech specialist for a local sausage manufacturer, and I was in my fourth and final year of design school. It was April 1996.

  ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘would I want to go to Tasmania?’

  ‘Just to have a look,’ he replied. ‘It’s supposed to be nice. It’s the Apple Isle.’

  ‘I’ve seen apples. If I could afford a holiday, I’d go somewhere where they have things I haven’t seen.’

  ‘It wouldn’t cost much,’ Geoffrey argued. ‘We could drive there.’

  ‘You mean I could drive there.’ Geoffrey didn’t own a car and caught the bus most places.

  ‘They have a boat that ferries cars across. It costs … $55 per vehicle under two tons. That’s a bargain. How much does your car weigh?’

  ‘Why would I know how much my car weighs?’

  ‘Right. Hang on.’ He typed something into AltaVista and waited patiently.

  This was before Google was a thing. Or wi-fi. We had to plug a box into the telephone, run a cable to the computer, edit scripts so they would work with the box, try several different PPP settings, unplug the cables, plug them back in …

  ‘We’ve got two flashing green lights on the modem now, what did you do?’

  ‘I changed 255.255.182.4 to 255.255.182.5. Hang on, I’ll try 255.255.182.6.’

  ‘Three flashing green lights!’

  ‘What do the flashing lights mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure but three has to be better than two. Try changing it to 255.255.182.7 … no, they’re all off now.’

  Nowadays, everyone has Google on their phone and they can research information anywhere. It’s practically impossible to make things up anymore wit
hout someone calling you out.

  ‘Did you know that the word “hike” originally comes from the time when the husband would ride on a mule while the wife had to walk alongside? As the routes were unpaved and muddy, the wife would have to “hike” up her skirt.’

  ‘That’s not true. Google says it comes from the old German word “hyke” meaning “to walk vigorously”.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Geoffrey, ‘it says here that a Fiat 124 Coupé weighs 2205 pounds. That’s around a ton. Even with our bags it will be well under the weight limit.’

  ‘I doubt the Fiat would make it that far,’ I said. ‘It’s only running on three cylinders and the radiator is shot.’

  ‘I’ll pay for your car to be fixed, and we can go halves in petrol. Motels are only about $30 per night if you’re not fussy about sleeping arrangements. If we go for a week the entire holiday will only cost a few hundred dollars. It will be a road trip.’

  ‘You’ll pay to have my car fixed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t actually have any assignments due.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  The drive from Adelaide to Melbourne, where we had to catch the ferry, took just over fourteen hours. It’s an eight-hour drive, but we had to keep stopping to top up the radiator. Geoffrey’s idea of paying to have the car fixed had consisted of purchasing a bottle of Wynn’s Radiator Stop Leak and a new set of wiper blades.

  ‘If we’re going to be touring the Apple Isle by car, we want a clean windshield to look out of. You don’t have to pay me back for those. They were only $4.’

  As we missed the ferry by five hours and had to rebook for the next day, we spent that night in the ferry car park.