The Absurdity of Being Earnest

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big Quadrant welcome to our headline act—comedian Cameron James!

Cameron happens to be an Australian comedian, which means his relationship with the sound of laughter is possibly a little strained. As is widely known, our local comic sources some years ago replaced jokes with studiously inoffensive tribal recognition indicators (sourdough bread is a constant) and various manifestations of woke.

You’ll recall that in 2019 Barry Humphries’s name was stripped from the annual Melbourne Comedy Festival’s award for the funniest performer, ostensibly because Humphries—the world’s best-known man in a dress—had offended the transwhatever community. This slur against the creator of Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson provided an unintended historical echo.

Back in the 1980s, Humphries noted that Moomba, the Aboriginal name of a then-popular Melbourne carnival, supposedly translated as: “Let’s get together and have fun.” The Aborigines gave us that word, Humphries as Edna said, because “they had no further use for it”.

Likewise with a prize for the most hilarious Melbourne Comedy Festival gig, at least throughout the past decade or so. No further use for it at all. You’d hear better punchlines in an Uber on the way home. For that matter, you’d hear better punchlines inside a toddler leprosarium.

But let us now return to the topic of comedian Cameron James, who has lately joined fellow Aussie jokesters in elevating their not-being-funny acts to astonishing new levels of not-being-funny. They’ve ditched being merely preachy and dull. Our national comedy comrades are now fully embracing actual full-blown earnestness.

This isn’t my view. This is the direct word from James himself, via an earnestly approving analysis at the ABC provided by Hannah Story—a writer and editor “working on Gadigal land”, God bless her.

“It’s taken me a long time to be comfortable with being earnest on stage,” James told the national socialist compensation crèche. “I hid behind irony and sarcasm for probably the first ten years of doing stand-up and then just slowly had to realise that I am a person who has feelings like everyone does.”

Seems to be an obvious violation here of truth in advertising laws, which should earn Cam a call from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. “Any information or claim about products or services must be accurate, truthful and based on reasonable grounds,” an ACCC enforcement officer may inform their earnest target. “And you promote yourself as a comedian, correct?”

They’ll get him dead to rights. But please double-check James’s misery at hiding “behind irony and sarcasm” during his “first ten years of doing stand-up”. This is the equivalent of a Test cricketer lamenting his use of a bat, a chef distressed at a kitchen’s confinement or a mechanic no longer able to tolerate the sight of a socket wrench. Irony and sarcasm are the primary tools of stand-up comedy. Without them, you’re just Cameron James, “a person who has feelings like everyone does”.

Good luck pulling a crowd with that dire promo. Your choice of performer could be worse, however. The same ABC article cites constant ABC bandwidth drain Wil Anderson, who at fifty is now subjecting audiences to an on-stage examination of his decades-old daddy issues.

“Because I drew so much of who I was by how different I was to my dad, I had to examine how much did I reasonably represent him and how much did I not [in my early jokes]?” Anderson told the ABC. “How much did I reasonably represent myself?”

Although as completely redundant as an award for Melbourne’s funniest comedy festival star, I merely point out that Anderson was for some years and possibly still is a daily marijuana user. Readers will already have gathered as much.

Let’s hear Anderson out, though, on the broader matter of our new comedic earnestness: “People are still telling much bigger stories about the world, about life or love or relationships, but they are doing it through storytelling that feels a little bit more personal.”

For “a little bit more personal” read “a lot less funny”. At a certain point, the suspicion emerges that these performers have simply given up on the challenging task of making an audience laugh and are instead coasting on self-obsession, neuroticism, imagined anxiety, narcissism and whatever else it is that leftists use in place of emotion.

When stand-up hero Lenny Bruce wandered off the laugh path in the 1960s and began badgering his fans with court transcripts—Bruce endured frequent legal attention—many fans turned away. “He lost his sense of reality and no longer knew where he and his art left off and the rest of the world and the law began,” Edward de Grazia, one of Bruce’s lawyers, told the authors of 2002’s The Trials of Lenny Bruce. As Bruce’s career faded, according to de Grazia, his jokes “lost spirit, originality, spontaneity, energy; they became boring, even depressing; often they did not provoke laughter or thought anymore”.

Yet there are those in modern comedy cells who are apparently drawn to the boring, depressing, lost and unfunny, and who celebrate comedy shows that significantly and deliberately hold back on the comedy. One of them inevitably turned up in Story’s ABC piece, which besides providing fine column material could also serve as the core of a PhD thesis on Australia’s intellectual death through saccharine poisoning.

“There is a strong trend towards warm, verging-towards-earnest comedy that’s quite relatable and quite optimistic,” comedy critic Daniel Herborn claimed. The poor fellow “saw 40 shows across the Melbourne and Sydney comedy festivals”, so he should know. He should also be put on suicide watch.

Herborn blames—well, that wouldn’t be the way he’d put it—notorious giggle-killer Hannah Gadsby’s no, no, no good Netflix special Nanette for all of this terrible stand-up earnesting. “That really changed Australian comedy—and probably just comedy full stop—for good,” he told the ABC. “You could do a great show that wasn’t just 55 minutes of wall-to-wall laughs.”

Our critic implies that providing “just” fifty-five minutes of wall-to-wall laughs is no big deal. Only an option, basically. Anyone could do it. The real magic in modern woke comedy, we’re led to understand, is delivering the bits that stall any amusement and straighten those smiles. “You could really go into some dark and very human territory,” Herborn adds, “and the show could be all the better for that.”

I’ll take the fifty-five minutes of wall-to-wall laughs instead, please. Perhaps Rhys Nicholson is up to it. Or perhaps not: “For months during the pandemic, Rhys Nicholson was living in a different country to their partner of 14 years, broadcaster Kyran Nicholson.”

Woke alerts are ringing all over the place, and they’re just about to get a whole lot louder: “Their wedding last year and their choice not to have children formed much of Nicholson’s latest hour, Huge Big Party Congratulations.”

Rhys and Kyran are biological men. This “choice” of theirs about not having children may fall slightly short of filling a one-hour comedy presentation. But it sure will clock up some mirthless miles on the old earnestometer.

The polite conservative is a fascinating creature. Dutifully scorning Donald Trump’s behavioural excesses, agreeing with approved sources on climate change, pandering to pronoun people, the polite conservative aims above all to survive.

Which makes perfect sense, so long as it works. As the lovely Lionel Shriver wrote for the Spectator back in April, referring to those intimidated by gender bullying: “It’s credibly to our evolutionary advantage to be conformists. At any given time, your chances of survival are greater if you parrot exactly what other people around you are saying and claim to believe exactly what everyone else around you claims to believe.

“None of this marching to a different drummer! Don’t call attention to yourself; just try to blend in. Even in secular societies, heretics are in statistically high danger of defenestration or immolation, if only metaphorically.”

Shriver calls this her “depressing theory”, but there are pleasing signs that the times are against go-along-to-get-along types on the conservative side. All of the Teal-ousted Liberals in 2022, for example, were polite conservatives. They were basically on board with everything woke—and now they’re gone.

By contrast, conservative heretics did remarkably well in June’s European parliamentary elections while Britain’s extremely polite and therefore wretchedly useless Conservative Party is about to be crushed by a party running on the very popular platform of not being the Conservative Party.

A more polite and passive Australian Coalition would have caved on the Voice to Parliament referendum, but thankfully found strength enough to stand tall. And, of course, we may in November observe the return to the US presidency of Donald Trump, the least polite conservative figure of them all.

As all Quadrant readers will agree, proper manners are an indispensable societal cornerstone. It’s just that our opponents will use our decency against us. For now at least, put politeness aside and pursue political success.