Rate and Review

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, December 16, 2023

David, we’d like to hear from you. How did we go? Please take a moment to share your experience. On a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (extremely) how likely are you to recommend us to your family, friends and colleagues? 

How annoying is the internet’s insatiable lust for feedback? I ask this rhetorically. I’m not inviting you to answer on a scale of 1 (mildly irritating) to 10 (a clear sign that our civilisation is going down the tubes). There’s not much you can do these days, from going to the doctor to buying a whipper snipper, that you won’t be asked to rate and review afterwards. And if you get the whipper snipper delivered, expect a separate email from Australia Post inviting you to rate and review your “delivery experience.”

Even as a professional critic, I find it tricky to compose a telling review of a postal delivery. Don’t get me wrong, I like my postie, and I like it when she puts a parcel on my doorstep. But exactly how many stars out of 10 should I give her for doing that? 

Anything less than a 10 would imply, falsely and harshly, that she could somehow have delivered the parcel better. But if the accurate placement of a package on a doorstep rates a 10, what would a 4 be? Leaving the package a metre shy of the porch, partly concealed in a hedge? And what ungodly act of postal dereliction would warrant a 1? 

Also, I hate to break this to the marketing people at Australia Post, but even if I feel that a given letter or parcel has been delivered impeccably, that doesn’t mean I will be urging my “family and friends” to get things mailed to them too. The topic of postal efficiency rarely crops up in my day-to-day conversations, and I don’t want to be the guy who keeps raising it.

Recently, I bought some Old Spice deodorant from a prominent online retailer. I would hesitate to call this an “experience,” let alone an experience I want to commemorate or “share”. But if you saw my email Inbox, you’d think my whole life revolved around armpit hygiene. Was the deodorant as described? Did it arrive promptly? David, we’re still awaiting your feedback on the Old Spice experience. Based on your recent purchases, we have a recommendation for you: more Old Spice! 

When I buy something, that generally means I like it. If the item is not as described – if it’s a box of nails instead of a stick of deodorant – the vendor can safely assume they’ll be hearing from me. Otherwise, paying for something and then getting it doesn’t strike me as an experience that calls for comment or celebration. Even in kindergarten, you had to do something a bit more spectacular than that to earn five gold stars. 

Anyway, the giving of the stars is just the beginning, in the field of online criticism. Next you’ll be asked to describe “your most important reasons” for giving that many stars. Suddenly you have to come up with an original work of prose: 150 words, for free, on the merits of a bag of dried orange peel. 

A few weeks ago I went to the football. The next day I got an email grilling me about every conceivable aspect of my game-day experience, including the half-time promotions. On a scale of 1 to 7, how “satisfied” was I with the experience of watching a couple of random contestants from the crowd trying to catch bombs in a giant novelty KFC bucket? 

I was also (and I’m not making this up) invited to rate the “spirit and desire to win” of the home team, and the level of “enthusiasm and elation when tries were scored.” Here I sternly selected the “prefer not to answer” option. I like player elation as much as the next person, but I want it to be organic. I don’t want footballers getting hauled over the coals because I’ve given them 1 out of 7 for enthusiasm. 

I want my views to matter, but I don’t want them to matter that much. Some things can’t be quantified on a numerical scale – things like team spirit, and the smell of Old Spice, and watching a sunset with a friend, family member or colleague. Prefer not to answer? It’s more that I would prefer not to be asked in the first place.

60 Years of JFK Conspiracy Theory

This piece originally appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, November 22, 2023.

60 years ago this week, a nasty loner with a cheap rifle changed the course of history. At 12:30 on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, as his open-topped limousine moved through an echoey, wedge-shaped city park called Dealey Plaza.

Most witnesses heard three shots. One witness saw a gunman aim and fire the third from an upper window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. Before police could seal the building off, a 24-year-old Depository employee – an ex-Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald – left via the front door. Police found his abandoned rifle on the sixth floor. Near the corner window, in a sniper’s nest made of book cartons, they found three spent shells.

Out on the street, Oswald took a cab to his suburban apartment, where he changed clothes and grabbed his revolver. Leaving on foot, he encountered a police officer named J. D. Tippit. Oswald shot him dead in cold blood.

Minutes later, looking breathless and dishevelled, he entered a nearby theatre, slipping mid-session into a movie called War is Hell. Police were called. The film stopped, and the lights went up. Cops moved into the aisle. Oswald stood up and said, “Well, it’s all over now.” He punched a cop in the face and drew his pistol, but was pummelled to the floor before he could commit his third murder of the day. “I protest this police brutality!” he cried, while being hauled to his feet.

Two days later Oswald was murdered in custody, during a botched transfer from police headquarters to the county jail. On live TV, in black and white, he was perp-walked into a crowded parking garage. A Dallas strip-club owner named Jack Ruby lunged into frame with a loaded revolver, and shot Oswald fatally in the gut.

Ruby thought he would become an American hero, when he knocked Oswald off. But far from doing his nation a favour, Ruby condemned it to a nightmare future of denialism and conspiracy thinking. Given time, Americans might have accepted the fact that a lone nut had shot their president. But two lone nuts in the space of two days was hard to swallow, even in America, even in Dallas.

In the six decades since Kennedy’s murder, opinion polls have consistently shown that over 50% of Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind it. Sometimes the figure has climbed above 80%. Don DeLillo, in his tremendous novel Libra (1988), called the assassination “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.” The crime “consumed the culture,” DeLillo has said; it ushered in America’s “age of paranoia”.  

We’re all still living in that age. In May 2016, Donald Trump set the tone for his impending presidency by offering his own hot take on the Kennedy assassination. At the time, Trump had one last rival for the Republican nomination: Ted Cruz. Appearing on Fox News, Trump ludicrously implied that Cruz’s father had been involved in Kennedy’s death. “I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the shooting?” Trump said. “It’s horrible!”

American conspiracy theory didn’t start with Kennedy’s assassination. There had been outbreaks of it before. After Pearl Harbor, assorted crackpots claimed the Japanese attack had been an American inside job. But the Kennedy assassination was something else. It produced an unending torrent of books, documentaries, feature films and official inquiries. In Libra, DeLillo called it “the data spew … an incredible haul of human utterance.”  

Somewhere at the bottom of the data spew lies the still unfalsified verdict of the Warren Commission, the presidential inquiry established by Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s successor. Chaired by Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the Commission concluded that Oswald alone had murdered Kennedy and Tippit, finding “no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy.”

But why did Oswald do it? The answer was elusive, concealed in the murk of his secretive and resentful personality. A self-styled Marxist and “student of philosophy,” Oswald defected to the Soviet Union at the age of 20. Three years later, having found the workers’ paradise to be a drab hellhole, he returned to America, bringing back a Russian-born wife, Marina, and a baby daughter named June.

Settling in Dallas, Oswald hatched a plan to assassinate an infamous local reactionary named Edwin Walker. He mail-ordered a $20 rifle. One night in April 1963, he stood in an alley behind Walker’s house and fired a shot at his head through a lit-up window. The bullet glanced off the sill and missed Walker by inches. The case was still unsolved seven months later, when Oswald used the same rifle to kill Kennedy.

“Had it not been for the prominence of the victim,” Earl Warren wrote in his Memoirs, “the case against Oswald could have been tried in two or three days with little likelihood of any but one result.” Factually, the case against Oswald was open and shut. Spiritually, it felt less convincing. For many people, Oswald just wasn’t a big enough answer.

“If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth,” as Norman Mailer wrote in his masterly book Oswald’s Tale (1995), “then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd.”

In 1966, the first conspiratorial bestsellers about Kennedy’s murder appeared: books with titles like Rush to Judgment, Whitewash, and Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? Their authors were bloggers before their time – citizen researchers armed with typewriters rather than keyboards. Seeking an answer less absurd than Oswald, they only succeeded in imagining greater absurdities of their own.

But if their arguments were flimsy, their timing was excellent. When the first wave of Kennedy conspiracism broke, public discontent with the Vietnam war was peaking. The government’s lies about Vietnam had popularised the concept of the “credibility gap.” In that climate of distrust, the early conspiracy books thrived.

A generation later, a feature film broke new ground in the obfuscation of Kennedy’s murder. Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) did more than any other work in the conspiratorial canon to convert the historical truth about the assassination into a paranoid cartoon.

The movie’s key speech was delivered by Joe Pesci, playing a jittery hoodlum who supposedly has the inside word on the assassination. When he’s asked the money question – who killed Kennedy? – Pesci scoffs, as if the question were laughably naïve. ”It’s a mystery!” he yodels. “It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fucking shooters don’t even know!”

That’s what conspiracy theory had to offer, after 30 years on the case. In the world of fact, the question of who killed Kennedy was as answered as a question can be. Oliver Stone had no better answer, but he didn’t like the established one, so he plugged his ears and threw a three-hour tantrum about it. His film turned the most thoroughly documented case of guilt in human history into a pseudo-riddle, a non-mystery wrapped in a choking cloud of piffle. The ultimate hedunnit had somehow become the ultimate whodunnit.

Besides being factually slapdash, Stone’s film was morally deranged. It made a cinematic hero out of Jim Garrison, the real-life New Orleans DA who had, in 1969, orchestrated what The New York Times called “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence.”

In Stone’s film, Kevin Costner plays Garrison as if he were the nicer twin brother of Jesus Christ. In reality, Garrison was a sinister demagogue who prosecuted an innocent man for conspiring to murder Kennedy, on the strength of evidence that barely qualified as negligible.

The innocent man was a New Orleans civic leader named Clay Shaw. Shaw was a closeted gay man; and that, for Garrison, was reason enough to make him the scapegoat in a Kennedy show trial. In Garrison’s demented view, Kennedy’s murder had been “a homosexual thrill-killing,” a gay conspiracy involving Shaw, Oswald, and Ruby.

The jury rejected Garrison’s homophobic conspiracy theories, taking less than an hour to find Shaw not guilty. But Shaw never recovered from the trial. His life and reputation were destroyed.

Not all the books and films inspired by Kennedy’s assassination have been bad. There have been good books too, even great ones. The best of them have demystified the crime in the only sane way it can be demystified, by clarifying our picture of the man who committed it.

Priscilla McMillan’s Marina and Lee (1977), written with input from Oswald’s widow, showed how Oswald’s itch to gun down public figures was prefigured in his violent abuse of Marina. Jean Davison’s Oswald’s Game (1983) made a similar effort to ground Oswald’s crimes in his personal history.

Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale drew on both those works, but added the X-factor of Mailer’s manic literary flair. Part of the book’s greatness lay in the fact that writing it made Mailer change his mind. To begin with, he believed the conspiracy theories. Having studied Oswald’s life, he was forced to conclude “that Lee had the character to kill Kennedy, and that he probably did it alone.”

Along with DeLillo’s Libra, Mailer’s book ranks as the finest literary work about Kennedy’s murder. Both writers brought their A-games to the case. They understood that the assassination, when intelligently approached, is one of the richest subjects in American history.

The greatest assassination book of all, though, is a book with few literary virtues, but huge value as a repository of fact. Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History (2007) is 1600 pages long, weighs almost three kilos, and comes with a PDF containing 1000 pages of endnotes. Bugliosi’s obsessive masterwork embodies the weird inexhaustibility of the assassination – the open-and-shut story that nobody has ever quite got to the end of.

As the 60^th anniversary of Kennedy’s death approached, I expected a deluge of tie-in books and docos, pushing bold new theories about the case. That has always happened before, on all the big anniversaries. But this time the conspiracy industry has fallen strangely silent. The silence is telling. It suggests JFK conspiracy theory has finally run out of steam.

On the Internet, hardier assassinologists continue the fight, like soldiers who haven’t heard the war is over. But in mainstream culture, the heyday of Kennedy conspiracism ended long ago. The great wave has receded, leaving behind nothing worthwhile. Its main achievement was to erode the culture’s sense of reality, helping to create a political climate in which contempt for objective fact has become dangerously routine.

It’s been said that the existence of a JFK conspiracy is the one thing all Americans agree on. There’s an alarming core of truth in that wisecrack. At least half of America believes something for which no good evidence has ever materialised. You can see why this belief persists, given all the noise the case has generated. Where there has been so much smoke, there must surely be some fire. But that’s what conspiracy theory is: smoke without fire.

Martin Amis 1949 - 2023

When Martin Amis died in May, I caught the announcement at the tail end of a TV news crawl. Hoping I’d misread the flash, I Googled Amis’s name. The top search result offered the standard précis of his Wikipedia entry. “Martin Amis,” it began, “is an English novelist …” 

The present tense was heartening. Maybe I’d been seeing things. Then I clicked through to the full wiki, which began: “Martin Amis was an English novelist …” 

So it was true. Wikipedia had absorbed the news and moved on, but Google’s webcrawler was still in denial. I therefore had one last chance to think of Amis as a living presence, before watching him vanish for good into the past tense ... [read more]

Cookbooks

Name one facet of Australian culture that has unquestionably improved over the last fifty years. Movies? TV? Popular music? Literary fiction? 

You could argue, if you wanted to, that some or all of these things are better than they used to be. But in each case the claim would be debatable, as such claims generally are. Cultural judgments are nearly always a matter of opinion, not of objective fact. 

But I think there’s one element of our culture that is measurably, and irrefutably, better than it’s ever been. Food. What serious human being would claim that food was better fifty years ago than it is now?
[read more]

Hillsong

This piece originally appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in June 2023.

As a rule, it’s a bad sign when multiple documentaries and podcasts about you come out simultaneously. A single documentary can be cause for celebration. Two or three at once is rarely a reason to break out the champagne. More than three and you’re really in strife.

A few years ago, Lance Armstrong got the multiple documentary treatment. More recently it happened to Elizabeth Holmes, and the late Jeffrey Epstein, and the organisers of the hilariously disastrous Fyre festival.

Now it’s the season of the Hillsong documentary. Late last year came the four-part Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed. A podcast called Faith on Trial debuted earlier this year. In the US, the four-part documentary The Secrets of Hillsong just went to air. This weekend SBS will premiere The Kingdom, presented by Marc Fennell, who grew up attending several Pentecostal churches in Sydney, including Hillsong. And to add insult to injury, Hillsong will be getting the satirical treatment in the first episode of The Betoota Advocate Presents, which premieres later this month on Paramount Plus.

The Hillsong story began in New Zealand in the 1950s, when a young Salvation Army officer named Frank Houston suffered a nervous breakdown and was reborn as a Pentecostalist. After rising through the ranks of New Zealand’s Assemblies of God church, Houston moved his family to Australia in 1976, and established a church called the Sydney Christian Life Centre. 

It was Frank’s son Brian who turned his father’s operation into a megachurch. Brian was a visionary. In 1983, he founded a branch of the CLC in Sydney’s Hills district. After a mind-expanding visit to America in the late 1980s, he wrote a mission statement called The Church I See. He dreamed of creating “a Church of influence … A Church growing so quickly that buildings struggle to contain the increase.”

Over the next decade, Houston made his vision come true. To accommodate his burgeoning flock, larger and larger venues were required – first school halls, then warehouses, and finally a purpose-built 3,000-seat auditorium resembling a scaled-down version of the Sydney Entertainment Centre. 

This was fitting, because by now Houston’s services had the ambience and production values of a rock concert. There was an in-house electric band to facilitate the dancing, singing and hand-clapping that are hallmarks of Pentecostal worship. Having “planted” branches of his church around the world, Houston tapped a gusher of revenue by licensing the band’s songs for international use. As a nod to the success of the music division, the whole church was renamed Hillsong in 2001.

“I’m not sure a church can be too big,” Houston once said. As Hillsong went mega, Houston acquired the political influence he craved. In his maiden speech to parliament, Scott Morrison credited him as a spiritual mentor. As Prime Minister, Morrison wangled Houston an invite to the White House, where Houston boasted of embracing “the chance to pray for President Trump.”

By that time, Hillsong needed as much praying for as Trump did. The church’s past was starting to catch up with it. The scandals of Hillsong are so various that the documentaries, to fit them all in, have to apply a kind of reverse triaging process, dealing briskly with the misdemeanours first, and saving the worst stuff for last.  

The smaller Hillsong scandals are mostly about money. For years the students at Hillsong’s Bible Colleges were used as unpaid – indeed, fee-paying – janitors and labourers. They were taught an inspirational mantra – “Do you believe we get to do this?” – to encourage the notion that they were doing God’s work, as opposed to Hillsong’s.

Hillsong also pushed the envelope on the tradition of tithing, which mandates that all worshippers, rich and poor, must divert 10 percent of their earnings to the church. In the Book of Malachi, there is a handy verse proclaiming that anyone who skimps on this obligation is picking the pocket of God Himself. Hillsong’s pastors seem to have been awfully fond of quoting this verse on stage. 

But these financial shenanigans seem trivial compared with the fact that Frank Houston was a serial child abuser. In New Zealand, Frank acquired a reputation for preying on young boys – a reputation that appears to have prompted his sudden departure from that country in the 1970s. 

In 1999, the mother of an Australian victim reported Frank’s abuse to the church. The victim was given $10,000 as a token of Frank’s regret. In return, the victim agreed to grant Frank his formal “forgiveness”, so that when the ageing pederast went to meet his maker – as he finally did in 2004 – he could stay out of Hell on a technicality.

Brian wasn’t implicated in any of his father’s crimes. But in 2021, he was charged with having concealed the Australian offence from police. He pleaded not guilty, arguing that the victim had explicitly asked him not to bring the incident to the attention of the authorities. Houston’s trial began in December last year; closing arguments will be heard later this month. 

In The Kingdom, Marc Fennell offers a personal take on the Hillsong story. As a youngster, Fennell was a member of the Hillsong congregation. He knows the church has destroyed lives, but he’s seen it improve lives too. Tainted as the bathwater is, Fennell wants to remind us there is a baby in there. “I remember feeling loved” in the church, he says. It was “really intoxicating.”

Intoxicating is a good word. As Fennell explains, Pentecostalism is “a faith designed to be felt.” Pentekoste is Greek for 50th. According to the New Testament, 50 days after Christ’s resurrection, on the feast of the Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them,” says the Book of Acts.

Speaking in tongues has always been a staple of Pentecostal practice. There are videos online of Brian Houston doing it. To the untrained ear, it sounds like he’s uttering meaningless babble. It sounds like that to the trained ear too. Modern linguists have established that the random yodels emitted by Pentecostalists don’t have the pattern of a language – not even an “unknown” one.  

Whether those doing the babbling understand that is another question. Near the end of The Kingdom, Fennell movingly recalls how lonely he used to feel in the jiving stalls of his megachurch. Everyone around him seemed to be feeling something profound, while he felt nothing. This seemed to mean one of two things. Either everyone else was “lying and putting on an act”, or God was granting them an experience that He was actively withholding from Fennell.

There’s a third possibility, though. Maybe Fennell’s fellow worshippers sincerely believed the Holy Spirit was coursing through them, because they’d been mentally softened up by all the singing and dancing, and by the supposedly charismatic antics of the resident preacher. 

This is another hallmark of Pentecostalism – its reliance on the personality of the charismatic minister. But charisma is a hard quality to define. It’s been said that Frank Houston had charisma. If he did, it doesn’t show up in the archival videos of his sermons. He comes across as a kind of charismatic black hole, a walking negation of vibrancy and charm. 

Nor is it easy for an outsider to understand what the Hillsong congregation ever saw in Brian Houston. Despite his lifetime of preaching, he has no discernible way with words. (Sample Houston aphorism: “How awesome is God?”) As for his physical appearance, Houston has tried a kaleidoscopic succession of looks over the years, without ever managing to land on a satisfactory image.

Early on he had glasses and a moustache. Both vanished in the 1990s. There was a leather jacket period, and a Seinfeldian jeans-with-sneakers period. A ponytail made a brief appearance. At one point he fully shaved his head. These days he attends his frequent legal appointments wearing an Ocean’s 11-style suit and open-necked shirt combo. The documentaries offer a time-lapse portrait of a man with an unlimited wardrobe budget but an uncertain sense of self.

Carl Lentz, the American preacher who became the frontman of Hillsong’s New York franchise in the 2010s, could never be accused of lacking charisma. When Lentz came to Hillsong’s Sydney Bible college in the late ’90s, Houston identified him as a future star, and handpicked him to spearhead Hillsong’s expansion into America.

In New York, Lentz became known for his chiselled physique, his lairy spectacle frames, his $10,000 Louis Vuitton hoodies, and his provision of spiritual guidance to Justin Bieber. In 2020 he was caught having an extra-marital affair, and Houston sacked him. Lentz now works in advertising. Even he has cracked a few jokes about the irony of this career move.

Brian Houston has denounced the current spate of Hillsong podcasts and docos as “mockumentaries.” “We’re under assault,” he says. It’s “the devil’s efforts.” 

But who is “we”? Houston’s flock is dwindling. This is the heartening thing about the documentaries. The most eloquent testimony in them comes from decent former congregants who quit the church when they noticed a certain discrepancy between the ethics it preached and the ethics it practiced.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, Houston’s one-time praying partner, continues to run his own thriving megachurch – one whose leader can never fall from grace, since grace is something he’s never even pretended to have. At Trump’s rallies, the Pentecostal overtones are palpable. There is rock music, and plenty of gibberish. As for charisma, it can’t be denied that Trump is a hard man to look away from, even if you hate what you see. 

You’d say that Trump has found a way to use Hillsong methods for earthly ends, if it wasn’t so obvious that Hillsong’s ends were always earthly too.

At the end of The Kingdom, an American preacher explains why he’s left the Hillsong network. “When secular corporations are more transparent than the church,” he says, “and when secular boards hold their employees and directors to a higher standard of accountability, we have failed.”

He sounds like a man who has learnt a lesson. But he’s only learnt half a lesson at best, if he still finds it strange and surprising when a church turns out to have looser moral standards than the dreaded secular world. 

Do evangelists behave worse than other people? Not necessarily, perhaps. But the idea that they behave any better has been in tatters for a while. You don’t need multiple documentaries to tell you that. 

Read the Room: A Mantra for Moral Hacks

Originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, May 6, 2023

When Barry Humphries died in April, the ABC kicked off the 7pm news with his obituary. It was a generally fitting tribute. Nevertheless, I braced myself for the part where it would be made clear that as illustrious as the decedent’s achievements had been, a couple of things he said late in his life did not meet the exacting moral standards of the national broadcaster. 

The reprimand was duly delivered at the obituary’s end, courtesy of a young comedian who gravely told the camera that it was a pity that Humphries, in his declining years, had “lost his ability to read the room.”

What exactly does it mean to “read the room”? People seem to think it’s an awfully clever thing to say. And they’re beginning to aim this directive not just at public figures like Humphries, but at the rest of us too. We’re all expected to read the room now. So how do we go about doing it? 

First, notice that we’re talking about the room. The definite article seems important. Nobody has accused Humphries of forgetting how to read a room. Comedians prize the ability to read the rooms they perform in. To lose that knack would indeed be a calamity.

But unless they’re abject hacks, comedians don’t read a room so they can overhaul their entire act on the spot, and tell the room exactly what it wants to hear. All good performers give audiences part of what they want, but push back against them too. Only by challenging an audience can you make it think, and maybe even change a few minds.

The injunction to read the room is more sweeping, and less negotiable. It implies that the whole world is one big room now. There are no walls any more, no discrete theatres or intimate audiences. Apparently we’re now meant to gauge the mood of the entire planet before venturing a joke or opinion about anything.

This sounds tricky. But the people who instruct us to read the room don’t see it as a problem. According to them, there’s only ever one opinion in this giant global room that’s acceptable – which happens to be the opinion they hold themselves.

So to read the room correctly, all we need to do is find out what these helpful wowsers think, then repeat their views. On the off chance we disagree with them, we’re always perfectly free to say nothing.

In other words, read the room, then heed it. Soothe it, flatter it, obey it. Toe the line. Lick your finger, hold it up, establish which way the wind is blowing, and adjust your verbal output accordingly.

This is a pretty presumptuous demand to make of anyone. It’s an astounding demand to make of an artist, and doubly astounding when the people making it purport to be artists themselves. 

And it’s triply outrageous to pretend that Humphries, when he committed his recent sins against orthodoxy, did so because he’d lost touch with the room-reading instincts that had previously been the cornerstone of his comedy. 

In truth, Humphries did not at any point “lose his ability” to echo orthodox opinion. He never wasted a minute of his adult life trying to do that. His whole career was based on being a minority of one. 

One of his earliest conceptual works was the chundering trick. He would board a bus holding a paper bag that he’d pre-emptively filled with custard and pineapple chunks. He would then noisily pretend to regurgitate into the bag. Then he would produce a spoon from his pocket and proceed to eat the custard and pineapple. 

Born into an age of stifling conformity (sound familiar?), Humphries spent his career bridling against Australian groupthink and complacency. Sometimes he retaliated gently, with characters like Edna and Sandy Stone. With characters like Sir Les Patterson he lashed out more savagely. 

In the 1970s he created a dodgy union official named Lance Boyle. “While performing him,” Humphries recalled, “it was amusing to scan the stalls” for scandalised left-wingers. “Their poor little pinched faces always fell most entertainingly when they realised that the odious operator on the boards was one of their own.”

That’s how Barry Humphries read a room. He actively devoted himself to making people’s faces fall. And this was an audience that had paid good money to come and see him! 

But it’s crucial to note that his audience didn’t respond by walking out, or ceasing to attend his shows. Audiences were less brittle in those days. They wanted to feel the frisson that comes when an artist irritates and amuses you simultaneously. 

Frisson is French for shiver, from the Latin frictio, meaning friction. Certain modern comedians seem to be afraid of friction. But friction between a comedian and a room generates surprise, enlightenment, and real laughter, as opposed to the kind of dutiful titters you hear in, say, a lecture hall.

There’s a performance by Bill Burr that’s legendary among stand-up comedians. Burr was headlining a comedy showcase in front of a drunken Philadelphia crowd, which had booed all the preceding acts off the stage. 

So Burr came on and improvised a blistering eleven-minute rant about what a pointless hellhole Philadelphia was. “I hate you people, and I hate this f—ing city,” he said, among other things. Having read the room, he told it to go fuck itself. 

By the end of his tirade, some people were laughing, and some were still booing. Burr didn’t care either way, because he’d said what he wanted to say. 

Read the room? Read a book. The whole history of worthwhile art was made by cussed individuals who followed the promptings of their own talents, and scorned the values of their time.

Did Vincent van Gogh read the room? If he had, he probably would’ve sold more than a single painting in his lifetime. But his paintings would have looked more like everybody else’s, and less like van Goghs.

Did Lenny Bruce read the room? Even when the room was full of undercover cops who were itching for an excuse to arrest him, Bruce followed his conscience, and let the profanities fly. Today’s comedians can say anything they like on stage precisely because courageous individuals like Bruce refused to obey the stultifying verbal restrictions of their era. 

Did Miles Davis read the room? Hardly. He was well known for turning his back to it while he played. 

Did the Beatles read the room? If they had, they’d never have moved beyond playing “She Loves You” to theatres full of screaming teens. Instead they quit touring, and made studio masterpieces like Sergeant Pepper’s and Abbey Road. 

A few days after Barry Humphries died, Jerry Springer fell off the twig too. Now there’s a man you could never accuse of failing to read the room. Springer gave the American public what it wanted; and America became a much worse place as a result.

Barry Humphries was a kamikaze contrarian. He rigged things so that no fan, however devoted, could possibly endorse everything he ever said or did. But to honour his dissident spirit, I think Australia should be the first English-speaking nation to stop saying “read the room.” 

It’s a dictum for moral hacks – a philistine import from the same country that gave the world Jerry Springer. It’s a recipe for dud art, a mantra for people who are afraid to think for themselves, and want the rest of us to stop thinking too.

In memory of the dangerously original Barry Humphries, let’s laugh this sinister, contemptible cliché out of existence. 

Heartburn at 40

Last October, the Daily Mail ran a story with this lengthy yet cryptic headline: “When Harry Met Salad! Olivia Wilde LEANS INTO bombshell revelations about collapse of her relationship by sharing vinaigrette recipe from Nora Ephron’s book about divorce from cheating ex-husband.” 

There was a lot happening in that headline. To make sense of it, and to get every nuance of the Harry-met-salad joke, you had to be familiar with a backstory that spanned four decades and involved five different celebrities, living and dead. 

The backstory was this ... [read more] 

Alone Australia

In 1848, an unfortunate American named Phineas Gage had a nasty accident while overseeing the construction of a railroad in Vermont. Gage was packing explosive into a rock with a pointed metre-long rod called a tamping iron when a stray spark caused the charge to blow prematurely. Shooting out of the rock like a javelin fired by a rocket launcher, the rod speared into Gage’s face, passed through the left frontal lobe of his brain, flew out the top of his skull, and landed point-first in the earth 25 metres away. 

Gage survived the accident, but his personality was drastically altered by the damage to his frontal lobe. This was a stroke of luck for the era’s brain scientists. Long before the days of fMRI, Gage’s injury offered valuable information about which parts of the brain did what. It would have been grossly unethical for medical researchers to obtain this information by ramming a metal rod through somebody’s head. But since that had happened to Gage already, scientists made the most of his misfortune ... [read more]

Cocaine Bear

This seems to be a season for films with bluntly informative titles – titles that tell you precisely what you’ll be getting for the price of your ticket. At one end of the spectrum of respectability you have Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, a solid contender for this year’s Best Picture Oscars. 

At the other end of the spectrum you have Cocaine Bear. Released too late to be eligible for this year’s Oscars, Cocaine Bear isn’t the kind of movie that people give awards to anyway. On the other hand, the film deserves high praise for delivering, riotously, on the promise of its title. It’s everything you could wish for in a movie about a giant bear that goes on a killing rampage after snorting a ton of cocaine ... [read more]

Ghosting

My late friend Clive James was a prolific emailer. One of the trickiest things about corresponding with the great man was trying to recommend books to him that he hadn’t already read. It was like walking a tightrope, which you could fall off in two ways. 

One way was to recommend a book so well-known that you would look like a rube for thinking anyone hadn’t read it. The other danger lay in recommending something that was obscure for good reason – i.e., because it was tripe. 

I once thought I’d found the ideal needle-threading recommendation for him: Open, the 2009 autobiography of Andre Agassi. For starters, the book was freakishly good ...
[READ MORE] 

Creepy Dolls

When the first trailer for the film M3GAN dropped in October last year, it achieved the highest honour that any modern content-creator can aspire to. It went viral, thanks to a five-second sequence in which M3GAN, the expressionless robot doll of the title, performed a very capable and therefore very eerie dance. Reaction videos proliferated. M3GAN memes multiplied. Within a month, TikTok videos with the M3GAN hashtag had racked up 300 million views.

M3GAN is short for Model 3 Generative Android. In the film, her name is pronounced the American way, to rhyme with beggin’ rather than vegan. Whether the film will make a bigger splash than its own trailer remains to be seen. Philosophically, it has interesting things to say about the perils of artificial intelligence. More primally, it taps into a theme that’s been freaking people out since the dawn of cinema: the theme of the creepy doll ... [READ MORE]

Satire with Guts

Whoever decided to release Triangle of Sadness at Christmas time in Australia must have a sense of humour as wicked as that of the movie itself. Written and directed by the Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund, Triangle is a bracing movie, but it isn’t your standard holiday fare. When it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, it won the Palme d’Or, and got an eight-minute standing ovation. It also prompted some audience walkouts, for reasons we’ll get to.

I knew I was going to love the film after an early scene set at a fashion parade ... [READ MORE]