SHAUN MICALLEF'S ONLINE WORLD AROUND HIM                             Back               Home
	A funny way to earn a buck By Phillip Adams The Weekend Australian 9 October 1999 WHAT makes Shaun Micallef even funnier than he would be if he did is that he doesn't ... that is, look like a comedian. In a society where people advertise their persuasion, their proclivities, even their profession with appropriate coiffure, cosmetics and clothing, Micallef looks straight. As an arrow. As a die. As an accountant. As a real estate agent going for Liberal preselection. This makes him Australia's Steve Martin. Like Micallef, Martin is a comic who doesn't look comic, the sort of bloke you'd expect to see filling scrips at the back of a chemist's or officiating at an Episcopalian wedding. It must have come as a shock, in Martin's earlier days, to see him performing to rock- concert-sized crowds with a joke arrow through his head. It's helpful when people look exactly what they're meant to look like. Kerry Francis Bulmore Packer, for example, looks exactly like Australia's richest man and, in politics, Bob looked very Hawke and Gough looked ineffably Whitlam. And nobody could do a McMahon like Bill (clearly political careers soar when politicians resemble political cartoons). In the US, no one looks more Clintonian than Bill, though Martin could, at a push, play the part. There's no doubt that Micallef, with a more expensive haircut, could double as the young Andrew Peacock. But some books have dodgy covers. Some people wear disguise. For example, years ago I bumped into three blokes bowling down Lonsdale Street. Two of them looked exactly like the famous painters they were, emphasising their artistry with the fancy dress of the profession -- unkempt beards with thick, unseasonal woolly jumpers. But the third artist, arguably the best of them, looked, as I observed at the time, ``like my bank manager''. Addressed to Fred Williams, these words were meant in praise. Fred reminded me of a character in a Saul Bellow novel who couldn't be bothered wasting energy looking different on the outside because he was too busy being different on the inside. Sadly, Fred misunderstood my observation, was immensely insulted and never spoke to me again. Micallef and Martin wouldn't be insulted. At least, I hope not. The other day a friend phoned me from London to say he'd just had lunch with Steve and found him ``excruciatingly dull''. But of course! That's what you'd expect from Martin, at lunch. But he's not dull when he's being the ``wild and crazy guy'' or when he's writing one of his dazzling essays for the back page of The New Yorker. Or starring in Fred Schepisi's Roxanne. His is the humour, the hidden danger, that gives hope to the ineffably ordinary, to the apparently unremarkable. Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Morecambe and Wise, and Flanagan and Allen belonged to a tradition of comic duos involving a straight man and a clown. But Martin and Micallef are Abbotts to their own Costellos. They toss the pie into their own faces, and into ours. Yes, some of the greatest comedy came from teams where both members were ratbags, Laurel and Hardy being the apotheosis of the Fat and Skinny genre. Many comics are comics because they had no other choice. Take Marty Feldman, whose eyes protruded like champagne corks about to pop from the bottle. And while not quite as hyperthyroid, Graham Kennedy's eyes, resembling headlamps on high beam, gave him a flying start. Zero Mostel, W.C. Fields, Roy Rene, Margaret Rutherford, Joyce Grenfell, Charlie Drake, both George Wallaces and Magda Szubanski belong to the tradition of comics who looked funny before they did anything. Comedy is a way of escaping from poverty, from despair, from madness. But it's also a fine career choice for the runt of the litter. If you were born a Marx Brother, growing up on the mean streets of New York, you'd have been well advised to take on the protective colouration of Groucho, Chico and Harpo. And ditto, generations later, for Woody Allen. But as Micallef and Martin remind us, you don't need to look funny to be funny. One of the greatest comedians had the face of a tragedian. Even more than Malcolm Fraser's, his might have been the prototype for the heads on Easter Island. And he never smiled. I once saw a portrait of Boris Pasternak at an exhibition in Moscow and mistook that beautiful face for Buster Keaton's. Both men looked sad, soulful, saintly. Whereas Pasternak was a poignant victim of Stalinism, Keaton was a victim of the fates, of the human condition. Disasters abounded, his world collapsed, yet he hardly blinked an eye. Keaton seemed to be carrying more weight on his shoulders than Atlas, to be born for suffering -- yet, at the same time, indestructible. All in all, a metaphor for the human spirit. Jacques Tati, all angles, a stick-figure with double joints, was another marmoreal-faced comic. And so funny that he almost killed me. Yes, I all but died laughing at the Dendy Theatre, Brighton, watching Tati play a village postman doing his rounds. He'd left his bike leaning against a fence and, on his return, swung his leg over both bar and railing. Which made it rather difficult for him to ride off. And Tati links directly to John Cleese, that uncoordinated ramrod, like Groucho, a choreographer of silly walks. The straightest of straight men, Cleese was funny in Python because he was haughtily impervious to context and even funnier in Fawlty Towers because he was invariably the victim of it. Forever out of sync, no matter what the circumstances he found himself in, Basil Fawlty was a prisoner of his desires for respect and respectability. He wasn't so much a victim of circumstance as a victim of himself. Humour is serious business. That's why it thrives in the ghettos, on the gallows. Every joke is a tiny exorcism, a way of dealing with something we fear or dislike, from death to lawyers. Which brings us back to Micallef. Mildly sinister, frequently sadistic, while maintaining a bland imperturbability, his comedy, particularly his fake interviews, turns the vulnerable into human wreckage. Which he doesn't even notice. Where most comedians seek your approval, your affection, Micallef has a touch of Keating or Kennett, the pollies who, unlike Hawke or Howard, didn't give a stuff what you thought about them. Which is why we don't like Micallef the way, for example, we love John Clarke or Max Gillies or Rod Quantock. Micallef has some of the hauteur and intellectual detachment of a Barry Humphries but, unlike Humphries, can't be bothered to don the drag of an Edna or the giant dildo of Sir Les. Micallef stands in the centre of the ring, cracks the whip, insulting and demeaning almost anyone who enters his arena. Footnote: It's odd that people who look like comedians often end up being dictators, wielding a somewhat different power over an audience. Look at Mussolini in Italy, Ceaucescu in Romania and Pinochet in Chile. You'd have sworn they'd wandered in from a panto, still wearing their silly costumes. But the best example of that is Hitler -- a doppelganger for Charlie Chaplin.