Dialogue: It's no joke we've lost sense of fun

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

A small group of us were enjoying lunch while working on the wharves in Wellington one lovely day many years ago, watching an English seaman painting the side of a small cargo ship, sitting on a plank slung over the side. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, had his shirt buttoned up to the neck, the sleeves buttoned at the wrists.

This was before skin cancer had been invented so we were lounging in the sun, stripped to the waist and hatless, eating our sandwiches. One of the other wharfies with me yelled out: "Hey, Pommy, why don't you let some sun onto your skinny white body and get a tan?"

The seaman put down his brush, fixed us with a stare and said: "The way I see it, mate, half the world is black and wants to be white, and the other half is white and wants to be brown. Me, I'm the only bugger I know who's happy with the colour he is."

He then picked up the brush and went on with the work. His delivery and timing were superb. Racist overtones? Not at all. Yet someone I recently told the story to was offended at the allegation that everyone who's black wants to be white. That's political correctness gone mad.

I was mentally trawling through the funny people and incidents in my life after talking on the phone early this week with the Assignment programme's Rob Harley about a planned documentary on what's happened to New Zealanders' sense of humour.

Both at the freezing-works and on the wharf I worked with Cockneys who had us rolling about every day with their loud, often rancidly vulgar, irreverent, almost always sexist humour, most of which I couldn't repeat here.

I worked on a provincial newspaper with a local man who adopted the mock persona of an educated gentleman. He had wanted to be a lawyer, he said, but struggled at exam time because he had what he called a lazy brain. It wasn't all that lazy because it was stocked with an amazing repertoire of what were then called dirty yarns, as well as long passages of Shakespeare. He was the funniest man I have worked with.

One day a printer asked him for a loan in a low voice so the rest of us wouldn't hear. My friend climbed soberly on to his chair and in a thick and theatrical Jewish accent paraphrased a piece of the Merchant of Venice: "Yesterday on the Rialto thou spat upon my Jewish gabardine and called me cur and now thou asks me for monies." He then sat down without another word and pored over this work. Insensitive? Grossly. Funny? Hilariously.

There's no doubt in my mind that New Zealanders don't laugh as much as we used to, but blaming political correctness is only partly the answer.

It's important, for example, to remember the difference between humour and cheerfulness or a sense of fun. In the 1950s and '60s, A.H. and A.W. Reed published a large number of New Zealand books that purported to be funny in the Wodehousian tradition of humour but were really just cheerful. They were stories about farming or nursing or being a veterinarian, a roadman, a housewife. They are rare now, perhaps because people don't enjoy their lives and their work so much.

Then I asked myself: What's happened to radio and television satire of the That was The Week That Was ilk, and to the broadly and brilliantly funny programmes such as Hancock's Half-Hour?

In the next morning's Herald, I read that multi-millionaire Ted Turner, the man who founded CNN, said he was suicidal after the break-up of his marriage to Jane Fonda and also because he lost control of his broadcasting empire. "I felt like Job," he said.

Ah, I thought, if Turner thinks of himself as a Job-like figure, and the world doesn't fall about laughing, then how can you take the mickey out of anyone any more? Humour must have fallen victim to cynicism, to the grotesque shape of modern people, their lives and beliefs.

A couple of decades ago, American humorist Art Buchwald stopped writing a syndicated newspaper column because, he said, he was unable to poke fun at public figures who had become so utterly ridiculous. At least one British satirist complained you could not send up Maggie Thatcher when she did it so compellingly herself.

Take corporate business in New Zealand. On the one hand, we still have personnel companies insisting unashamedly that we should pay our corporate leaders even more exorbitant money, relative to staff, than they get now or they will go overseas; and were urged to treat them like national heroes.

On the other hand, a huge proportion of shareholder value in almost all our major companies has been destroyed over recent years. Is Sir Seldom Blushing a corporate hero we should be adulating? Would New Zealand have lost so much had he and a few dozen others emigrated?

To send up a situation like that you'd have to pretend to put them on a pedestal and proclaim they were not getting enough money or bonuses - but that's what they do themselves. No laughs there, mate.