Serial satirist captured
Double Disillusion: Musings from a Rebel Comic
By Rod Quantock
Lothian Books, 1999
229 pp., $19.95 (pb)
By Phil Shannon
Inspector Mastiff of the Yarra turned up the collar of his gabardine coat as the wind whistled with arctic fury and the rain sleeted in with damp abandon. It was summer. In Melbourne. But Inspector Mastiff ("Bull", to his friends) was not about to let Melbourne's fickle weather deter him from his mission — to track down Quantock, the evil comic genius.
Quantock, a notorious urban humourist, was running a left-wing joke-making factory somewhere in the electorate of Wills, a Bolshie hot-bed of the working (and, increasingly, the un-working) class. A trail of blatant puns and still-warm punch lines from Double Disillusion, a collection of Quantock's weekly Sunday Age columns, soon put Mastiff on to the trail of the serial satirist.
Mastiff knew he was getting warm when he came across the ruined reputations of the rich and pompous — there lay the ridiculed dignity of Jeff (Mr Pain) Kennett, Bob ("Mate", to his mates) Hawke, Robert ("Sir'", to his toadies) Menzies, and sundry media moguls and entrepreneurs. Australia's finest. Their satire-riddled bodies had "Quantock was 'ere" written all over them. Just then, the sound of laughter from a nearby house brought Mastiff to a halt. "Must be an incendiary witticism that has gone off prematurely", he concluded.
Breaking down the door, Mastiff confronted three members of the "brutish labouring classes" whom Quantock had duped into his service through the use of wily jests and socially conscious buffoonery. "Who are you?", barked Mastiff. "Larry, Curly and Moe", they sneered. "Out of my way, you're just stooges", growled Mastiff in reply. Flinging open a bedroom door, he hauled Quantock out from under the bed (he knew where to look for dangerous Reds). "Oi, Quantock", snarled Mastiff, "the jig's up".
"It's a fair cop", said Quantock with heavy use of oxymoron, "but Society Pty. Ltd. made me do it". "Wherever there is undue solemnity in the face of royalty and Indonesian dictators, wherever bank managers and arms merchants tyrannise the poor and humble, I will be there with guffaw and snigger. Wherever their lordships condone wife-beating, wherever the ghosts of prime ministers past haunt this brown and pleasant land, wherever..."
"Save it for the judge, Quantock", snapped Mastiff. Turning to two officers who had sped to the scene, he asked for a constable to bring forth the handcuffs. "I am a constable", said one, stepping forward. "I'm very glad to meet you", said Quantock. "I really like your brother's paintings". "That'll be enough of that", howled Mastiff.
Heavily sedated by transcripts of The Footy Show, Quantock was led off to be force-fed an exclusive diet of Australia's Funniest Home Videos and Friends, to learn what proper humour is all about — relentlessly trivial, pleasing to advertisers, and, above all, politically safe. But Quantock was not done with, and Double Disillusion lived on to bring hope and mirth to the huddled (it was, remember, summer in Melbourne) masses and apoplexy to the heartless and the humourless.