An American in Canberra
Frame of reference optional.
Last week, we talked about someone that most Americans have heard of. This week, we’re discussing two people who are not nearly as well-known here. On the plus side, they never probably killed anyone, and I think we can learn something about how humor crosses international lines.
Or maybe it’s just an excuse to watch some brilliant writing paired with charming delivery.
It’s possible you have seen John Clarke and Bryan Dawe before, even if you don’t recognize them by name. If you have seen them before, it was probably from a 1991 television segment that began making the rounds online years later. And if you haven’t seen them before, you have to now:
A fun game to play is to show this video to someone else and see how long it takes them to realize it’s satire and not a real interview. The incident it’s based on was real—the July 1991 sinking of a Greek oil tanker—but the interview was parody.
I actually have a method for telling whether a certain video, tweet, etc. is legit or not. When a certain amount of absurdity strikes in a clip with unclear context, I always ask: “This can’t be real, can it?” Often, it can’t.
The thing about finding relatively obscure brilliance is, you wish it were less obscure, but then maybe it wouldn’t be as brilliant. Clarke and Dawe were not so obscure in Australia, but you probably won’t find many fans elsewhere.
Outside The Environment
Most of the Clarke & Dawe segments available on YouTube are from this century, but there is another one floating around from 1991. With only 550,000 views compared to almost 10 million for “The Front Fell Off,” this skit is not as popular, but it is a more direct representation of their brand of satire. And also great.
Clarke’s character, representing the Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) Company, a mining firm, tries to smooth-talk his way into the interviewer’s graces by suggesting that, why, yes, he does care about the environment.
But how does he express himself? Thusly:
The precise detail, you see, of what we're doing seismically is somewhat at odds with the general principles espoused by Greenpeace, general principles I might say which we also espouse, general principles the espousal of which would be axiomatic I would think to any understanding of environmental issues.
I love this kind of sentence (yes, it’s one sentence) and it’s always fun when the setup to a punchline is itself amusing. In response, Dawe simply asks, in a way that I always recall when the same question is asked in other contexts: “Could you be more specific?”
The BHP spokesman immediately cracks under this simple question, proving his earlier word salad to be just that:
Yes, we were going to dig a dirty great hole in the seabed because there's a quid in it and we got caught and we're rather embarrassed about it.
From there, Clarke’s character is egged on by Dawe’s to start ranting about how whales and horses are not the same animal. Axiomatic espousal of general principles indeed.
Politics?
Of course, environmentalism remains a hot-button issue, and so we are again kind of failing at avoiding politics-adjacency. Honestly, I do not intend for the theme of this Substack to end up “talk about comedy while barely avoiding politics”—although, maybe that is the type of special premise that a Substack needs to succeed. But that’s a question for another day.
And anyway, these guys were appearing on current events programs, they were good at what they did, and they did it a long time—starting from 1987 on radio and 1989 on television, right up until Clarke died suddenly in 2017.1 So politics were unavoidable, even if they had wanted to avoid them, which they didn’t really. Sketches as broadly absurd as “The Front Fell Off” were more of a happy accident.
They were versatile comedic minds nonetheless. Even when they ventured into American politics, the Clarke & Dawe segments were gold. Just as their international audience might not be completely in tune with Australian politics, but didn’t necessarily have to be (more on that later), their Australian audience could understand just how messy the 2016 U.S. presidential election was even without a great deal of background context.
Finishing someone else’s sentences has rarely gone better.
Naturally, of course, most Clarke & Dawe content did revolve around Australia. Their political views were obvious enough if you paid much attention at all2, but the financial crises that started around 2008 were a whirlwind for everyone no matter what your views.
Here they are doing a “money printer go brrr” bit in 2011, several news cycles before the meme emerged in its true form in 2020.
Or this, which presupposes that nations should repay debts, at least in order to properly mock the accounting absurdity that underlies countries lending money to each other. (Also, this fun little gameshow format they often went with in their later years works way better than it should.)
And if you lived through these financial crises, sketches like these last two are even easier to laugh at.
Barriers, Language or Otherwise
Language is usually considered the chief barrier to cross-cultural humor. Much has been written about translating humor; the subject even has its own Wikipedia article.
There is nonetheless a bit of a transpacific issue with being an American watching an Australian and a New Zealander, even though the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand all speak English. Basic familiarity with the political systems and players is only the most obvious obstacle.
But how much of one? This next sketch about the uniqueness of Australian culture and language sounds like it would be particularly hard to follow outside of Australia, but it turns out to be perhaps their most universally applicable interview ever:
The throwaway gag at the beginning is hilarious enough on its own, but the main part of the sketch may be Clarke’s peak in terms of pure delivery. His bureaucracy-speak is gold, from “a much-needed and long-overdue economic reform” to his fantastic delivery of the line, “Is it a gift?” in response to a question about what is paid to the tax office. The correct answer: a tax, and therein lies the joke.
It’s perhaps their best example of a politically-oriented skit that avoids the topic directly. Still, a YouTuber commented in 2023:
What was so continually amazing about this duo is that regardless of where you placed yourself in the political spectrum or which part was currently in power, they could still make you guffaw with that brilliant mix of brutal honesty and very clever satire. Truly a high point of political commentary on Australian TV, and desperately missed these days.
As Dawe says in this next bit: True dat.
Olympics
The pair weren’t limited to these segments, either. John Clarke’s first hit it big in New Zealand in the 1970s, when he played a Kiwi farmer named Fred Dagg. Once the 1980s rolled around and Clarke and Dawe had joined forces, they did focus mostly on their mock interviews, but they also satirized bureaucratic morass in The Games, about the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney.
The two-season mockumentary is not nearly as internet-digestible, being a full-length program and series, but here comes another one of those brilliant Clarke lines. At one point, a construction contractor for the Olympic stadium has somehow left several meters off of the race track.
Clarke’s response:
I don't understand, Mr. Wilson, quite why in the construction of a 100-metres track you would want to depart too radically from the constraints laid down for us by the conventional calibration of distance.
By writing this piece, I’ve realized just how much I like this kind of extended, vocabulary-dense writing and just how much it was a common occurrence in Clarke & Dawe; see the BHP guy’s soliloquy and the economic reform gag for other examples. These moments just might be the thing that draws me to their comedy than anything else.
And, of course, the delivery was on point as always.
Wrapping Up
One reason this pair was so good might be that we only saw the best half of their work: “According to the broadcaster, Clarke and Dawe would film two completely different episodes each week. Clarke would then decide which episode should be broadcast.”
But as with many things, it was probably their attention to detail more than anything. They knew how to pick a target, with just the right amount of sharpness; they knew how to write a line, with just the right word at a key moment; they knew how to deliver a line, with just the right comedic touch.
The following wasn’t their last sketch, but it aired exactly one month before Clarke passed and serves as a solid swan song.3 Clarke and Dawe had started their routines in one era of news, but they were now in a completely different era—and yet, having no doubt keenly observed all the trends that led to the shift, they were still as relevant as ever.
Today’s Takeaways
Comedians, even those with a message, must be funny above all else. Clarke and Dawe helped prove that. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, just one of many politicians they had satirized regularly, nonetheless said about Clarke: “His satire served a noble purpose… It kept politicians on their toes."
It’s not too late to leave a lasting artistic legacy. Clarke and Dawe were both about 40 when they started together, and were just as sharp in their 60s.
What has happened to the news in the internet era? Maybe it’s as simple as this: the front fell off.
Video Of The Week
After Clarke passed, the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC), where he and Dawe had spent 17 years, aired this half-hour documentary about his career. If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to learn more about him and have the time, might as well:
As for what Dawe has been doing since 2017, he turned to artwork; see this 7-minute audio clip of a May 2023 interview with him for more.
Your Turn
This subject may not have been the most immediately gripping one, but I hope you found it entertaining nevertheless, at least to watch one or several of the sketches I linked.
Did you have a favorite? Had you actually heard of Clarke and Dawe before or was this your introduction? Any other takeaways? Leave your comments below!
The final episode was filmed 4 days before he had a sudden heart attack while hiking on a mountain called—no kidding—Mount Abrupt.
Though not necessarily in the clips I’ve selected.
Not to be confused with a “Wayne Swan song.” Yes, I managed at least one Australian politics reference!