A Complete Dagg
John Clarke
Susan Haynes/ Allen and Unwin
RRP $14.95

A series of interviews has begun appearing on Nine’s A Current Affair in the last five minutes of their Friday edition. Paul Keating, Andrew Peacock, Margaret Thatcher and Dan Quayle all appear on TV frequently but never before has anyone noticed their uncanny resemblance to John Clarke. They look and talk like him, they even share his profound belief in the reductio ad absurdum, but, at the same time, they have never been more themselves.

Take Dan Quayle for instance. Ever since he made his first public appearances as the United States’ least sentient Vice-President there has been great sport in presenting him as a witless dolt. Held in place by marionette wires and shrewdly questioned by straight-person Bryan Dawe, Clarke’s Quayle apparently can’t remember the name of Australia’s PM. This is not because he is stupid, however, but because such details are simply unimportant. Asked what he had said to Bob Hawke about the US wheat markets, Quayle replies breezily that he told him to go to buggery. In four minutes John Clarke had isolated the true meaning of the Vice-Presidential visit better than the entire national media apparatus – Dan Quayle had come on behalf of his great nation to tell Australia to go to buggery.

This is what Barry Humphries is referring to in his introduction to John Clarke’s latest miscellany, A Complete Dagg, when, likening him to Michael Leunig, he calls him “a great Oceanian artist.” “Fortunately for John Clarke,” Humphries observes, “he can always be dismissed by his victims as a harmless wog, an amusing ratbag and an anodyne parodist. If he told us what he sees and what he knows about Australian society in any other but his jester’s guise he would long ago, have met with a very nasty accident.”

In New Zealand parlance (at least as I recall it) “a bit of a dag(g)” loosely translates as “a bit of a laugh.” A Complete Dagg, not surprisingly, is something rather more total than that. In his previous collections, The Fred Dagg Tapes and Daggshead Revisited, Clarke published a great many of the short editorial radio spots which tested and finally corroded the mettle of ABC political courage. There are legendary stories that Ian Sinclair had greatly disliked hearing jokes about his father’s posthumous handwriting and that this had had some bearing on the fact that, soon after, Mr Clarke’s contract with the fearlessly independent National Broadcaster fell behind the filing cabinet.

All that political bearbaiting on radio and then, on TV with The Gilles Report, was some years ago. The cover of A Complete Dagg proudly announces “All persons connected with the publication of this book wish to express their respect and admiration for the government and all public figures currently living in Australia.” Which .is just as well because one could be forgiven for thinking that time has only given more ·menace and point to Clarke’s mighty pen.

The first section – Australia: A User’s Guide, turns attention to such phenomena as the Australia Post awareness campaign~ “They have filletted the competition to the point where, I believe I am right in saying, in some areas the Post Office is now the only Post Office still operating as a Post Office.” – and Telecom – “We ran a visually very satisfying campaign some time ago explaining to people what a telephone is. (In effect, a telephone is a thing that rings in the mountains of southern Europe, and the ringing stops if you pick it up and cry into it.)” There are also savage whimsies on banking, the stock exchange, the New Right and the golf of politics. Elsewhere there are transcripts of those interviews with Hawke, Joh and Charles HRH as well as a section on the politics of golf.

Sport has always amused Clarke. His fascination with its arcana and grandiose commentary led to his creation of Farnarkeling and the exploits of that farnarkeler nonpareil, Dave Sorenson, star of gonad, grommet and whiffenwhacker. Sorenson is back, as are Clarke’s splendid accounts of domestic chaos when the Federated Under Tens combine with the Massed Fives to harass management with a log of claims relating to ice cream.

Readers of The Eye may have wondered about the provenance of Damon’s Beat. Now the full story can be told. The flawlessly Runyonesque adventures of Little Bob, Excitable Greiner, Choo Choo Hill, Landslide Howard, Complete Dawkins and the Ipswich Kid, garnished with drawings by Jenny Coopes, are gathered for posterity in this Dagg completeness.

John Clarke’s work has grown richer and tougher and this collection is some of the proof of that. There are plenty of funny people about but few have the relentless intelligence and unstudied elegance that Clarke has. This book is full of slow fuses, suave spleen and reminders that the body politic needs someone as seriously funny as John Clarke to announce when it is giving odour.

“Risible” The Adelaide Review, No.64, June, 1989, p.28.