Category: humour
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Gently altering the world – the arts
Returning from a writing residency in Cill Rialaig, in Ireland’s County Kerry – https://cillrialaigartscentre.com/residencies/ – it was weird to be back yet not be able to hop on my bike and see friends, go to tango lessons, films, cafés and libraries or walk around the lake. I watched that ingenious ABC program You Can’t Ask…
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‘Life is not for doing the doable.’ – Tim Ferguson
There are remarkably few books or courses on how to write humour. Most people think that it can’t be taught. Tim Ferguson disagrees. He holds regular classes on how to write narrative comedy, in Australia and other countries, and has written a book on it, The Cheeky Monkey: Writing narrative comedy (Currency Press, 2010). I…
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Robin Dalton’s exhilarating books – great Christmas presents
High dramatic comedy Death was ‘always present, cosily accepted’ in Robin Dalton’s 1930s childhood in Kings Cross, Sydney. As a single child in a house full of eccentrics, the fairy tales she was told were the amusing accounts of how her relatives met their ends. Her 85-year-old great-aunt Julia was knocked over by a bus.…
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Puns in life and puns in dreams
Fraught father/son relationships Last post was about the memoir I Am Brian Wilson. There’s an interesting aside in it that involves a pun. I’m not a big fan of puns (notwithstanding the visual one on this site – a sharp pen) but they can be interesting, specially when they involve a Freudian slip. Brian’s father,…