Comedy Classics with Bill Nothling

My name is Bill Nothling and I have no friends whatsoever. I have severe depression and low self-esteem which compounds my feelings of loneliness. Plus I live in Brisbane.
I was confident when I was seventeen but it all fell apart for me when I left school and my life seems to get worse all the time. I am now 42. Occasionally I leave my house but I have no-one to visit so I drive around Brisbane. I am one of the great unmet. The only people who talk to me are shopkeepers. Brisbane to me is just roads and buildings. Breakfast Creek Road, Sandgate Road, book stores and the art gallery.
Also I am convinced that some terrible fate awaits me, some kind of vengeance that will be inflicted upon me by evil people generally accepted as virtuous by this small-minded town. I will be branded a criminal and any art work I create will be voided, all my opinions discredited. (I am an amateur stand-up comedian. Well, I went once.)
All through my life I have gradually lost friends, and been unable to form new friendships to replace them. Althought they weren’t friends when I lost them, if they ever were. I had my spirit broken years ago by yuppy creeps from my old school and I doubt I’ll ever recover. They were spoilt, cruel people. They made me their scapegoat because I wouldn’t conform: I was an artist, different, in a backward town that has no time for art, no respect for vocations. They were professionals, the small-town aristocracy, and I wouldn’t be one of their servants, so they rode me till I struck back. That’s how they convinced me I was the criminal they always said I was. Their program still rules my mind. I can’t move on to a new phase, leave their world and get a new one.
I can’t help feeling my immediate family is falling apart, too, mainly because of my brother-in-law whom I believe has a manipulative personality disorder. My sister isn’t talking to me. But I also feel there is some underlying flaw in my family that has never been tested before. I believe that I will lose my support system, and I will probably lose my job. I dislike my job intensely, so maybe that won’t be such a bad thing.
I also think that the world is some kind of delusion in which I am really kidding myself that I could ever be a good person and go to heaven or wherever like everyone else. I think that I was an evil person in a former life and that when I come to the end of my life I will be shown that I was evil all along and that I must live this life over and over again. I also think that I have some talents but that I will never be able to make a living from them, and instead will have to continue performing menial work, in Brisbane, if I wish to survive.
Given this general mental malaise and probable reality I have sought tirelessly and in vain to cheer myself up by purchasing comedy material such as books, comics, cds, and magazines. These include the following items. I will start with the top shelf of my bookcase.
There are several books by Richard Brautigan lined up here. Picadors, mainly. Brautigan was a writer from San Francisco who was quite popular in the 1960s. His novels are realistic fantasy, written in a style that basically labours a point in a strange way. His best novel, I believe, is The Hawkline Monster, about two cowboy hitmen in the 1800s hired to kill a monster under a woman’s house. He has a book of poetry called The Pill versus The Springhill Mining Disaster, and a book of short stories called The Revenge of the Lawn. Other books include Willard and His Bowling Trophies, and The Abortion, an Historical Romance.
Another funny writer is Charles Bukowski, the famous alcoholic Los Angeles “laureate of lowlife”. For black humour read The Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, particularly chapter 10, and also Jim Thompson’s hilarious Pop. 1280.
Something I would put on my top shelf if they would fit are my Viz comics which I get from certain newsagents once every two months. It comes from the U.K. and is like a comic book version of Ripping Yarns or Monty Python. It mercilessly pokes fun at the enlightened hypocritical manipulative wankers of the modern age, eg the politically correct, feminists, and other morons. It dares to criticise these sacred cows and the orthodoxy of the Good Guys, whom so many people seem to let do their thinking for them nowadays. Ooo, I’m not allowed to say that, am I?, you p.c. parasites. Viz uses peurile humour to great effect, with characters like Johnny Fartpants, Roger Irrelevant, and loads more. Great stuff. Pity we don’t have that freedom of speech in Australia.
Let’s see what else I can recommend here. I’ve got these cds lying here next to the book shelf. One is called Why Bother? which is British comedian Peter Cook playing his character Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling in an interview situation. He recounts stories of how his father sent him to prison at age five, and rebutts accusations that he took a great deal of convincing to leave the air-conditioned office he had in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Another c.d. set is a new one, A Celebration of Sellers, which has all his recordings mainly from the sixties, including a version of A Hard Day’s Night done in the style of Laurence Olivier doing Shakespeare. For those obsessed with British humour another set of cds of Hancock’s Half Hour is also around.
Recently I read a book by Steve Allen called How to be Funny, and in it he recommended some master comedy writers mainly from the forties, which I have found to be excellent. These include Stephen Leacock, Robert Benchley, and S.J. Perelman (Crazy Like a Fox). These writers are experts at nonsense and you can see the influence of people like Benchley on later writers like Woody Allen. Good luck in ever finding any books by them, however. Allen has an ok book called Getting Even, which is a collection of essays and other stuff.
Let’s have a gander at my collection of biographies. People love biographies these days because it’s a nice fantasy to escape into someone else’s life and get an idea what it’s like to be successful and a genius travelling the world as opposed to living in Brisbane and driving yourself mad with frustration and a sense of life wasting away in a lonely, banal, endemically corrupt backwater ruled by accountants and solicitors without a hope of things improving for you, as the trucks endlessly drive past your window. My favourite biography is The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which goes into details of his neurotic ways. Allegedly he’d get people fired from movie sets for looking at him or he’d ban people from wearing green in his presence. He was the classic British depresso comedy genius. In the same mold and from the same post-war era is the archtypal comedy depresso Tony Hancock. I have a great biography of him called When the Wind Changed. Another great book is Mo’s Memoirs, a very rare autobiography by one of Australia’s greatest comedians, Roy “Mo” Rene. This is one of my prized possessions, even more than the autographed copy of Noel Coward sketches I liberated from a now-defunct second hand bookstore. Mo’s Memoirs is an interesting insight into the vaudeville era of 1940s Australia.
My Wonderful World of Slapstick by Buster Keaton is a good one and Lost in the Funhouse by Bill Zehme is a good biography of comedian Andy Kaufman. There’s a good biography of Peter Cook by Harry Thompson and one on French comedian Jacques Tati by David Bellos. I also have a great one on the Marx Brothers called Monkey Business and one on W.C. Fields called Man on the Flying Trapeze, both by Simon Louvish.
Let’s have a look at my second shelf, here. Ahh, here’s a nice one. Skywriting by Word of Mouth by John Lennon, and these earlier works of his, too, A Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write. I recently saw a book by Stanley Unwin whose style Lennon basically rips off. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Ancient Egyptian and Indian paintings are often done in the same style without detracting from their worth. Here’s another interesting bit of wordplay. Tarantula by Bob Dylan. And an old anthology of nonsense called Nonsense edited by Paul Jennings which is also good.
Just to jump back to comics for a second, there are several good titles you can order from Fantagraphics in Seattle. One is called Schizo by Ivan Brunetti who’s a very funny satirist. Robert Crumb and Daniel Clowes are also funny cartoonists while also very serious, and similarly I can recommend Raw which was an anthology put out by Penguin Books back in the late eighties. Not all of Raw is humour, some of it covers very serious issues, but a lot of it has a whimsy and humour to it.
Here’s one I picked up at a recent Lifeline book sale. A very good Australian writer of comedy, Lennie Lower, who was writing in the forties. The Best of Lennie Lower is a collection of his columns and stories. I got this copy of Stately as a Galleon there, too. Joyce Grenfell was a British writer and performer and it’s a collection of her monologues, stories and poems. Leslie Nielson has a good one called The Naked Truth.
Animation provides some good comedy material and there’s a book of summaries of cartoon plots called Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies by Beck and Friedwald. There are also items from the internet I’ve printed out and placed in plastic leafed folders. Interviews with Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, for example. There’s a lot of comedy stuff like this on the internet, but a lot of it is rubbish posted by dullards and nerds.
Oh, here’s a great book, too. Norman Gunston’s Finest Moments, by Garry McDonald and Bill Harding (Angus and Robertson, 1975). It contains all of Norman’s best interviews. Garry McDonald was the first to do the sort of prank humour Andy Kaufman and Tom Green are famous for. But while we’re on tv, The Tom Green Show is very funny, although some of his humour can border on the cruel. The Micallef Show is pretty good, too.
Lastly, on my bottom shelf in a plastic envelope, I have a few joke books by Robert Orben who wrote books for want-to-be stand-up comedians in the fifties. Of course not all the jokes stand-up today. However some are good and the rest are interesting to see how humour has changed over the years.
And that’s about it. My comedy collection. My blessed, beautiful collection. My only fear is that I will lose my ability to support myself and therefore a storage area for these treasures. And also when I die what will happen to them? I would hope that some Brisbane City Council library would take them but then they often throw out stuff after a few years. There’s fat chance of me ever becoming famous so no university would preserve my collection. My only hope for these books is that they will end up in some Lifeline book sale and be found by some other comedy obsessive like myself in the future. But I doubt that will happen. Old books will probably be banned in a few years anyway. Cheers.