Caricature and Cultural Stereotypes
Chair: Bryce Galloway
Smith’s Weekly and the Larrikin Tradition in Australian Cartoon Humour
Robert Phiddian, Flinders
"There's your dinner!" - Comedy Elements in Training and Education.
Michael Meany, Newcastle
How 'You and Me' became 'The Potts': The Cartoonist at Work
Lindsay Foyle, UNE
Comments 12
Kia ora koutou,
Welcome to the Caricature and Cultural Stereotypes online panel
My name’s Bryce Galloway. I joined the Wellington-based Conference Committee here in Aotearoa/NZ to help organise the 2021 Conference of the Australasian Humour Studies Network. I’m a Fine Arts lecturer in the School of Art at Massey University, Wellington
I’d like to thank you all for being prepared to present in an online format you may not be used to. I’d also like to thank those of you who were open to sharing research at the somewhat speculative stage of the research arc.
All three of the presentations touch on evolving male stereotypes as presented in comic (print and youtube) forms. Robert looked at the ‘larrikin’ type in Smith’s Weekly cartoons and argued for a plural broadening to discuss evident ‘cosmopolitan, chauvinist, bohemian, bourgeois, respectable and moralistic’ types. Michael presented on YouTube’s Taryl Dactal, joking through the persona of the unkempt male who cares nothing for his looks (bad teeth) and inhabits an all-male domain with his real-life sons taking on sidekick roles. Lindsay’s history of The Potts touched on the introduction of Mrs. Potts in an attempt to soften the narrative, and the Mr. & Mrs. Potts evolution from an embattled argument-based relationship to something more akin to discussion.
Perhaps we could start the panel by looking at these points of connection. When do you see the comedy of these male types as conservative, and when is it more radical?
Looking forward to discussing these presentations online later today. Come and join the discussion!
1-2pm Perth
3-4pm AEST (Brisbane)
3.30pm Adelaide
4-5pm AEDT (Melbourne/Sydney/Canberra)
Zoom link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83269611574 [Meeting ID: 832 6961 1574]
Hi Bruce, Robert and Lindsay.
Bruce, thank you for chairing this session and for you provocative questions. Thank you to Robert and Lindsay for cracking presentations.
Lindsay, I’ve always been interested in processes and practices of creative production. “Jimmy didn’t shy away from re-using a gag.” That, to me, says something important about comedy and popular culture. Maybe after a couple of years people did forget the original version of the gag, however, it could be that the ‘old’ gag was saying something different in a new context.
Robert, as always, the depth of your analysis and wealth of examples is astounding. Thank you. There appears to be a suite of cultural tropes presented in Smith’s. Some look like incongruous oppositions: bush values in an urban environment; cosmopolitan knowingness and naive uncertainty; a modern boredom and youth over-enthusiasm. And somehow the larrikin can be found lurking in all these places.
Thanks again,
Michael M
Sorry Bryce… Autocorrect created a Bruce! Twice!
Must have been the ‘larrikin’ autocorrect, ‘Bruce’ is much more of tearaway name
Thought after the Zoom session on Bryce’s question:
Cartoons in popular newspapers cannot really afford to be radical over time. A bit of subversion is possible, so it’s not all conservative, but the forum conditions how the humour will be created and (perhaps more importantly) received by the audience. There’s a lot of confirmation bias in humour and satire generally, but real radicalism tends to break the public sphere, at least in mid-century Australia.
Hi Robert,
Thanks for your paper. So, are you trying to outline a typology of larrikinism via Smith’s Weekly? It strikes me that larrikinism likes to think of itself as subversive and oppositional, particularly towards the powers that be — so that in that sense, maybe, it partakes just a little of the carnivalesque. But larrikins can also kick down as well as up. That’s how they were first regarded, of course, in their original form as street gangs: as a bullying public nuisance.
As larrikinism develops via sporting clubs and popular culture in the early 20th century, however, it acquires a homespun respectability, particularly during and after the First World War (see Melissa Bellanta’s excellent history). What Smith’s Weekly does, then, is more-or-less institutionalise larrikinism as a form of white Australian male identity — whereupon its oppositional aspects become mainstream: the otherwise respectable bloke who likes to drink, smoke and gamble, who is suspicious of authority, but also of forms of ethnic, racial and sexual difference. In that sense, being a larrikin is still a bit like being in a gang.
Can you maybe say something more about the relationship of larrikinism to the darker elements of Smith’s Weekly? Can this be properly called larrikinism?
I need to spend more time with the paper, and in particular read a lot more of the prose.
Larrikinism is certainly a dark as well as a carnivalesque thing. What I want to copy from your work is enough historical imagination to engage with the range of these things rather than just critique the unpleasant elements as unenlightened. It is an especially hard topic not get drawn into the idiot culture wars in.
Robert, thanks for your paper–it was a great reminder about how our historical narratives about humor obscure the sorts of variations that are foundational to how it circulates. And nice for me to learn about these cartoons!
I’ve been talking to the AusStage people about how to collect cartoons (Jenny is at Flinders, after all) and am struck by the amount similarity between trying to record performance and cartoons in newspapers. Even if you can find the artifact, mapping the context is an extra level of difficulty. Keep me posted on your work.
Thanks Robert, will do!
Thank you all for your comments on the Caricature and Cultural Stereotypes panel. As a New Zealander, it was interesting to join the Zoom Discussion about the day’s three panels and hear a variety of the Australian contingent speak about the existence of a paradoxical larrikinism/conservatism in the Australian identity. It was interesting to hear this spoken about as a given, in the same way New Zealanders will talk about our ‘culture cringe’ or ‘tall poppy syndrome’ (perhaps you have those too).
Thanks for watching, listening, thinking, being involved, making comments and joining the Zoom Discussion. I hope the critical conversations have helped you develop your research arguments, and that you’ve made some interesting new contacts or had the opportunity to reengage with peers in the field.
On behalf of the committee for the 27th Conference of the Australasian Humour Studies Network, thanks for taking part.
Noho ora mai
Bryce Galloway