Smiths Alternative Bookshop
Season closed
Reviewed by Samara Purnell
Images by Jorian Gardner
Not only are our pollies writing our material for us, they are now giving us the titles of our shows! Moya Simpson gleefully informs us.
You can only pray for slips of the tongue like Tony Abbott’s suppository comment and so, running with that gem, Simpson with her partner-in-political-satire John Shortis presented the “Suppository of Wisdom”, delivering nuggets of humour to a sold out show at Smiths Alternative Bookshop.
The first song, of the title, was a dream for wordplay, with its description of an anus horriblus, (yes, you read that correctly), the Parliament of bowels and the anals of history. This was backed up by a Classical Latin ditty “Stimula Stimulus Stimluae”, which conjugated deficit to defecate.
All the usual suspects made their appearance over the show’s duration – Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard, the worm…But also included were observations on the names of Ministers, including that we now have two Dicks (well, perhaps more than two, Shortis pondered).
Commentary on the insanity of private media ownership delivered funny statistics about the right-wing articles in our national newspapers, with “News Very Bloody Limited”. And of course the warning to local people smugglers in the full page ads appearing not only in Metropolitan papers, but the humble Bungendore Mirror, got a mention.
As residents of Bungendore, Shortis and Simpson drew upon local inspiration such as the near-by nudist club (who knew?!) and Bungendore’s apparent reputation as a marijuana hot-spot, to offer a Jamaican-style invitation to K-Rudd to come chill out in Bungendore, post his election loss.
They elicited hearty laughs when, inspired by Abbott’s scheme to “buy all the Indonesian fishing boats” they suggested a more apt goal than the Very Fast Train, might be the Very Slow Boat (VSB).
But the show took on a sombre, thought-provoking note in “Foreign Aid Highway” about funding roads for the 21st century through foreign aid cuts.
The audience got a mental work-out keeping up with the switching of initial letters in “Learless Feaders” performed as a drunk-bloke-at-the-bar, with his take on everything. It was a clever way to get around strong language and opinions.
The show concluded with Shortis and Simpson’s take on a medley of well-known songs, “Rudd is in the Air”, “It’s not easy being Crean” “Shorten Bread” and “Blue Ties” (that lean to the right).
They performed across a variety of musical genres, including yodelling, and did an incredible job not only to write material that requires constant updates, but to memorise it, with delivery reliant on accuracy.
This was a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon in a town primed for Political satire.
This review appears on the CityNews website