Lawrence Mooney – Beauty

At one point in his stand-up routine, Lawrence Mooney says, ‘Isn’t it great to discriminate – you just have to pick your minority.’  Listening to his audience, he picks right.  He runs the gamut: sexist jokes, racist jokes, penis, pudenda, and arsehole jokes, mocking disability jokes, graphically obscene descriptions of dicks (circumcised or not), arseholes (hairy or not), and Gladys Berejiklian’s appearance and love life.  Having a quick one off the wrist while watching Nigella Lawson. 

But Mooney also ascends briefly to a ‘higher plane’, to tell us how the ancient Greeks had everything worked out around 3000 BC.  He gives us a quick trot through some ancient Greek mythology – all on topic - to get us to a definition of ‘beauty’.  He shows us Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’, projected on a huge screen.  Not really Mooney’s idea of ‘beauty’, incidentally – no pubic hair.  He likes pubic hair, and he comes back to it.

Yes, the show is called ‘Beauty’ and we, the audience, must understand that we are not beautiful.  If we were, we wouldn’t be there.  The people who are beautiful are somewhere else, in silver service restaurants, for instance, secure in the knowledge of their beauty and enjoying it.  There is, it’s true, a momentary pause in the laughter here, as if the audience could be affronted, but we soon recover because like most good jokes, it’s also sort of true. 

Mooney wins us back because he is so clearly enjoying himself, or it looks like he is, despite all we might have read about the ‘void’ within him, the depression, and his ‘abrupt’ departure from Triple M.  He refers to the last a couple of times, without going into it, as if we know all about it and we are, of course, on his side.  Naturally, we get some of Mooney’s Malcolm Turnbull schtick –  and it’s aimed squarely at Turnbull’s pomposity and conceit, things that clearly irritate Everyman Mooney no end. Just so we’ll get it, we learn to pronounce a few words, such as ‘kayak’ in the Turnbull manner.

There’s also some sharply detailed ‘observational comedy’, for me, the best – i.e., the funniest - parts of the show.  A couple of immediately recognisable examples of where a wife could cheerfully kill her husband.  There’s the experience of having to use a restaurant toilet…  And a very exact description of a 1960s date – and we’re back to pubic hair.  Mooney wraps up with a heartfelt plea to young people to leave the bush alone!  You haven’t really lived until you’ve got a bit stuck in your teeth…

If any of all that sounds ‘shocking’, well, it is – a bit – and it’s also in your face and it oh-so-deliberately politically incorrect, but that’s the idea.  He pours it on hard and fast from the start.  He judges where his audience is at, and he gets it right.  They quickly get the naughty rude boy thing, and they have a very good time.  You might be appalled by that, but too bad.  The laughter, loud and delighted, never stopped.

Michael Brindley