Mark Watson - The Information

We asked UK comic Mark Watson "English humour versus Australian humour: your thoughts?"

The first Australian joke I remember hearing in a comedy club was ‘if you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot; but if you get away with it, you're a legend.' This one-liner reinforces the colonial picture of the average Aussie as a fun-loving, easy-going larrikin who's never happier than when he's cracking open a few beers, spending some quality time with the boys, and then driving home blind and tragically mowing down a pedestrian. It might be suggested that Australians are underselling themselves in their comedy.

But maybe the joke is on the Brits, because - thanks to their selective export of popular culture, and cheerful ability to exploit the British love of a national stereotype - Aussies' humour has been subtly spreading misinformation in the UK for a long time now. My generation of Brits believes, almost uniformly, that the chief insult down here is ‘flaming galah' (thanks to Home and Away mainstay Alf Stewart); that Steve Irwin's insane clowning with crocodiles was pretty much standard Antipodean behaviour; and that people all over the Lucky Country enjoy quaffing nothing but Foster's, rather than - rightly - dismissing it as undrinkable piss and sending it as far away as possible. The fact that, in a country like the UK where almost every building is a brewery concocting real ale, Foster's enjoys a huge share of the market, may be the cruellest joke Australia has ever played on the British - apart from maybe the ongoing farce of the Ashes.

Which is, of course, another traditional vehicle for cross-cultural wit. If you ask an English sports fan about Australian humour, they may well mutter about the unsavoury practice of sledging, an ungentlemanly invention far lower than anything we in the old country would ever stoop to. Someone like Warney can just about get away with it - the British hold him in high esteem, largely because he's a love rat, and we adore people who screw up their private lives - but when it comes from a Gilchrist or a Ponting it's a different matter. But then, Australians are in a good position not to take sport too seriously, because Australia normally wins. When England briefly recaptured the Ashes in 2005, the British public reacted to the unfamiliar scent of victory with an orgy of crowing, drinking and sneering at backpackers, which only made the subsequent mauling in the return series all the more embarrassing.

And if you had to sum up the experience of being a British comic in Australia, the parallel with sport is quite a handy one. In my experience Aussie crowds are happy to get the upper hand on you, but equally happy to take a bit of a kicking. The aggression of some British clubs is not really evident here, just as the general aggression level in society is noticeably lower. (The recent scandal over ‘binge drinking' in this country has been amusing to observe, for a British visitor; what passes for drunken violence over here would barely get you thrown out of school in the UK. We don't call it a bad night of binge drinking unless more than half the population of the town is reported dead the next morning.)

That's probably the bottom line: Australian comedy - maybe Australian art in general - tends to be less confrontational because that, broadly speaking, is the way people are with one another. Naturally, this has cons as well as pros. The very fact that British society is so introverted, uptight, tense and aggrieved has resulted in a magnificent, defiant legacy of pop music, comedy, film and literature, which is still the envy of Australians and indeed most of the New World. But the flipside is that while Brits are hard at work in grey, freezing buildings composing all this stuff, Aussies are exchanging repartee over a barbecue or barracking for opposite teams at the footy without wanting to kill one another. And all this from a country which started out as the place we sent society's most anti-social individuals. Perhaps that is the longest-running Anglo-Aussie joke of them all.

This was originally published in 2008