What ever happened to the Mo Show which Barry Humphries had roaring plans to stage in 1966? Roy Rene, aka Mo, beloved slapstick vaudeville clown and folk hero. Humphries not the first or the last Dada dandy to blow the Mo Trumpet. Mo’s face later used as a Nimrod poster, welded onto experimental theatre by Martin Sharp, lover of Magritte and the Happening. Ironic (actually when I think about it not ironic at all), that it was the serious young Max Harris, surrealist poet/novelist/publisher, who first thrust Mo onto the dandies.
Mo’s Memoirs, published by Reed and Harris in 1945, purporting to be the autobiography of Roy Rene, was ghosted by poet Elisabeth Lambert and edited by the inimitable Max Harris. The sitting of a folk hero within the experimental, not unlike Nolan’s Kelly series, exemplifies the pioneering and patriotic Modernism Reed and Harris, out of Heide, were producing in war-time Australia. Reed and Harris blazed trails. The lurching stream of Roy’s consciousness, inducing profound ennui, is a killer combo, which some scholars (me) argue Beckett stole for Waiting for Godot:
It was then I lost one of my front teeth. It was just that one had grown slightly over the other … been told it was lucky to gave (sic) a gap in front. Actually I don’t believe in luck … Temperance Hall, they wouldn’t have me for a gift. If you mention beer they gave you the sack, and no telling blue jokes either … The Oriental … The Royal Mail … Wonderful counter lunch … slap our shilling down on the counter and they’d never guess there was no more where that had come from.
Lambert knows her stuff, racketing me from existential boredom to nausea when Roy’s manager calls him ‘Jew Boy’ he then in Blackface: ‘I’d never thought of being a Hebrew comic. It just simply had never occurred to me,’ Roy explains, until in 1911 he saw the American Jewish comic Julian Rose performing the hooked nose stage Jew. Whiteface, beard, baggy pants, bowtie, spats. Oy Vey. Mo appears.
Max came late to the editing process. Mo’s Memoirs delayed by Ern Malley. Max publishing the Darkening Ecliptic, poems written in his own quasi-surrealist style, hoaxed by the lads, trouncing the jokers. Ern categorically the product of unconscious genius Max announced, inscribing an imaginary Modernist poet into literary history. Max’s distraction that year/our blessing. The duelling Lambert (Roy) and Harris voices freakish and extraordinary. Her monologues/his editorial interjections typed up in italics for us to see! Seconds before the book goes to print, Max stamps the Reed and Harris imprimatur onto the ramblings of Roy:
It may seem pretentious to say this of a supposed comedy man, but we do see something of our own spluttering elemental; selves … the real genius behind ‘Mo’ and the link by which it is possible to join his name with that of Chaplin.
Charlie Chaplin, so adored by French writers that Sartre and crew named their mag Les Temps Modernes after his film, an arty icon, not unlike Mo. Although it was Mo’s audience not the clown on the mind of Sidney Nolan, Reed and Harris’ designer, in ‘45, thinking about what we Australians laugh at, catching ghoulish elemental selves in sideshow mirrors, painting ‘Giggle Palace’.
By the early 1960s, Harris had a new publishing venture with Geoffrey Dutton. Sun Books, nicking the cheap paperback concept from Penguin for our writers, subverting our bourgeois expectations of plot. Pages printed blank, upside down or as with their edition of Thea Astley’s The Slow Native leaping fabulously from page 32 to 65 (Sun Books much sought after now by discerning collectors). Max, however, on the hunt for a new existential clown, Mo being dead if not forgotten.
In the wings of the Tivoli back in ’45, Max recalls for the Bulletin (25 August 1962), watching Roy transform into Mo, ‘analysing’ rapid fire ad-libbing, Max still stewing about the strictures radio imposed on Mo by hack scriptwriters in the 1940s. Mo’s genius, Max declares, on show only in those unrecorded, unscripted LIVE performances, another brilliant Harris argument, like the unconscious, which cannot be disproved!
Max found his new clown by accident one night in Adelaide relaxing in front of the telly watching Grame Kennedy LIVE from Melbourne. Graeme Kennedy. Of course! Whether I find Kennedy funny isn’t the point. LIVE television. Inserting the folk into culture. Pure anarchy. Theatre, Harris swotted preemptively, was DEAD. (You can read about Kennedy yourself in actor Graeme Blundell’s biography. Ring me in fact and I’ll give you a package deal on the Kennedy and Sharp bios.)
You could say Mo haunted Max: what he saw from the wings and all the stuff left unsaid. No one wanted to talk about it. Barry’s Mo Show a fag end thought as told to Jeane Pratt of the Jewish News backstage, probably drunk. Blundell, while finding parallels between Kennedy and Mo, deftly avoids the problem. John Bell, co-founder of Nimrod, speechless in his memoirs, unable to even mention their production of ‘The Young Mo’, 1977, scripted by Steve J. Spears, starring Gary McDonald.
Max finally blew his gasket in the pages of the Bulletin (where else), 15 July 1980, asking why a Jewish Australian performed the ‘Yiddish Uncle Tom?’ Mo was playing to ‘racially bigoted audiences’ Max said, before we were at war with Hitler and our greatest authority on patriotic laughter Smith’s Weekly suddenly didn’t think Jewish people really funny after all. ‘Giggle Palace.’ Mo the mirror to our grotesque selves. Dear Max, couldn’t leave Mo in ‘a situation of self-abasement’, inventing ‘Defiant Comedy’, which others might call the Theatre of Cruelty:
There he’d be leering, spitting, expostulating, celebrating every vulgarity in a society rich only in inhibitions, self-delusions and respectable hypocrisies … The audience laughing at the worst of themselves … The honest Vaudeville belly laughs were mixed up with something else, something dangerous and unnerving. I could read this not only in the performance but in Mo himself. It took him 30 seconds to switch off after he left the stage. He had no affection for the audience.
Good morning Jane
Hearing from you makes me realise how badly I need to catch up with you and chat. So much happening at present and for you, I hope.
I’m in Rome at present, home Nov 9, I will ring shortly after
My best
Geoff
Australian anti-semitism is not often acknowledged, let alone explored, so good for you, madam. We rejected as an immigrant the arguably greatest philosopher of the C20th, Karl Popper, twice, in the fifties and in the thirties, because he was Jewish. On the first occasion he was escaping the Nazis. In Goroke lived Frederick Tobin affectionately known in the town as ‘Hitler’ on account of his anti-semitic social and professional life. Tobin, the only person in Australia convicted of holocaust denial, had generous patrons. He had also 2 mailing lists and one of those lists would send some very high profile (think socialite) Australians scuttling for dark recesses were they ever to come to life. Our anti-semitism took a big hit from the holocaust, but it survived. currently it thrives thanks to the zionist extremists in Israel and their enablers. Israel may be the most anti-semitic country in the world.
Sorry, meant also to say well done for talking about it. Last three sentences very nice. They were Max’s, I assume, but good on you for knowing about them and sharing! BTW not so sure Max did have the last laugh re Ern Malley.