In the days following John Clarke’s death in 2017, his elder daughter, Lorin, went to his city postbox to clear his mail. As usual, it was stuffed to the gills with letters and envelopes, books and magazines. John was an enthusiastic correspondent, often exchanging letters with family and friends in New Zealand. He also bought endless books and maps, subscribed to a stack of periodicals such as the London Review of Books, the New Yorker, The Oldie, The Spectator and Private Eye, and received many unsolicited scripts and tickets to red-carpet events he never went to.
When Lorin got back to her car, she saw that one large envelope was addressed to her. It contained a ring binder from her rural primary school. Written on the spine in Biro were the words: How to return a named, sealed envelope, by John Clarke.
Excursions or other school requests all asked parents to return the attached permission slip, and the money, in a named, sealed envelope. The binder was full of these envelopes.
The first one, written in John’s careful handwriting, reads simply:
Lorin Clarke’s book club money in a named, sealed envelope, as you might expect.
Others read:
Lorin Clarke’s book club money in a nominated, fixed receptacle.
Lorin Clarke’s music money for one ticket for her mother, whose name for the moment eludes me.
Lorin Clarke’s permission to leave home and live in the mountains.
Lorin writes in Would That Be Funny?, her new family memoir: “To anybody who knows the work of John Clarke, the envelopes fit right into his oeuvre, playing with language, hinting at politics, and making gentle fun of officialdom and bureaucracy.”
Primary school was about the time Lorin noticed that people began asking her, “‘What’s he like at home? Is he always funny?’ I came to realise they were asking if he was how they imagined him.” The question became central to the book.
“The answer was, by the way, yes. He was funny at home. He was outrageously, consistently, shockingly, will-I-ever-breathe-again hilarious. Humour leaked into almost everything, including arguments he had with his teenage daughters, for whom it was infuriating to fight a smile, mid-argument, to not cave in the face of his amused smuggery. I distinctly remember laughing and stomping my foot at the same time.
“The answer to the other question, whether he was exactly who you thought he was when you watched him on the telly, is also most likely yes. I used to try the opposite thought experiment and consider whether I’d like his work if he wasn’t my father. My answer? I enjoy The Games and Clarke and Dawe, but in my experience, when it came to conversation, the man was a virtuoso.”
Moving account
Would That Be Funny?, as might be expected from an acclaimed writer in her own right – Lorin is the creator of plays, podcasts, children’s books, and has worked on the TV series Bluey – is a funny and often moving account of a man, public and private, his life and career. But central to the book is the family, and their “offensively idyllic” early life in a semi-rural suburb north of Melbourne.
The book is interspersed with digressions and glossaries: the dramatis personae and their nicknames (Jaype, Noina, Narz and Nutce, as well as in-laws WFF, Nevama, Charlie Boy and Gina de Babe), “famboliant” terms (used only within the family), and emails between John and his daughters, rife with wit and silliness and love.
Despite his life story being so well known, the memoir also contains a few surprising revelations. Were it not for a series of serendipitous moments, for instance, John might never have become a comic writer and performer adored by two nations. No Fred Dagg, no Clarke and Dawe, no The Games, no movies such as Death in Brunswick. He might have become a very funny teacher if not for encouragement from his future in-laws, Charlie and Jean McDonald, to try something else.
John had first met their daughter, Helen, in 1972 in England, where he was living as a long-haired, unemployed university drop-out. They met through Michael McDonald (no relation), brother of New Zealand actor Ginette McDonald – who had earlier got John an acting job on The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and later became famous as Lyn of Tawa. Michael had met Helen while on a language course in Italy.
In Australia, Charlie and Jean welcomed John when he visited them in Victoria, despite his distinct lack of prospects and Helen being university-educated, a trained artist and bilingual. He told them he had loved doing stage shows in Wellington, but that clearly wasn’t a job. They assured him that performing could be a career. He said he hadn’t “had the brains” to think of anything long term. They were teachers; perhaps he could always retrain as a teacher. Charlie said to him, “You’d shit in, John.” He meant, says Lorin, not just in teaching, but in anything he tried his hand at. It suddenly seemed silly not to go back to New Zealand and give performing a go. This conversation was the beginning of what became Fred Dagg.
Two other serendipitous moments stand out. The first was around 1975. By then, he had already become famous as Fred Dagg. (The opening of the Country Calendar episode with a lot of Trevs that launched him to stardom was shot at his and Helen’s first house in Northland.) But he was ambivalent about a chat show he’d been offered, so visited a New Zealand TV executive he knew to ask what he should do. To his surprise, the man told him he should leave New Zealand.
“Nobody here understands what you’re trying to do. You know the history of humour and you’ve got what you want to do in your head. You write it, you perform it, you know exactly how it should look. I know you’d rather stay here but I think that’s what you have to do.”
The second serendipitous moment occurred in the late 1980s. British comedian Peter Cook, who was in Melbourne for the city’s comedy festival and whose work John could quote verbatim, had seen his newspaper columns of mock transcripts of political interviews. During a golf game, Cook asked, “You thought about doing them on television?”
Crossing the tasman
A lot of factors had eventually taken John across the ditch. In the documentary Thanks For Your Time, someone notes that, after a record-selling album and an unprecedented national tour, he felt the “oppression” of success in New Zealand.
Actor Sam Neill says Australia “liberated” him. Helen had already left her teaching job to paint and do her master’s degree on her way to becoming an academic. Ads John did for Qantas kept taking him back to Australia, where people would offer him work on TV and radio. Besides, Helen was pregnant. In 1977, they made the move to Australia, and in August Lorin was born. In 1981, Lucia arrived.
Lorin says the lure of Australia was irresistible. “It’s just a bigger pond, and he never really was terribly interested in going to a bigger one than Australia. He could carve himself a niche. And when he went to Channel Nine with the Clarke and Dawe idea, he said, ‘I don’t want to do a monologue’. It was too much like Fred Dagg. I think creatively to a dialogue. There’s the two-ness of things.”
John said that because his parents had a difficult marriage and eventually divorced, he could always see that each of them was both right and wrong, so saw that duality – a point and its opposite – instantly.
Luckily, he had a perfect partner and foil in Helen. “She met him at a time in his life where he was lost, really,” says Lorin. “And finding her seems to have refined his thinking on certain things.
“And Mum, being a support and she’s emotionally really cluey, was also quite a brilliant kind of editor. The way I see it is he appreciated the impact of her more-thoughtful approach to his work and I think you can probably see that as he develops as a creative person.”
The memoir suggests, however, that the constant public attention and his inability to say no could be trying for the family.
“Yeah. I think partly what the memoir project is about a little bit for me personally is that there was an accidental asymmetry in the family, which was fame.
“In our family, Charlie Boy [Helen’s dad] was the celebrity. I think a family that was so democratic, everyone was considered a meaningful, moving part of the same thing, and [John] did too.
“He loved his audience and respected them a great deal, was always interested in other people. “But then through no fault of his own really, the outside world encroached on that dynamic in a way that was sometimes very frustrating.”
Out of the blue
And then came the shock of John’s death in 2017, when he was just 68, while walking up a bush track in the mountains west of Melbourne.
“It was a massive shock to all of us. It came out of nowhere,” says Lorin. Though in the fullness of hindsight, there were signs. “Like he’d felt really unwell and he’d hurt himself playing golf on the side of his chest, where you retrospectively go, ‘Ah’. So his beautiful heart was a bit of a ticking time bomb. There are people in the family history who’ve had similar things. But not his parents. They lived forever.
“Grief is kind of universal, but it’s also incredibly specific. That did mean that we didn’t have to see him struggle after a heart attack or maybe he lose some of his mental capacity, and so on. But then people who do get that also get to say goodbye.”
Yet when he died she had this sense that they were going to be okay. “And we were shocked by it. I feel like it was all of the work that they [John and Helen] did. Not that it felt like work, I’m sure, but to be parents who gave their children that sense of emotional security.”
How much was his style as a father a deliberate response to his own childhood? His relationship with his father, Ted, was difficult. He had suffered in the war, and his mother Neva’s true love died.
“John was always really respectful and loving about his parents, called them remarkable. He described his parents’ marriage as a disaster. He said he took what was nutritious from his parents’ personalities and who they were, and left a lot of it behind.
“I think partly the reason he could do that was because he met Mum and Mum’s family. He really did say, ‘I didn’t know you could be like that.’ But also he was naturally great at [parenting]. He was so fun and loving.
“And you never felt that we weren’t on this madcap adventure, through the creative project that was life, and life, work, family, all were sort of meshed into one. But you can experience love and pride and still have complex responses to that.” And, she says, confirming a longstanding belief about John, “he used to say that his complex response was just to put it in a box, and the box was anxiety about flying.”
Family first
It was said about John that “he could have done anything he liked, but he chose family – wisely”. What was he most proud of, project-wise, other than his family?
“I think he always had a soft spot for The Games. That was a gorgeous programme to work on, the people in the cast and the crew. It was a lot of hard work. He was totally wrecked by the end of it all. He loved working with Ross Stevenson, who he co-wrote it with. They would just laugh and laugh and laugh.
“He was given the degree by Victoria University for his poetry book as well, and that was a project of love, because he loved poetry.
“As for the family, I think that’s true. He chose family, but he chose his work, too. His work and creative projects, that drove him in lots of ways; he didn’t see the distinction.”
What might he be doing now? “The projects he worked on where he had a good editor I think he just adored. He put out the Clarke and Dawe interviews on YouTube and he had that access to his audience.” The videos are still popular in places like Finland, she says, people asking which minister was saying “the front fell off”.
“It wasn’t the event, it was the framework, in which he could do whatever he wanted.”
Did anything get him angry? Lorin smiles. “If somebody wasn’t nice to Mum, that was fun. If the system didn’t work, it irritated him, if it didn’t serve the people it was supposed to serve, he was allergic to that.
“He had no time for that undemocratic approach – not even in a political way; he just couldn’t resist bucking that system, even if it was parking letters.”
Things you don’t want to be accused of in the Clarke family
- Giving someone an illness. If you so much as sniff, there will be a Royal Commission into where you’ve been, who you’ve seen, what symptoms they were displaying, and whether you should have been wearing full PPE.
- Not making the tea when it’s your turn.
- Any kind of syntactical error. You could be telling our parents, “So then me and Banksy painted the moon purple—” and you’d be interrupted by someone saying, “Banksy and I.”
- Folding the cover of a book all the way back.
- Scaring off an animal.
- Being the reason there isn’t a frisbee in the car.