Maybe it was because I'd just been discussing Bram Stoker's Dracula, but when I was introduced to Murray Bramwell — he was a postgraduate student just arrived from New Zealand, I was a lecturer in English — I said, 'Welcome Bram'.
Not a disastrous gaffe and Murray quickly and amiably helped me to make the adjustment but it looked for an instant as if I was cheekily but clumsily trying to invert his entire name (Welbram?) and this was enough to cause me a severe attack of the blushes to which my doggedly tan-resistant pallor succumbed in those youthful days with embarrassing alacrity.
We became good friends despite an age difference my way of a decade or so. Starting his new life in Adelaide, Murray wrote memorably for Adelaide Review and met David Matthews (related? Yes, eldest son) who was enjoying a postgraduate gap year busking in the Mall and pondering his options.
Witty and loving a laugh themselves, David and Murray were fascinated by the then flourishing art of stand-up comedy and satire and decided to have a shot at seeing what made it and its growing army of practitioners tick. And so they produced Wanted for Questioning: Interviews with Australian Comic Artists (Allen and Unwin 1992). In the rather prescient introduction to this book Murray and David write:
'[H]umourists and comedians have to become experts on human behaviour and human institutions. They hold a fun-house mirror up to nature and reveal the incongruities, discrepancies and absurdities they find. Their territory is the gap between what we wish and what we ruefully know. In the late 20th century that gap has become the abyss ...
'The earth is deluged with electronic data on such a scale that meaning becomes secondary. Never have we needed guidance more, never has it been less in evidence. This century has had so many demagogues, prophets and dangerous loonies grabbing for the steering wheel that we distrust the very idea of leadership. Recent history ... presents us with a seemingly relentless pageant of grief ...
'Comedy brings relief and shoves a stick into the spokes of manifest destiny at the same time ...'
One of the 30 comedians, satirists, cartoonists and writers they interviewed was John Clarke. 'I first met John Clarke five years ago,' Murray recalls in his 1992 introduction to the interview, 'even though we grew up in the same town in New Zealand and for a while went