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According to a spokesman for DAAS: "Skinheads are wimps and woosies who can't get girls. Most of them play dungeons and dragons too much and I defy you to find one that doesn't have a bum covered in pimples."
After touring the country - shocking audiences, aggravating townspeople and being all-round naughty boys - the Doug Anthony Allstars arrive back in their home city of Melbourne.
For the next three nights, they will play the National Theatre. It is the last leg of their national "Kids and Animals" tour but this afternoon, with the show only a few hours away, Tim Ferguson and Richard Fidler are busy rehearsing a new song while Paul McDermott continues his painting duties on a new backdrop.
Tim searches through his back-pack and, moving his Frederick Forsyth novel out of the way ("People think I read Kafka," he says. "I can't even spell it"), he pulls out a scrap of paper with the lyrics of the new song.
The new song is called "Joan Collins". Tim reads the lyrics out loud. Joan Collins is a transsexual and has been fooling the world for all these years. If you were dead, we wouldn't miss you/Even if you were a woman, we wouldn't kiss you.
Lyrics in hand, Tim sits at the piano in the back stage area. Richard is at his side strumming a guitar. There's a mention of Shirley Bassey. The guys decide to sing a line out of Goldfinger directly after it and start work on the riff from the James Bond theme.
Paul, still painting, shouts form the stage that he doesn't think the idea is working. Tim and Richard continue regardlessly. A lot of things they've tried in the past haven't worked but that's no reason to stop testing the water.
According to Tim, things are constantly dropped or rearranged every night. "Because we're constantly reinventing things and rewriting things and changing things, every night we'll be ripping out things," says Tim. "Try them out once or twice and if they don't work, just toss them."
A perfect example was one of Tim's jokes: Question - How many interrogators does it take to change a light bulb? Answer - I'll never tell, never. You'll have to cut my throat first.
"That was a joke that just blatantly didn't work," explains Tim. "I tried it once, I tried it twice and then it was cut from the show."
Richard: "To tell the truth, all three of us have our pet jokes that we think are funny but no one else in the world does at all. And no matter how many times they go over stone-cold, we keep putting them in the show, night after night."
Tim: "Richard always calls me the 'Jacques Cousteau of chicken curries' because that's a line I used one night."
Richard: "He used it in this routine about being on an aeroplane and Japanese people being so obsessed with photographing that they photographed their chicken curries. And he came up with Jacques Cousteau of chicken curries. It's just one of those classic Fergusonian tangents that he goes through. So now I always call him that and no-one understands. But it's good to have a few in jokes that we find funny."
And have they tried to cut down on the in jokes?
Tim: "Oh no. We have no obligation to our audience to make them laugh or to entertain them.
"We basically set up an atmosphere in which our people can have fun. Then it's up to them. We'll just say and do what we like on stage That's part of the ethos and that's what people like about us - the ability to take risks no matter how flamboyant, no matter how ridiculous.
"The bigger the risk, the more chance we'll take it. The dumber the idea, the more likely we'll approach it with all of our vigor and see if it will work. And a lot of the time the stuff we do will fail and die in the arse. So we try to get these huge zeppelins of humour up in the air and every once in a while, they'll just blow up in our faces.
"But audiences can at least see that risks are being taken and someone is doing something new - that at least we are doing something different. Whether it works or not doesn't matter because they know that in three minutes we'll be doing something that does work."
Taking risks has meant divorcing themselves from the pre-occupation with offending audiences. Or, rather, DAAS set out to specifically offend, whether it be through attacking icons or presenting audiences with non-comic shows.
According to Tim, audience in the United Kingdom were first introduced to DAAS through a sci-fi thriller entitled Bland. There was little comic content in the programme and people were quite surprised when the three guys started touring as a comedy act.
Tim says he personally feels more comfortable working with non-comic material. "It means you can get your teeth into something with a bit more meat," he says. "Most of the comedy stuff we do is very transient - every 30 seconds we like to change topics. Consequently it's a very disposable thing. Every joke is like a Kleenex - you toss it away and do something else. Whereas, working on a book or a series of books that have a darker intent and a whole story, you can actually go and get into things more and approach ideas with a lot more detail."
In tackling so many styles and mediums early in their careers, the three DAAS members have set the foundations for easy transitions into other fields later on. In not stereotyping themselves as only comics, they might avoid the problems faced by the likes of Woody Allen and John Cleese when trying to move away from humour.
But, for the moment, they must deal with the problem everyone who has ever cracked a joke in public must face - confronting people who expect comedians to be funny every minute of every day. "Socially, it's a problem," says Richard. "People often approach you in a nightclub when you just want to enjoy yourself and not really worry about the fact that you're on television at all.
"People will often present themselves without introducing themselves - that will just present themselves in front of you - and stand there and expect you to entertain them."
"Quite often in a nightclub, it's like being a kick-bag," continues Tim. "People come up to you and tell you a joke that you've heard, and then they walk away again. I do think that Woody Allen and Cleese have a point that most comedians in real life aren't hysterically funny people.
"Certainly I know for a fact that the 'wags' at parties - the people who are the life of parties and put lamp-shades on their heads - tend to make lousy comics. They're the ones who are always encouraged by their friends: 'Oh, Barry, you should go on stage because you're just hysterical'. They go on stage and no one thinks they're funny.
"Comedians tend to work on their humour from a very different angle apart from just being spontaneously humorous. They tend to have an idea they want to get across. Also most really good humour comes from the dark side - you usually don't find the dark side with a lamp-shade on your head."
Richard: "Being in comedy… I don't know. I'm not a very nice person so much as I used to be anyway. Comedy makes you more horrible as a human being as you go on. You become more cranky, bitter, alienated."
Tim: "And it makes you a bit of a kleptomaniac of genuine experiences. Any experience that is deeply felt in my life, I just become a kleptomaniac of, and I just disregard it for its intrinsic value and I think, 'Mt God, can I make this funny?'. That's so true. 'My best friend just tried to shoot his mother.' Gee wiz - I wonder what that would look like. So things that should be important are eventually just pilfered from life and the important experiences, the landmark experiences of my life, simply become good punch lines."
Will that situation get worse once the ideas start to dry up?
"I can't see how we will ever dry up for material mainly because we don't write jokes passe," says Tim. "We just simply find a vaguely humorous idea and work on it until it seems funny.
"We never write comedy from talent. We do it from sheer hard work. We've never claimed to be funny - all we do is we make a fairly good representation of comedy. We're pretty good at pretending we're funny. We're not genuinely funny people or genuinely funny performers. Hard work will get you everywhere.
"What we're doing is just like running a fish and chip shop or a corner store - you have to work on it 24 hours a day all the time with no holidays. And if you keep working, you have to be successful.
"Talent has nothing to do with it. You don't need talent to get on anywhere. In fact, talent is just a hindrance because it makes you believe you've somehow been chosen. We've never been chosen. The only reason we are where we are is because we don't sleep."
"Yeah... so we've heard from everyone else we've talked to."
On the other end of the phone is Paul McDermott, who you probably know best as the Short And Nasty One. Like his two partners in the sacred cow abattoir that is DAAS live and on telly, Paul thankfully feels no desire to cloud interviews with overt stabs at Being Funny. When The Doug Anthony Allstars decide to talk about something, they're only too happy to do so intelligently. On the agenda today is the trio's first venture into print, a book that goes by the paradoxical title of Book, and a work that stands up (or rather sludges about in a mess of its own mucus) as a work that is challenging, provocative, periodically inspired as it is occasionally revolting and not a bad read at all once you get used tothe idea that its intent is not strictly comical. Bemusement, befuddlement, bewilderment and other things that start with "Be" and end in "Ment" are going to be the common reactions...
"We're aware of that. But it's the sort of book we wanted to write. It would have been very easy for us to sit down and write a book like a Young Ones type of thing, where you just run around and get a couple of photos and look wacky and stupid. But what we wanted to do was actually do a book, and do it in the same way as in our live shows, where we project a certain idea, to take the literary form and do something with that."
So you think there are recognisable traits, things in there that are still inescapably you lot...
"Yeah, I do actually. I think the underlying thoughts in the show are very similar to what we've tried to project in the book. It's more if you strip away the facade of the music and the action. What's being said on stage is sometimes very similar, as ideas, to what's being projected in the book. Obviously with the book you have a better way of saying things, a better way of putting things, of putting things in different contexts. And being for more subtle in what we can have a go at."
Five minutes from now, Tim Ferguson, the Tall One Quite A Few Girls Think Is A Bit Of All Right, will observe...
"I don't think anyone else could have written it. I think if someone was to pick it up and read it, they'd so there's a fair chance the Doug Anthony AIrstars wrote that."
So your sense of time and space remains undamaged, a large black duck will enter from the right and go "Quack" at the moment Tim really said that.
The book, which is short stories, raves, rambles, cartoons and tacked on one-line witticisms and white pearls of black wisdom held together with a reasonable tenuous narrative, is the first in a series of four. None of the rest have stories about leeches in them. Book has a horrible tale about some bloke who gets a leech up his nose. What's worse in that the story is true. It happened, last year, to a friend of Paul's.
"The whole book really is about parasites, and that's the most obvious indication of it."
A large black duck waddles from stage right, and shrugging off slight stage fright, coughs nervously. The weeks of readings, reheasals, voice classe, are coming to their climax. Straightening to face he crowds, the duck fluffs its wings and utters the most important words of its career.
"Woof".
(Crowd erupts, tomatoes land on stage, director self-immolates. "That's showbiz" says duck, and is offered own chat show.)
Hello for the third time, Tim. How keen are you on being taken seriously as writers aside from being comedians?
"Oh, well... Being taken seriously has never been something we've been worried about. We've written a book based on the principles of Antonin Artaud who just said if you want to do it, then you do it. His paintings were based upon the theory of ignoring the beholder. The beholder has nothing to do with beauty, which I think is quite an interesting concept. It's the some way we've written the book, where the reader has nothing to do with it at all. We've put as many stumbling blocks for the reader in there as we can, by changing styles quickly, and going from one extremity to the other so the reader really has to concentrate."
Book is currently the subject of court action in England, where after selling 30,000 copies in two weeks, it ran foul of Thatcher's party, dim-witted censorship. DAAS refused to release an edited version or put warning stickers on the cover, so to the Old Bailey it went. Defending them are the same solicitors who won the Sex Pistols the right to call an album Never Mind The Bollocks, which is sort of appropriate. Live, and in their role on the ABC's increasingly rampant Big Gig, the troupe are reknowned for their capacity to outrage.
Does that kind of reaction bother you?
"Well no, I don't think anyone who works in any field of art should worry about offending people. If you stand up and say 'I play with my own shit' someone's going to be offended. If you stand up and say 'You shouldn't play with your own shit, someone's going to be offended. You really can't win. You should just do what you think is funny or what you think is good. As Oscar Wilde once said, there's no such thing as good and evil art. Only good and bad".
Tim goes on to explain, in his chatty and cheerful style, that the next moves for The Doug Anthonys include a movie, another TV series, a record, more books, videotapes, a children's book about a girl with a magic umbrella and a role-playing game. He may be joking about one of these. He also explains that Book contains references and parodical tilts to/at Kafka, Ginsberg and others. "That story of the existentialists that Richard's done, that cartoon, it's full of all these wild allegories of various artists, painters, political figures and musicians. If you look closely you'll see quite a few familiar images."
Er, yeah. But what if you're enormously thick and uneducated and think a Ginsberg is what a ship runs into when the captain's pissed?
"Did you enjoy the cartoon?"
Sure.
"Well, there you go. See, everything we do is designed to appeal to as many levels as possible."
Thank you Tim. Hello Richard Fidler (Guitarist And Eternal Victim.).
Tim was off about all these media you're hoping to conquer. Are you worried that people will see you as just another comedy act?
"Perhaps. I don't know. We hope that people would see us as a group that continued ally try to surprise. That's another reason we think it's appropriate the book comes out now. People see us, as you said, as TV performers and comedy performers. We constantly seek to surprise, all the time. So yes, it does worry us that we're going to be pigeonholed as a comedy act. Our endeavours are very wide and diverse."
As the most musical Allstar, Tim informs that the debut album will be mainly songs we already know, love or are rather perplexed by, while the second might be strange, off-the-wall, possibly a serious musical effort. And why not?
But what will you be doing in ten years?
"I've got no idea. We plan things about a year in advance at the most. I don't know, I think we'd like to be running a small country. Some small European principality, like Luxembourg, or maybe even Denmark. The trouble is, there'll be a hideous power struggle between the three of us. We'll try and run it like Napoleon ran the second republic, with first consul and second consul and so on, but there'll be a fight over who gets to be what and the other two will be killed."
There's a power struggle in Melbourne. Tim grabs the receiver.
"The theme of Denmark will be'Someone is rooting in the state of Denmark'."
Richard regains control.
"Very witty, Tim. Anyway, you can put that down. We'll be running Denmark, I think. It's nice and cold, Copenhagen's quite pretty and a bit gloomy, so that'll suit us. And the Danish have no sense of hurnour. Name one great Danish humourist, Andrew. Come on, one."
I'm still working on that one, and still watching with growing amazement as the Doug Anthony Allstars take on more of the world. Really, comedy must be like shooting rats in a barrel for them now. (They recently won the Pick Of The Fringe prize at the Edinburgh festival ahead of five hundred other acts for the third year running.) The transition to the printed word has been made, and made successfully. As a statement of what they're about and what they're attempting, it's more Mine Field than Mein Kampf, but step carefully and the rewards are there.
At last, a book our mothers will hate.