It's hard to think of many mainstream Hollywood films in recent years that have actually managed to be riotously funny, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that most CD-ROM titles have about as many gags as `Learning C on the Macintosh'. Trying to define why something is funny is a dubious business and probably best left to gifted humanitarians like television reviewers and John Howard. But since we're dealing with a new medium of entertainment here it's probably worthwhile to look at what interactive multimedia can do with comedy that no other medium can, what's turned up so far, and why the comedy that does appear is often lame and incidental.

Tortured Cats

Firstly, it must be said that multimedia creatives have thus far been the kind of guys that populate Battlestar Galactica conventions, have double bagged X- Men collections and enjoy torturing cats with stuff made up from their junior chemistry sets.

Enduring undergraduate humour in computer games oddly resembles having some programmer recite Monty Python sketches to you at a party in a whining, nasal tone when you're pissed and defenseless. Now, with the arrival of Hollywood creative types on the scene, we can expect to see much of the Gag-Writing-By-Committee that tends to leave movie comedies strangely joke free and prone to the sort of dumb theory quoted at the top of the page.

Tame Innuendo
There have been some gloriously funny games. An early version of Leisure Suit Larry, a brilliantly cynical, 4-bit descent into the hell of a single man with a Travolta suit and rancid breath, was the first thing to make me laugh out loud over a keyboard. As Larry, you spend your time ducking crack gangs, winos and pimps, trying the whole time to get laid.

`Larry' pioneered a kind of comedic technique that interactive multimedia excels in: the Jack-in-the-Box trick. You click on something (a door, a character, a urine specimen) and something completely unexpected jumps out and tears your skin off. In LSL you click into a dark alley and hey presto, you get murdered by a crack gang. Well, you don't expect that in a computer game. Later versions of `Larry' had slicker graphics, but the hard edges had been replaced by tame Benny Hill innuendo.

Cheap Sleazy Lines
Something about the crudeness of the earlier `Larry', works. The script has a smart- arsed, crass appeal which complements the cheesy graphics. As Larry, you can deliver appalling, cheap sleazy lines in a bar to a digital babe that you know you'd never make in the real world. Interestingly, most of the `Larry' fans I know are women. It gives them no end of pleasure to roleplay a nightlife lowlife as an act of revenge and a chance to indulge in some digital crossdressing. It would be interesting to see a game where the roles were reversed. Australian comedian Wendy Harmer has come up with an idea called `Are You Alone?', a kind of Sim Singles Night, where you're a woman over 30 with a body clock on burnout. You've got to navigate through a landscape of commitment phobics, co-dependants and sleaze buckets and somehow find Mr Right.

Bring Out The Gimp
Character identification or empathy is an often used comedic weapon in cinema. In Pulp Fiction, the hillbillies bring out the Gimp and it's funny because we can share Bruce Willis' revulsion and horror (the idea of sharing anything with Bruce is, in itself, quite revolting, and so we are granted even deeper insight into his emotions at the time). Interactive multimedia offers the chance to go beyond empathic responses to characters into the realms of actually assuming the characters. The comic potential in this is enormous. Just imagine what you could do if you could borrow the body of Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher or Michael Jackson's chimp, without fear of consequence and you'll know what I mean.

The Secret of Comedy
As Anon. once said, the secret of comedy is....timing...which goes a long way to explaining how hard it is to make people laugh at a CD-ROM when the data rate is capped at 300K per second, the game code is slow and the digitized actors are relatives. Best sellers such as Myst and 7th Guest seem to have done away with the notion of comedy altogether for this reason, preferring to skirt around the medium's limitations as best they can.

Waiting around for the computer to deliver a predictable punchline can be a real drag for a media generation used to the rapid fire pace of The Simpsons. In any case, much of the action on CD-ROM is prosaic and literal. You see the taxi in HellCab. You wait for it to pull up, wait for the panels to roll by as you approach, click on the door, wait for it to open, enter the cab, turn around, click on Raoul, the driver and then wait for him to say something faintly amusing as you watch the audio play out of sync with his mouth. Then your carpal muscles pop out of your wrists from all this pointing and clicking and all you've done is enter a cab and talked to the driver. The `story' has been structured like this so you always feel you know where you are.

Meanwhile, back in Springfield, Marge has been imprisoned for shoplifting. This means there are no brownies for the local fete, which leads to a shortfall in revenue, so the town can't afford a statue of Jefferson. They settle for a cheaper one of Jimmy Carter instead and the town explodes into rioting and looting. All in 30 glorious seconds.

'Waiting around for the computer to deliver a predictable punchline can be a real drag for a media generation used to the rapid fire pace of The Simpsons'.

People are becoming more and more media literate; so familiar with the language of movies and TV they don't need the laborious plot set-ups or joke set-ups of the past. This is the real challenge for story based comedy in CD-ROM. To overcome the slow data rate and the feeling that the players must know where they are geographically at all times. With this approach to storytelling, there can be few surprises.

Stuffed Pegs
There have been some attempts at repackaging comedy on CD-ROM. Most notably with the US television show, Saturday Night Live, Spinal Tap and Monty Python's A Complete Waste of Time. The `Saturday Night Live' product can be held up as a textbook case in what a bad idea it is to try and stuff the square peg of TV comedy into the round hole of interactive multimedia. The idea to repackage this dated, tame material into CD-ROM, was probably to cash in on a perceived crossover market between computer nerds and comedy obsessives. It sucks.

The Spinal Tap and Monty Python products are more successful. They throw in some paraphernalia around the video footage, like outakes, cross-referencing and some Jack-in-the-Box tricks which are quite nice. But this just underlines how much better it would be to create comedy for the medium rather than to just repurpose existing material from another format.

The prognosis isn't good as more and more Hollywood types turn their baleful gazes towards the new media. Cross promotion, tie-ins and scriptwriting by committee with lawyers having the final say in what's funny and what's not will probably be the modus operandi in the near future, just as it is in the movies and TV. Organized religion and parents groups are looking more closely at new titles. In Australia, it is readily acknowledged that censorship and classification standards are far tougher on CD-ROMs than films or books.

Still, Ren and Stimpy somehow got through this process, as did the Naked Gun movies. It's not too much to hope for something that funny in CD-ROM for CD-ROM.

Richard Fidler is a director and animator in digital media and is currently making an entertainment CD-ROM. He used to be in comedy group The Doug Anthony Allstars, beloved of Christian Youth groups everywhere.

Australians are more and more inclined to feel that all politicians are corrupt, self-serving, dishonest bastards

Pollsters have long been telling us about two climbing trends in public opinion: Australians are more and more inclined to feel that all politicians are corrupt, self-serving, dishonest bastards. Our elected leaders are right up there with child molesters and journos in public esteem. People rightly or wrongly have come to regard our politicos as a kind of non-human evil species that hatches itself from muck encrusted pods on the lawns of Parliament House.

More alarmingly though, polls also reveal that the general public are appallingly ignorant about the way our democratic system works. Most people are hard pressed to name the Foreign Minister, let alone outline the role of the Senate in parliamentary democracy. In the absence of any kind of civics education, a lot of people just haven't bothered to acquaint themselves with our system of government. In other words, they hate it and don't understand it.

Back in 1979, Rod Cameron of ANOP once prepared a candid, private research report for the ALP, where he said this of the swinging voter:

They are basically ignorant and indifferent about politics. They vote on instinct for superficial, ill-informed and generally selfish reasons... They believe politicians are irrelevant charlatans, and that the country survives despite them.*

Maybe the swingers are right. Scandals involving abuse of superannuation and travel benefits by our politicians don't help. But since most human beings are corrupt, evil bastards then it seems a little unfair to single out politicians for abuse.

In any case, it's becoming harder for our system to afford this kind of glib cynicism. Parts of the electorate have become susceptible to the assorted political freaks and green-eyed monsters that have surfaced in the last few years with final solutions for the country that usually involve sticking a sheet on your head and placing a flaming cross on someone's front yard.

When people are feeling so disenfranchised and cranky, it's time to have a major public discussion about the system, to reacquaint ourselves with its basic principles and to carefully change the bits that don't work for us any more.

There are two things that could emerge from this constitutional overhaul that may improve the quality of our democracy and allow us all to feel like we have more of a stake in the current scheme of things. Firstly, the establishment of an Australian republic that replaces the Queen with an Australian citizen as our head of state. Secondly, a preamble to the constitution that briefly and elegantly states some common values and recognises prior aboriginal ownership of the land.

The British monarchy is becoming a meaningless institution for us. The current constitution was written to establish Australia as a dominion of the British Empire. At the time of Federation, the crown was indeed a symbol of national unity, more or less. This is no longer true for the majority of Australians who have expressed their preference for an Australian head of state for some years now.

The very process of reworking our constitution into a republican document may go a long way to revitalizing our democracy. A national civics lesson, if you like, although that sounds like as much fun as two weeks in Hawk's Nest with John Howard. If the convention doesn't degenerate into a mindless slanging match, then it will be good for all of us.

... a good president or head of state can play a truly meaningful role in a democracy

Presidents can't make us richer or improve our sex lives (well, not unless we ask them to, on a personal basis). But a good president or head of state can play a truly meaningful role in a democracy. A gifted one can heal divisions, set a good example and go some way to reconciling a country to its difficult history. Examples of this kind of thing abound. Vaclav Havel, the hippie playwright president of the Czech Republic, has gone a long way to help his people address the corrosive influence of 40 years of Stalinism. Nelson Mandela's generosity of spirit towards his former captors is another good example. During World War II the British Royals were able to inspire confidence and courage by sticking around in London during the blitz to cop the same bombardment that their subjects did.

But the British Royal family is incapable of fulfilling this kind of a role in Australia. They are inherently unable to reflect us at our best, speak meaningfully to us of our national aspirations or help to reconcile us with the darker aspects of our past. How could they be expected to? They don't even live here.

And then there's the issue of those silly little rules that govern eligibility for the job. When HM the Queen finally passes on to her well deserved rest, they may advertise for her replacement as our head of state in the Times. If so, the ad may well read

Position vacant, London: head of state for UK, Australia, NZ and others. Must be an Anglican and member of British Royal family. A woman will be appointed only if no male is eligible. Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Blacks, Chinamen, Australians and cattle need not apply.

A good preamble to our constitution could also breathe some life into our concept of citizenship

The rules for who gets to wear the crown and who doesn't are the legal by-product of King Henry VIII's need to rack up more divorces than Elizabeth Taylor. They have absolutely nothing to do with us and are incompatible with our own egalitarian values. Because by law only an Anglican can become King or Queen, Catholics and Jews are forbidden from becoming the head of state of Britain and therefore in Australia as well. This is hardly the thing that ought to be at the apex of an inclusive, participatory Australian democracy.

A good preamble to our constitution could also breathe some life into our concept of citizenship. The United States constitution and Declaration of Independence are powerful national symbols that unite just about every American. Their founding fathers had to sit down and figure out what it was that they were all about as a people, even if it was to agree to disagree. The Declaration of Independence contains this well known phrase

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The US has been called on to live up to these high minded ideals again and again, particularly when it has failed to extend these unalienable rights to African Americans. Why not set some high-minded goals of our own? Why not enshrine the values of liberty, equality, reconciliation with the original inhabitants and the right to follow a football code of your own choice, in a simple, concise preamble.

When the so-called 'race debate' (if you can call a media frenzy around a racist politician a 'debate') arrived on the scene in 1996, our leaders grasped for some core Australian concepts to unite us. They appealed to the Great Australian Traditions, like 'a fair go', 'tolerance' and 'mateship'. These are, I suppose, the Australian names for liberty, egality and fraternity, but who decided that these are our core values? When did we all sit down and talk about it? When did we vote to enshrine these ideals?

In our constitution there are no references to a fair go, tolerance and mateship. Neither are there any references to political parties, prime ministers and Aboriginal occupation of the land before the first fleet. In spite of this, the present constitution has functioned pretty well and delivered stable, accountable government since federation. But with declining faith in our political institutions coupled with widespread ignorance about the workings of the democratic process, some kind of spadework on the constitution is well overdue.

During the convention there'll be a lot of bluster and fear mongering from some monarchists. Some will claim that if we dare to replace the Queen with an Australian president, then Anzac biscuits will become illegal, Phar Lap's heart will spontaneously combust and we'll all be forced to have the Universal Price Code Symbol stamped on our foreheads.

The best argument we get from these guys is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it; the constitution has served us well for nearly a century and we shouldn't tamper with the damn thing or it may go off in our faces. That's not a bad point. But the candle wasn't 'broke' after centuries of use, yet we upgraded to the electric lightbulb all the same. Of course the people who do say "if it ain't broke don't fix it" tend to have black & white TVs and eight track cartridge players and they think Bert Newton is an exciting new talent.

Our constitution is like one of those giant, clunky computers from the fifties, with vacuum tubes, knobs and levers that took a team of experts brought in from somewhere else to operate. It's time to upgrade to a constitution that would be, to quote a phrase, for all of us.

*Quoted from Paul Kelly, The Hawke Ascendancy, Angus & Robertson 1984, p.86