Crack Up or Crack Apart
When the world gets grim, you’ve only got two choices: crack up or crack apart.
After days of heavy headlines and the suffocating weight of politics and history, sometimes the wisest thing we can do is pause, pour a cuppa, and remember to laugh. Yet I suspect many have gone past that point.
Australia has always been a country of people who crack up, crack a tinny, crack a joke, and move on. But even we are weary of watching our nation and our world crack apart.
Today I want to talk about the birth and death of humour - how the left lost what little they had, and how humour itself has shifted. Because when laughter dies and mockery takes over, humanity has lost its soul. And sadly, too many governments are legislating joy out of our lives.
Think of Dave Allen, one of Ireland’s finest comedians. Criticised for swearing, he came back swinging, funnier than ever. Would he get away with it today? Hard to say. But back then, it was brilliance.
Some of the sharpest, most enduring humour was forged in the darkest times, like diamonds under pressure. The Irish, with their knack for laughing through centuries of hardship, set a gold standard. Their self-deprecating wit turned famine and strife into stories that sting and heal all at once.
Across history, others followed the same pattern. Blackadder Goes Forth spun the grim tragedy of the First World War trenches into biting satire. Lines like, “We’re in the stickiest situation since Sticky the Stick Insect got stuck on a sticky bun,” land because they mock the futility of war while winking at human resilience. And they are just silly.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, pure genius, blends medieval chaos with absurdism, skewering authority without cruelty. Born in the post-war ‘70s, it laughed at the establishment with skepticism rather than malice.
Looney Tunes, Depression-era escapism, gave audiences Wile E. Coyote’s endless Acme failures ... a cartoon middle finger to despair, showing you could get flattened and still chase the next Road Runner. Pretty much like Aussies after the latest bushfire, flood, rat plague or election.
Robin Williams, during the Vietnam years, humanised soldiers with manic, heartfelt comedy in Good Morning, Vietnam, smuggling truth past censors while making audiences laugh. And Fawlty Towers? Basil’s self-inflicted disasters turn British stiff upper lip into a laugh, showing that self-deprecation and absurdity are universal coping mechanisms.
What ties them together is magic: these creators laughed at the human condition, not just easy targets.
Which ( finally ) brings me to my message for today.
Modern social media snark often masquerades as comedy, but research confirms what the greats knew intuitively: humour that reflects shared struggle and self-awareness builds resilience, while cruelty and mockery isolate.
It was the same for soldiers in the trenches of the First World War. Diaries from that time show a stream of gallows humour: jokes about mud, lice, rations, even death itself. Not because it was funny - but because if you didn’t laugh, you would go mad. Psychologists call it “gallows humour.” Soldiers called it survival.
Which brings us to a darker truth. When humour disappears, resilience goes with it.
Look around today, and you see it. Outrage everywhere. Anger without release. Some parts of our culture - particularly on the left - seem to have forgotten how to laugh, especially at themselves. They carry the heavy load of moral seriousness but have lost the comic relief that makes seriousness bearable. Without laughter, people snap. They burn out. They despair.
The murder of Charlie Kirk is a brutal reminder. Here was a man speaking and debating - ordinary acts in a free society – and for that he was killed. It’s shocking, but it proves why humour isn’t optional. Too many outraged, humourless people make for a dangerous world.
And despair is dangerous. That's where the Aussie spirit kicks back in.
With this one as Minister for Energy. 🤣🤣 https://t.co/yIxyngHkXv
— Aus Stats (@JacksAUstats) September 12, 2025
That’s why people love the Dusty Gulch dispatches and the running joke of the Acme Shed from Looney Tunes. In the cartoons, the Acme Shed was a magical warehouse of absurd contraptions - jetpacks, anvils, giant mallets - that always blew up in Wile E. Coyote’s face. Yet somehow, he dusted himself off and carried on.
Getting knocked down but bouncing back.
Dusty Gulch is much the same: a place where the laws of sense bend, penguins protest, and kangaroos fly biplanes. It’s absurd, yes - but it’s also a refuge. Because in the real world, the anvils are falling hard and fast. Sometimes the only way to carry on is to laugh through the smoke.
One thing’s for sure: if we forget how to laugh, the anvils will flatten us.
But if we can still crack a joke and let out a belly laugh in the face of misery, then maybe, just maybe, we can stand back up again.
Because make no mistake: if those who consider themselves social justice warriors continue to treat life as a problem to be solved with outrage alone, if they refuse to accept hardship as a fact of existence, society itself risks disintegration.
Humour will vanish, replaced only by cruelty, mockery, and the policing of laughter. A humourless, defiant, intolerant culture doesn’t just kill jokes - it kills resilience, empathy, and the very joy that makes life bearable.
