I grew up in a different degeneration. My heroes were not bumper, nor did they come from university, and kick on to the ABC. My heroes were shy sheet metal workers of Raglan St., East Preston. My comedians were bloated bus drivers of foggy Coburg.

In short, my comic inspirations came from the cheap stage of life. An unending script written by blind pensioners, snarly lolly shop men with bunions all over them. Ferocious barley sugar suckers. Idiot lawnmower repairers who keep back their nightmares like weeds.

As I feebly turned the pages of this spin-off book-of-the-show, it dawned on me that I’d lived too long. I felt like Spike Milligan stuck in Nhill. I was workshopping No Exit by Sartre on Saturday night. I was lost. They were found!

The flyleaf is not exactly written by Lenny Bruce. A quote from a beaut poem by Longfellow is just sort of chucked there for a laughless laugh, if that is possible.

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

Underneath which we read:

‘May I have a window seat please?’ attributed to R. Trimbole, Final Words, 1984.

The thing wrong with this book is its smart-arseness. As a practising smartarse myself, I know what I’m talking about. Early on there’s a photograph of a drowned man with his hands roped behind his back; the caption reads ‘While the rest of Sydney sweltered today in 32C heat, this lucky anti-drugs campaigner was spotted by our reporter taking a refreshing dip at Bondi Beach’. Man, that really killed me!

Of course anything’s a goer if there’s a bob in it, but this book is exactly as funny as Channel 10 Eyewitness News.

What’s wrong with that, Dickins, you cry.

The only real interpretation of comedy is laughter, I think Buster Keaton said that. Would D-Generation send up Buster Keaton? You bet your sweet Kool Mints they would. Anything’s up for grabs, this book stammers.

You definitely get the feeling the whole thing has been clagged together over a clarety weekend. I have enjoyed D-Generation on the tell; but this book gave me a mild case of ‘the nowheres’. (A disease one picks up from bad reads.)

As for the authors, John Alsop, Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, Andrew Knight, Rob Sitch, and Magda Szubanski, they all need to have a good listen to the street, read Lennie Lower, and make new friends.