A Barry Dickins sketch, playlet, or what you will, was recently featured as half of a double bill at the Staples Theatre, King’s Cross, entitled “Yeah, but is it funny?’(well, that’s sticking your neck out a bit, Lord knows; I am charitable enough to suppose the title was fobbed off on him by management) to which the tempting reply is ‘No it ain’t’, comics should always avoid whimsical or shy-making wheezes sprung on them by others. Booksellers, perforce, are excused this stricture; they have to signpost the lighter stuff ‘humour’ so the public will know where to find it. The blurb on the slim volume I have before me labels Barry Dickins as ‘the true Australian funny man,’ but how do we know whether he regards himself as such (unless he wrote it himself)? My own definition of a cartoonist who presumes to write – or vice versa – is ‘professional funny man’ simply because, faute de mieux, no definition of such a prodigy exists.

Barry is evidently a bit of a character, ‘Ah, here are my old cuttings in this book here. I feel stacks better just looking at them.’ It is a well-known fact in the book world that when a publisher spots a journalist approach with what is obviously a cutting book under his arm, his little face goes white, he locks himself in the toilet or ducks out the back door where he keeps a car with the engine running. Or tells Miss Wilcox to inform the caller that he has suddenly been summoned to outer Mongolia or is in the intensive care ward. With cerebral malaria. (It’s no good her giving the wretched scribbler the ‘He’s in conference’ routine; he’ll simply wait.) So Barry must be quite a character – or to possess hypnotic qualities – to prevail against the barricade of evasions and prevarications that usually meet the bearer of press cuttings and to shepherd his little (slightly yellowed) flock to the shelter of stiff (well, limp actually) covers. ‘A Symposium of Pieces from the Low Life’ announces the subtitle; if we are to take the definition of ‘a drinking party with conversation, etc,’, Barry certainly qualifies, for there is no lack of conversation in its booze-soaked pages, from the garrulous Christmas reveller who feeds his car festive bubbly – and slaughters all his family – to the chemist who dispenses ‘Grog­Rid, the Universal Hangover Cure to nerve-shattered journalists’.

But ‘low-life’ it definitely is not - apart from tentative dips into the world of charitable institutions and the Old Men’s Home which seem to be experimental, perhaps checking up on the day when newspapers would no longer dish out their benevolent stipend (why else would. Barry, after booking a clean but frugal bed in the men’s refuge, flee into the damp and cold of a Melbourne night back to his snug flat) – rather is it a rich goulash with plenty of salt and spice, or life in Marvellous Melbourne. What few visits to Sydney he has made seem to have left him-with the impression that Sydneyites subsist on mangoes and recherché suppers at Kinsela’s ... Kinsela’s and mangoes in the Big Smoke, apples and the Old Folks’ Home in the Garden City.

Yeah, but is it funny? Oh yes, indubitably; Barry’s sentences have about them a sort of wild comic spring. If you take his word for it Melbournites spend all their time taking out their false teeth and gnashing them (to point up a story) falling off trams, throwing food about, or. gazing at Chloe with lecherous longing. Donald Horne once defined Australia, as ‘a grown man licking an ice-cream cone’, substitute Barry Dickins and make that an Icypole and you have the essence of Melbourne.

Although aimed at a more popular market than the scholarly; it is a grave defect in Dickins’s work that it contains no maps (how, for instance, can the stranger be expected to know that sordid Fitzroy Street is nowhere near sordid Fitzroy but in sordid St Kilda?), and the lack of a glossary can only leave the average reader confused; such terms as Briquettes, sosso, flake, Bank rollie, spag and sangos do not spring readily to the tongue of a denizen of Steak and Kidney

Two puzzles and a mystery. The text is sprinkled at intervals with minute illustrations, the purpose of which is not made clear; they are of a size which in ancient books would comprise illuminated initials, but in our enlightened days trading stamps. In the absence of any instructions it-would seem that one is expected to cut them out, affix them to a postcard, and send them to Penguin Books in the anticipation of a prize. Whatever can these prizes be? ... one is all agog?

A free trip, for two, to Melbourne (in Cup Week)? ... year’s supply of sosso sangos… a set of gleaming dentures ... or even, Oh rapture!; a box of overripe mangoes (imported) to throw around at Flinders Street Station.