My Paul Kelly joke

I once wrote a joke about Paul Kelly that was used at least once by Sandy Gutman, a.k.a. Austen Tayshus, narrator of the massive-selling Australiana monologue. It was just after Paul Kelly of the Sydney Swans had won the Brownlow Medal and it worked on the hilarious notion that Paul Kelly was quite the man – a great footballer, a famous singer-songwriter and a journalist and author of weighty political tomes as well.

I had dreams, when I fashioned this great bit of humour, that it would take off and I would get to meet the three Pauls, all at once, preferably in the front bar of the Terminus Hotel which, at that stage, was still an Old-Style-Pub with three men in it at busy times. But it didn’t and I didn’t but sometime later there was an exhibition, if memory serves correctly, at the Australian Museum and all three of them were there together to demonstrate something about identity. Or something.

So the three Paul Kellys certainly achieved in their chosen fields. But the one who writes How to Make Gravy is the one we’ll remember and study in schools for generations to come.