Because it’s election day, because this has been one of the wackiest, funniest, most insane, fun and entertaining Federal election campaigns in decades, because Mark Latham was rolled gold for all the wrong reasons, because PM Julia Gillard released doves (yes, she really did, and not a magician in sight), because former PM Kevin Rudd’s axing turned the ALP into a comic tragedy, and because Opposition leader Tony Abbott was armed with a Glock and stun gun, I bring you some funny highlights and observations of the day.
Let’s start with this brilliant window display in one of Australia’s best and most innovative butcher shops, Victor Churchill.
Two pigs – one wearing a red wig a la PMJG, the other in red Speedos like the LOTO wears and a sign: “Vote 1, whose bacon will you save?” Brilliant.
One shop assistant told me people asked if the pigs were real. She’s Irish. No beating around the bush. “It’s a butcher shop. What do they think?”
Well, there were a lot of people who bought the line about former President George W. Bush’s “plastic turkey” at Thanksgiving when visiting the troops in the Middle East.
But back to the funnies: this from smart Tweeter @WogBlogger: “Overheard in polling queue in Wentworth: “Would you like a Greens how to vote card”? “No … second thoughts, I’ll take one. For comedy value.” Comedy gold.
Wentworth, of course, is the seat held by train spotter Malcolm Turnbull.
Style guru and social commentator @MelissaHoyer tweeted this: “Sad there r no sausages at Paddington St Francis of Assisi school. ‘It’s Paddington. They have sushi’, said one queue wag . .”
Another Tweeter, @marksmithers came up with this: “Outside polling station amusing myself by handing Australian Sex Party how to vote cards back to Family First campaigners #ausvotes”
And then there was this in The Australian by sharp election observer Samantha Maiden: “There was a touch of George W. Bush, a moment of Vladimir Putin, bare-chested, Old Spice-style—“I’m on a horse”—to the magic photographs of Tony Abbott let loose in a Campbelltown cop shop after midnight.”
The idea of Abbott as Old Spice man is too delicious for words and the rest of Maiden’s piece is a Must Read.
If you like your humour dripping with irony, how about former Labor hard-man and self-confessed Pinocchio, Graham Richardson who wrote in the same organ today: “I am confused…I am in utter despair”. Read Richo’s confession about Labor and PM JG’s woes.
Happy voting.