Case Note on Judicial Humour

“There was a classic scene where one of the leading characters, Dan Doonan died and left everything to himself in his will, and the solicitors, Quock, Murdle, Protts and Frigg – obviously the emphasis being on the junior partner – met, shortly before watching Popeye, one afternoon and discuss (sic) the will.  In the middle of it all Mr Murdle said to his colleagues, “This will take years of work to unravel” and then made the prophetic statement, “We must make sure of that.” And I always think of that when I think of what it takes to get something simple done around Cairns.

“You know, if Spike wrote a script about this for the Goons, it would start something like this:  Quite innocently, the defendant’s charged with an indictable offence and a summary offence and his solicitors engage Neddie Seagoon to try to get the relevant forms done so that they can bring the summary charge up to be dealt with the indictable charge.

Neddy, briefed with that task, heads down the street where he runs into Henry and Minnie, two well-known characters from the Goons, who he talks to for the next five days, having meaningless conversations about this and that. In the middle of that he gets assaulted by a Batter Pudding and wakes up unconscious at Lake Tinaroo.  He realises that this is a dangerous, dangerous mission and very complicated, so he decides he needs to enlist help.  Being the bright spark that he is, he decides he needs to enlist the help of a criminal because this is a criminal charge, so he goes to his good friend Major Dennis Bloodnok, the famous coward, head of the 12th Underwater Heavy Artillery, and he asks him if he can help him to find a criminal, to be told very promptly by Bloodnok to go and find his own, it’s taken him years to assemble that lot.  But in any event, after seven weeks’ negotiation he manages to convince Bloodnok to help him and they head off to the DPP, down Sheridan Street, to try and find the relevant forms. They eventually fight their way into the building and after some weeks come out with the form, which is signed.  Unfortunately, on the way out he loses Bloodnok and the entire army after three rounds with the revolving door at the bottom.  

He then proceeds down the street looking for help, knowing full well that Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty must be behind this devilish plot to try and stop the course of justice proceeding. He finds the intelligent Bluebottle and — the less intelligent Eccles and the philosophical Bluebottle and enlists their help, and they then proceed the dangerous mission of crossing Sheridan Street with the documentation. It takes quite some time because of the traffic and, unfortunately, when they get to the other side of the road they collide with the script from the Jet-Propelled Guided NAAVI and are confronted with 10,000 cups of tea, which they had to drink.  This goes on for weeks, although their pain is eased by the fact that they hear some music from Max Geldray’s Orchestra and from the Ray Ellington Quartet.

Finally they make it into the building, this complicated, tricky building.  Once they get in there they get lost.  They walk in all different directions.  They seek help.  Finally they find a civil servant.  They explain to him their plight. They ask him, Neddie asks him quite innocently, “Will you join us?” to be met by the comic response, “I didn’t know you were coming apart.”  But this bloke was not just renown for his famous one-liners, he was also a zealot, so he spent the next three years trying to put the three of them back together. Once back together, they got lost and somehow fell into the bowels of the building.  In the meantime the defendant died of old age.  His family turned up at the watch-house to try and claim the body, only to be told that they needed a “Transmission of Body” form completed by all relevant parties and were last seen trying to find Neddie Seagoon to see if he could organise the documentation for them.”