Funnybone: Slithershanks’ dark side of the news

Today, we introduce a wickedly off-colour humour column, covering current affairs, and featuring the views of the world’s worst manager, Slithershanks. Enjoy.

The appalling attack on that knight in tarnished armour, broadcaster Alan Jones, is completely beyond the pale. Sure, Jones carelessly said that prime minister Julia Gillard’s father died because he was ashamed of his daughter’s lies. But he only repeated something that he himself had said earlier in the day that he shouldn’t have repeated because he should not have been repeating the fact that he was repeating himself. Over and over. In a rather repetitious way. Rather repetitious way.

There is an interesting question here. If Alan Jones died, would it be because the daughter that he doesn’t have has beaten him to death with a microphone? Or would his daughter be so ashamed of her disgusting, vile motor-mouth father that she would have gone to the nearest cliff to jump off it?

Hard to say, but it is a good thing she doesn’t exist. Otherwise she would be in real trouble with the relevant authorities, quite frankly. She would be helping the police with their inquiries, at the very least.

And then we have the equally interesting question of who will worry when Alan Jones departs this earth? Will he cark it because he is ashamed of the daughter he doesn’t have? Will it be because it suddenly occurred to him that he is to public debate what bubonic plague is to advanced skin-care? Is meaningless chatter on the radio final proof that the theory of evolution is actually back-to-front and we never really evolved from the apes at all? One thing’s for sure. If we tune in we will never find out.

Experience matters

Slithershanks leaned forward on his human resources base and fiddled idly with his actionable band width with a view to achieving maximum buy-in.

“You know, Dolly,” he said to his colleague Dolly Riseranks, who was looking about as encouraging as a taipan with an overbite, “I think at this stage I can say that I am a truly experienced manager.”

“Well, it is an experience knowing you, I suppose. The kind of experience that robs you completely of the will to live and makes hunger strikes look like an excellent weekend pasttime.”

“No need to be like that, Dol. After all, I have plenty of experience making unwanted advances on staff that are result in permanent psychological scars. And I am also very experienced in never having seen a pay rise I didn’t like. That has to be worth some respect, surely.”

“I think I’ll starve myself this weekend.”

The devil’s dictionary: Some important definitions

• Analysts, financial: Those who are to logic what a table leg is to the pillars of Western philosophy.
• Analysts, economic: Those who think that table legs may exist, but only if there is a measurable market price.
• Analysts, accounting: Those who have seen some table legs in the footnotes to the accounts, but who still believe that further proof is required.
• Applied economics: A type of economics that allows you to apply for tenure in university economics departments.
• Financial advice: The art of telling clients that if they have more money, then they will be wealthier than if they have less money.
• Fund managers: A form of lemming that likes to feed on three-course lunches it has neither earned nor deserved. Beware of cliffs.
• QE3: The third text book in the strange discipline known as Queer Economics. It involves printing money you do not have to pay yourself wages that don’t exist so that you can buy products that don’t satisfy.