Sunday - John Clarke

Television (Excerpts) – 2008

I've often wondered who that was and what he made of that conversation...
– John Clarke on a 1974 Fred Dagg sketch in which he answered a live telephone call, and said he'd call back later

It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the Olympics is terribly important. In fact it's not important, and there are all sorts of things happening in the world that are...
– John Clarke on the Olympic Games being heavily featured in the media

...the whole news and weather department was read as if we were in Shropshire.
– John Clarke on the BBC style accents used by NZ television presenters in the early 1970s

I thought it was illegal previously. There certainly wasn't much of it when I was growing up. I sat in the audience as a teenager thinking 'why doesn't somebody do this?', and nobody had by the time I was 23 and I did it myself.
– John Clarke on wondering why no one sounded like an ordinary Kiwi on NZ television in the late 1960s/early 1970s

His dairy operation would have kicked in by now ... he was always a diversified farmer, he was very sensible.
– John Clarke imagines what Fred Dagg would be doing now

That's an important part of it, because it was my view at the time that the politicians had become so aware of the power of the media that they were mimicking themselves ... so I wanted to deface all of that.
– John Clarke on his decision not to physically imitate the Australian politicians he was lampooning

He's more Australian than Australians are really, in terms of the way he speaks. But he's like that when he's performing, he's like that when he's off and he's not performing. He generally sees something that other people don't see.
– Collaborator Bryan Dawe on John Clarke

Before John came along there was really no one that was doing it at such a sophisticated level. And so as a consequence of that, he inspired a lot of people to go perhaps beyond the stand-up comedy area, and think about more sophisticated ways ... and I was one of those people.
– Collaborator Bryan Dawe on John Clarke's importance to Australian comedy