Asteroid City breaks the third wall, the fourth wall – every wall that’s ever been thought up by human showfolk to enable comprehension and clarity.  It breaks down the barriers of performance and drowns the lot in an incoherent soup of stylish surrealism and quirkiness for its own sake. 

As with advertising, so with politics.  You sell your message better when you leave out the sermonising and make the people laugh.  Barbie should have stuck to making jokes. 

[Humphries was] a brilliant comic writer and social satirist, probably Australia’s best ever….[He] had his faults.  He was a bit of an intellectual snob; he could be peevish and sarcastic, especially as he grew older, but grumpy old comedians should be allowed to say what they think on important social issues just like everyone else.

‘You may call me an apostrophe pedant or an apostrophe fascist.  I like to style myself an apostrophe warrior.  I go about the streets obliterating apostrophes that shouldn’t be there, and less often inserting them where they should be.  Not that I go looking for trouble, but when I spot an apostrophe crime I can’t help myself. ‘

Whenever there’s a fuss or a tizz involving famous people it is inevitably dubbed Whatever-gate.  Even young folks, who probably couldn’t tell you what Watergate was all about, know that whenever the suffix ‘gate’ comes after a word such as, say, pizza, it denotes some kind of scandal.  And yes, there is a Pizzagate. 

‘The critics loved After Sun.  So did a friend who has a difficult relationship with her father. As for me, I began to wish I’d blundered into a mindless action movie instead.’