Ten Films To Watch While The Patriarchy Burns

Released this week through Affirm Press, Best Australian Comedy Writing was edited by Luke Ryan, and contains published and original words from some of your favourites, including Shaun Micallef, Annabel Crabb, Chris Taylor, Zoe Norton Lodge, Tony Martin, Ben Pobjie and more. 

This is an excerpt. They are all this good.

–

127 Hours of Mansplaining

Erin Ralston is a legendary explorer who goes canyoneering alone in order to escape what she calls the “MENdane” city life. We know something bad will happen to her, because that is just too clever for her own good.

She is rappelling through canyons in what is an obvious metaphor for vaginal birth, when suddenly she slips and falls and a huge boulder falls on her arm, trapping her. We don’t know what this is a metaphor for.

After two days of captivity, there seems to be little hope that she will ever free herself. She names the boulder ‘The Patriarchy’ and makes a joke about it “crushing her”. This is so clever that now we know she is surely going to die. Suddenly, she hears a man’s voice! For once in her life, Erin is overjoyed to see a man, especially because this one is carrying both water and a jackhammer.

As he begins freeing her, the man – let’s call him Chad – starts to explain things to her. Chad tells her where canyons come from, what canyoneering is, and what boulders are made of. He explains to her what America is. As he launches into a detailed explanation of how she ended up trapped and why this is definitely her fault, Erin deliberately pulls the boulder down onto her own head, killing herself instantly. This is widely regarded as her cleverest move yet.

–

TransformHers: Age of Extinctmen

It’s five years after the battle between Deceptivemen and Fembots levelled Chicago and made everybody super-suspicious of their cars. The government now believes ALL robots are a threat (somehow not convinced by the #notallrobots hashtag created by the male robots who totally started the battle) and secretly dispatches a crack squad of CIA agents to destroy every last one. Cade Yeager, somehow a real character name not made up for this parody, stumbles upon OptiMs Prime disguised as an old truck, and together they set out to eliminate the robot hunters as well as the Deceptivemen who have taken over the government. They also destroy the rest of men on earth just to be safe.

Cade, seeing the beautiful utopia this creates, decides to sacrifice himself for the greater good. The way he achieves this is too horrendous to depict on screen, but from that point on his method is forever known as the ‘Yeager Bomb’.

–

Finding Men? No!

A community of beautifully animated clownfish enjoy a simple, care-free life in the beautiful surrounds of the Great Barrier Reef. Everything is going swimmingly until a team of scuba divers capture all of the male clownfish and take them back to a pet store where they are sold to ungrateful seven-year-olds who really just want a puppy. The female clownfish shrug their fishy shoulders and continue going about their fishy business. The clownfish population slowly begins to die out, but they all agree: it was totally worth it.

–

Not All Men In Black

After being spotted at a Richard Dawkins fan event, James Edwards – AKA Reddit user ‘Fedora the Explorer 6969’ – is recruited by the secret government agency Not All Men In Black, which was set up to police conversations between women all over the world. The newly monikered Agent J becomes one of the NAMIB’s most prized agents, known for his incredible ability to derail any conversation two women are having simply by ignoring their personal experiences and thoughts.

But things go awry for Agent J when he makes the fateful error of accidentally listening to a woman’s point of view and experiencing what he later discovers is ‘empathy’, which he works out by typing the words ‘feelings’ and ‘others’ point of view’ into Google. The NAMIB internet monitor reports him to his superiors, and he is quickly neutralised. Empathy is for chicks.

–

Guardians of the ‘Gal’-axy

Massive dickhead Peter ‘Starlord’ Quill finds himself the object of a galaxy-wide bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan Keating, the leader of Boyzone. Boyzone is a planet where women aren’t allowed, conquered in 2014 by the participants of Gamergate when society unreasonably demanded that they treat women as if they were human. Neither of the men actually knows what the orb is for, but they still want it with every fibre of their being because another man covets it, and it is shaped like a breast. In order to fight Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy alliance with a big guy, a raccoon guy, a tree guy, and Gamora, a woman he wants to sleep with because she is literally the only female character in the film.

Ronan and Quill fight over the orb, eventually causing it to split open. They realise too late that it contains within it the power of every woman in the cosmos and it immediately destroys any man who is too weak to handle their strength. Ronan and Peter both die, along with every person on planet Boyzone. The tragedy is deemed an overall success.

Afterwards, Gamora is given her own movie that depicts a world where women are given the lead in superhero movies and have their picture on all the merchandise, but it is deemed “too far-fetched”.

–

Dawn from Baby-Sitters Club of the Planet of the Apes

War has broken out between a community of genetically evolved apes living in San Francisco’s Muir Woods and the few remaining human survivors of a virus pandemic. A peaceful resolution cannot be reached because the apes have evolved to exactly match the intellectual imprint of a human male: the ego. Alternate Officer of the Baby-Sitters Club, Dawn Schafer, is parachuted in because she is originally from California, a fact that she never shuts up about. She is wearing the outfit that the other members of the Baby-Sitters Club insist on calling ‘California Casual’, even though they are definitely just regular clothes.

After she arrives, Dawn first sees if she can babysit her way to a peaceful solution. She cannot. Then, as a last resort, Malcolm (the human leader) and Caesar (the ape leader) are locked in a room with Dawn. For hours she lectures them about recycling and world peace and the importance of pesco-vegetarianism until they both agree to do whatever she wants, whatever anyone wants, please god just let them out of there. A truce is reached.

–

Ironing Man

It’s been six months since the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which the Avengers figured out how old Ultron was or something – I don’t know, that movie was like super boring. Bereft of a world-ending catastrophe to worry about, Tony Stark is going through an existential crisis. Like most middle-aged men, he doesn’t know if being a genius billionaire philanthropist inventor superhero is enough to keep him fulfilled. He feels as empty as the explanation of how the Hulk’s pants stay on when he transforms from a thirty-inch waist to a two hundred-inch one in the space of about three seconds.

Pepper Potts is worried about Tony and about the likelihood that people are laughing at her name behind her back. One day, while trying to make Tony smile, she shows him an iron. He has never seen one before and thinks it is hysterical, along with poor people in general. But when he picks up the iron, his laughter dies. It feels … right.

He begins to iron every piece of clothing in their house, even Pepper Potts’ Pleated Purple Pencil Pants, a notoriously difficult item that she is also convinced people may be laughing at. But Tony is a natural, and he loves it. In fact, he refuses to call it an ‘ironing board’ because he knows he will never be ‘bored’ again. Pepper runs his company while Tony is happy to stay at home and destroy the concept of gender roles, just like he once destroyed three-quarters of Manhattan.

–

Boylent Green

It’s 2022, and the masses now subsist on a plankton-based product called Soylent Red. Huge babyman Detective Frank Thorn complains the loudest because he isn’t getting enough protein to build huge arms that will impress other straight men at the gym – essentially a living nightmare.

One fine day, while watching the movie One Fine Day and not crying at all, Thorn sees an ad for a new protein-heavy product called Soylent Green. Its tagline is ‘Soylent Green, ProTeen’. With both suspicion and interest piqued by this fun spelling of ‘protein’, Thorn decides to investigate, just like his hero Jessica Fletcher would have. Grabbing his best crime-solving hat and favourite Angela Lansbury mask, Thorn stows away in a garbage truck (where all men belong) on its way to the Soylent factory.

Once inside, he discovers the horrific truth: Soylent Green is made out of 100 per cent real teenage boys. Before he has time to post about it on Tumblr, Thorn is captured by the feminazis running the factory. As he is carried away to be fed into the meat grinder, he screams, “YOU MUST TELL EVERYONE! SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE FROM BOYS! AND IT SHOULD BE CALLED BOYLENT GREEN, WHICH IS MUCH CLEVERER!”

But his screams go unanswered, and later on everyone agrees that Detective Frank Thorn truly was the most delicious boy of all.

–

World War Zzz

A hideous plague is sweeping the world. It takes mere minutes for the infected to start transforming into a self-important, middle-aged bigmouth, and less than an hour before they become entitled, pompous windbags who just want to tell women about their newest property investment in Sydney, and how they should dress so that they won’t be attacked by men. The infected contaminate those around them by boring them into a stupor from which they awake a ‘zzzombie’.

A team of female scientists struggles to develop an antidote that will save humanity from the unstoppable scourge. They make an exciting breakthrough, ascertaining that DNA samples from middle-aged men who ask long and self-involved questions at literary events (that turn out to not even be questions but just explanations of something they did twenty years ago) were somehow cross-contaminated in a laboratory and then fed to patient zero: Tony Abbott.

But the excitement slowly turns to dread as the scientists realise that the zzzombies were willingly voted into power at the last election and have now cut all funding for the antidote. After a brief meeting, the scientists begin working on a suicide pill instead.

–

Ghostbusters

It’s Ghostbusters, but with women. Stick that in your dicks, men.

–

This is an extract from Best Australian Comedy Writing, out now through Affirm Press.

–

Rebecca Shaw is a Brisbane-based freelance writer and co-host of the comedy podcast Bring A Plate. For dumb jokes and crazed rants, you can follow her on Twitter @brocklesnitch