Stupid, crazy…and very funny

“As you’re probably aware, I’m a family kind of guy, meaning of course like many of you other family guys out there, I’m basically a single guy who woke up one day with a wife and the cast of Oliver in my bed.”

Thus opens the first of the late Peter Ruehl’s columns published in Men are Stupid, Women are Crazy, a collection gathered from his columns for the Australian Financial Review over the past two decades.

The fact that Ruehl died in April this year, and his widow, journalist Jennifer Hewett, is responsible for the column choices and the publication of this collection lends certain poignancy to what is a collection rife with examples of Ruehl’s signature style.

From the beginning, writes Hewett, one of his favourite sayings was “Men are stupid, women are crazy”. The book, rather than being ordered by publication date is split into the three themes Ruehl most often wrote about: Family, life and politics.

Over the course of years, readers watch Ruehl’s three children grow up, and join the family, becoming part of the clan, reading stories of his sister Mercedes and his friend Otis, following the family’s moves, renovations, and the perils of teaching his children to drive in Australia: “Many Australians take to driving like a duck takes to hunting season” and “Your chances of getting hit in Sydney and Melbourne are the same, except in Sydney they’re aiming at you”.

The columns which sit under the ‘life’ umbrella range from topics including marriage – one particular column is titled, ‘If she’s perfect, proceed with caution’ – manners, Shakespeare in schools, his coffee table, alcohol, McMansions, men’s clothing, and the beach.

‘Politics’ contains some of Ruehl’s best work: Funny, cutting and littered with pithy observations, he skewers everyone from the Queen to Bill Clinton, and runs the gamut of Australian political figures, starting with the May 1988 opening of Parliament House and moving through the Howard years and Mark Latham’s time as opposition leader. The column titled Latham, Chapter and Worse (17 September 2005) opens, “Mark Latham is pretty lucky. Not everyone can trash their own career and get away with writing a book about it”. He then moves on to Rudd, Gillard and Abbott, Obama and even Berlusconi – “How can you, deep down if you’re a guy, not like someone like Silvio Berlusconi? He’s a total rogue, a third-rate womaniser and filthy rich, and he’s been running an entire country as if it’s a country club. For a day or so, you’d switch places with him before your wife found out and killed you”.

It’s only when the reader reaches the final column in the collection, published five days before Ruehl’s death, that the book loses its humour – not because of Ruehl’s final column, but because of the understanding there will not be any more columns.

Still, it was great while it lasted.

Men are Stupid, Women are Crazy, by Peter Ruehl. Melbourne University Publishing, 2011, $29.99.