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Just wogs taking the pizza

Ross Warneke, arbiter of televisual tastes, last week alerted me to an SBS program called Pizza. “I was disgusted,” Mr W says in the Green Guide. “And it takes a helluva lot to offend me.”

Pizza sounded irresistible, so I tuned in on Monday night. To sum up: Pizza is to multiculturalism what Absolutely Fabulous is to feminism. It is energetically politically incorrect and pokes fun at the sacred cows, humbug and pompous cant of multiculturalism and gets away with it because it is on Wog TV, thereby confusing the sanctimonious.

The program’s one joke is that the pizza delivery boys, “Lebanese legends”, are as crude, sexist, racist, bigoted, stupid, vulgar and undeservedly happy as any other yobbo who happens to be called Smith or Brown.

Ross W reckons that the only people who would think this funny would be “dead-beat, Commodore-driving outer suburban hoons”. I’m not so sure. Laughter can be a safety valve that lets off the steam of socially unacceptable rage. For the past couple of weeks, the weight of PC has been suffocating.

In case you have not seen the show, the synopsis is roughly as follows: Pauly and Sleek are delivery boys for a pizza shop. The owner, BoBo, is a perpetually angry and dangerous bloke seriously lacking in couth. Last week, he advertised for an apprentice pizza chef and a young blind man turns up with his Braille certificate of pizza cooking. He is thrown out of the shop with maximum prejudice. A Chinese old-aged pensioner in a wheelchair tries for the job and is dumped in the gutter. A lesbian is turned down, not because she is a lesbian but because she is ugly.

Pizza is a televisual essay in praise of assimilation. Sleek makes the obligatory pilgrimage to his home village in “Lebanese”, where he is an utterly bemused alien. The only thing that he knows about his “home” land is that his uncle, a famous Lebanese rhythm and blues singer, started the civil war by “rooting chicks from all religions mate. Muslim. Christian. Jehovah’s Witnesses”.

His Middle Eastern pals in Sydney are in on every insurance swindling scam known to the Mediterranean, confident they can get away with anything because “all wogs look the same to them mate”.

It is a mistake to read too much noble intention into any entertainment, but I wouldn’t be surprised that, if the 77 per cent who want to keep informal migrants out of the country were to form their opinions while watching Pizza, they might be more relaxed about letting the aliens in.

The underlying tenet of multiculturalism is that everything Australian—in the sense of pertaining to people born here before 1949—is crass, vulgar, sexist, xenophobic and racist. Those who arrived here post-1949, or whose children were born here, are, by contrast, cultured, refined, dignified and tolerant. They are congenitally incapable of racism. They are encouraged to keep their superior cultures and to resist homogenisation with the boorish natives.

Pauly and Sleek are multicultural resisters—insouciant ockers with a touch of something exotic. They identify themselves as Lebs, in an off-hand way, much as you might identify yourself as a Collingwood supporter. Sleek’s number plates say BADWOG. His mobile plays the William Tell overture. He is scared stiff of Maoris and 98 per cent of his waking time is spent thinking about sex. The ethnicity of the chicks is irrelevant.

Multiculturalism may be the official government theory of migrant accommodation, but the irresistible reality is assimilation. It is what most natives want and what most migrants aspire to. I take comfort from the fact that the most watched program on multicultural television is the one that takes the mickey out of multiculturalism.

And I also laughed a lot. They should be reported to the racial and religious vilification thought police. Thank you, Ross. And if the show disgusts you, try the website.

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By Terry Lane
September 09, 2001
The Age