Humor & Life Quote by Ernie Wise

It lands like a shrug, which is exactly the joke. Ernie Wise takes what could be the stuff of legend - a six-month stint in Australia in the late 1950s, long before global touring was frictionless - and reduces it to the plainest possible travelogue: we went, we stayed, it went fine. That deliberate flatness is Wise’s comic fingerprint. Variety comedy, especially the kind Wise and Eric Morecambe mastered, thrives on anticlimax: the promise of showbiz glamour deflated by domestic understatement.

The intent isn’t to dazzle you with anecdotes; it’s to signal a working performer’s mentality. “We decided” frames the trip as almost casual, as if uprooting to the other side of the world were akin to changing pubs. “All the shows went well” is even slyer: showbiz memoirs usually trade in catastrophe or triumph, but Wise opts for competence. The subtext is professionalism as punchline. He’s quietly mocking the storytelling conventions that demand drama, and he’s also protecting the mystique of the act by refusing to mythologize it.

Context matters: 1958 sits in the era of Commonwealth circuits, when British entertainers routinely toured Australia, feeding a shared TV-and-theatre culture. For Wise, that tour is both proof of reach and evidence of the grind: six months of repetition, logistics, and keeping the machinery running. The humor comes from treating that machinery as unromantic, and somehow more impressive for it.