Laugh Track

By Belinda Luscombe/Sydney

This week the leafy avenues of Sydney will be filled with the sound of an enormous exhalation as her citizens let out their stomachs, put away the good china and shove their feet back up on the table. The foreigners are leaving, and Sydneysiders can resume normal behavior.

But the Games will never be the same. Sydney has changed things, perhaps forever. Gone is the notion that the Games are supposed to be a serious affair. To the motto "Swifter, Higher, Stronger," Sydney has added "Not Quite So Solemn."

From the homage to corrugated iron in the opening ceremony to the risible outfits the volunteers wore, these have been the Goofy Games. And once you add humor to the potent cocktail of international competition, drug scandals and rhythmic gymnastics, you cannot take it out.

Not that you'd want to. Greco-Roman wrestling was just one sport that got an entirely new audience from the antics of the late-night television show The Dream, which was unlike any official coverage seen before. The two wry hosts, Roy Slaven and H.G. Nelson, delighted in running wrestling footage accompanied by Barry White love songs while speculating on why large men would grope and mount each other from behind. The two took jabs at fat judo contestants and openly mocked the New Zealand medal tally (four as of Saturday night). The public lapped it up. After barely a week on the air, the show's mascot, Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat, was so popular the I.O.C. requested that athletes stop posing with it.

With NBC's ratings less than stellar and Dennis Miller already ensconced in the booth at Monday Night Football, it cannot be too long until a network in the U.S. lets loose one of its wags on the Games. The smug mug of Craig Kilborn from CBS's Late Late Show seems to just beg to be dispatched to make light of the kayaking and women's discus in Athens. On the other hand, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart seems more of an archery guy.

The local admen caught on in no time. Mawkish commercials featuring aging Australian athletic greats were whipped off the air and quickly replaced by spots featuring the same old-timers or parents of current Olympians engaged in self-parody, all the while hawking phones and banks.

Live events were similarly jollied up. With baseball, a sport with which locals are not overly familiar, Australia showed that it's possible to outdo even Triple-A ballparks with cartoonish bells and whistles. At every foul ball, loudspeakers blasted the sound of smashing glass--even if they were grounders. One can't help feeling there's a lesson here for the steeplechase or dressage. Those top hats are just begging for a visual gag.

In fact, sometimes Sydney may have taken the entertainment a tad too far. Beach volleyball had its own M.C., Lifeguard Dave, who worked the crowd on that rare day when the sunshine and four bronzed athletes a-diving were not enough. After a spectator good-naturedly heckled Chelsea Clinton for not wearing a hat, Dave called him out of the audience for a light-hearted reprimand. Dave also pioneered a new crowd move, the slow-motion wave, which is somehow much, much funnier than an ordinary wave.

This surely was overkill. After all, beach volleyball is a sport that prohibits bikinis bigger than a certain size. Its charms are self-evident. Other sports are in vastly more dire need of the bonhomie of Dave and his ilk. Athens might like to consider Epee Demetrius for the fencing.

There are problems, of course, with this approach. Should Beijing win the 2008 games, it's hard to imagine a local show making fun of the Beijing authorities the way commentators have made fun of Michael Knight, the state's Olympics Minister. One declared that Knight "had put his testicles on the wire--to use a meteorological term--that the weather will be fine for the opening ceremonies."

Moreover, the whole humor thing works only if your populace is mad for the Games anyway. Australians snapped up tickets to all sorts of sports that had enjoyed almost no profile in the country before last month. They had to be turned away from shooting events. They flooded the Olympics merchandise store, waiting more than three hours in line to buy silly-looking slippers. They would have gone to a staring contest if it had been a medal event. Live theater performances, including Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida at the Opera House, came to a halt while a big screen showed a particularly anticipated race. The denigrating humor was merely a contrasting shade in a riot of eagerness and team spirit.

What does it all mean? One thing's for sure: Salt Lake City is in deep, deep trouble.