Python running rugbyWhen I first heard about the Limp Falling Club✪ and it’s fanatical penchant for bizarre, nonsensical public (and pub) antics, it sounded like the physical humour of a very silly Monty Python skit. It turns out I wasn’t the only person to make the association between the Limp Fallers’ shtick and the Surreal sketches of the legendary Monty Pythons. No less a practitioner of his own unique brand of cutting satire than John Clarke joined the dots between the Limp Falling Club and Monty Python … channeling John Cleese’s “Minister of Silly Walks” Clarke went on to advocate the formulation of a new ministerial office, an appropriately absurd (given the lunacy that is Canberra politics) “federal Minister of Limp Falling”.
The “spontaneous public theatre” of the LFC was the brainchild of Australian political cartoonist Paul Rigby, circa. late 1950s⍟. The ‘ritual’ proceeded like this, a group of neatly-dressed white collar workers (mainly journalist types) would convene, typically in a pub or a bar or perhaps a restaurant. After consuming copious quantities of beer, on a signal they would suddenly and ‘spontaneously’ drop to the floor singularly or holus-bolus in a collapsed heap, no doubt startling nearby onlookers. I found a slim handful of grainy You Tube videos on the internet demonstrating the technique (sic), including one which shows a score of Limp Fallers including Rigby tumbling haphazardly down a staircase with scant regard to their safety.
At the time Paul Rigby was living in Perth, WA, where the “art form” took off. The cartoonist’s favourite “watering hole”, the Palace Hotel in the Perth CBD became the epicentre of the performance art of limp falling, the epicentre of the activity in Australia at least. A 2013 article by Aleisha Orr suggested the spectacle of limp falling “swept across many parts of the world in the 1950s and 60s”. In the same article one of the few surviving, octogenarian members of the club had his own take on the mysterious origins of the art of limp falling, the result of a house party accident when one of the journos—well-lubricated at the time no doubt—fell through an asbestos wall❂
Palace Hotel, PerthI don’t think that limp falling has ever quite reached the international heights of “fad-dom” of say the Rubik’s Cube or “Flash Mobbing”, but I can testify to the quirky practice having some degree of international currency. Going back some 30 years I remember seeing a story on the nightly news about the “All Fall Down Association”. A different moniker but dedicated to the same peculiar pastime – a group of respectable looking middle class ‘suits’ (all males again) from various parts of the compass coming together at London’s Heathrow Airport. On the intoning of a special code word, in synch all collapsed to the ground with dramatic effect.
‘President’ Rigby (Source: AMHF)After Rigby’s death in 2006 the LFC’s presidency eventually passed to his son, although the Club (Perth chapter) appears to have been inactive for some years now.
⎯‒―⎯‒―⎯‒―⎯‒―⎯‒―⎯‒―
✪ AKA the Limp Falling Association
⍟ according to the Australia Media Hall of Fame, the concept of “limp falling” was the result of a collective meeting of minds of Rigby and Ron Saw and Steve Dunleavy, two of his journalist colleagues from Sydney’s Daily Mirror
❂ the other partygoers found the incident hilarious and a new fad was thus born