Gerard Henderson, master of comedy, tackles the funny greenies in a tag team match brimming with hilarity ...

(Above: Gerard Henderson, comedy master, showing the power of the sideways comedy beat. Pure Jackie Gleason).

The pond rarely drops in on the ABC's Q&A - it's too much like discussing politics at a dinner party organised by an anarchist - but last night, it had a piquant flavour, thanks to the presence of conservative member of the commentariat Gerard Henderson.

Never has there been such an awesome display of overtly negative body language, full of hostility, and churlish surly resentment, especially when hapless, quiet, gentle, philosophical Raimond Gaita had a turn at the mike. Even the studio audience got a going over for daring to laugh, as Henderson launched into his strict head teacher routine when confronted by disrespectful chavvies ...

(Above: oh yes, his finest Dr. Smith sneer. Warning, danger, Raimond, danger).

It was a fine curmudeonly display, as Henderson lined up with Jim Wallace, who was blathering about the homosexual 'agenda' in his usual way. Also in his usual way, Henderson kept on wondering why atheists didn't persecute Muslims in the same way they persecuted Christians and Jews.

He wanted Muslims taken down a peg or two, so it was an exceptionally refined irony to see Henderson late in the programme defending conservative Muslims, their attitudes to gay marriage, and the Islamic capacity for homophobia.

No doubt it will dawn on Henderson in some distant era that the Muslim religion is just a canny regional variation on the Abrahamic religions, and supposedly worships the same god, with Christ as a prophet, and if you scratch a conservative Catholic, you'll find many of the same attitudes to those who are different as can be found in conservative Islam.

(Above: don't you talk to me like that you uppity young atheist thing, you).

As for the notion that Islam is a more violent religion, we wait the day that Henderson explains how Islam plunged the world into the first great war (or perhaps communism), somehow absolving a bunch of allegedly Christian nations from managing that imperial nee colonial jiggery hokey pokey ...

Well no doubt the transcript will turn up later today on the Q&A site, but the show's already available, and just for the brooding resentment, and hearing Henderson defend Islamic homophobia, it's worth a little bit of your bandwidth, though maybe in form that allows for fast forwarding:

Henderson: Well that's all pretty easy to say but there may just have a particular view of marriage in many religions, including the Islam religion. There are traditional views of marriage and it's very easy to dismiss them as some kind of phobia, but they may just believe in a marriage between a man and a woman, like Julia Gillard. What is wrong with that?

Easy to dismiss them? Easy to dismiss Islam? No way Jose, not if you're Gerard ...

Actually it's very easy to give Muslims a hard time about this, along with conservative Christians and Jews, but you won't find it coming from unofficial spokespersons for conservative Islamic social attitudes like Gerard Henderson ...

No wonder the audience littered with insolent ruff youffs was cackling away ...

But wait, there's more, because a few lines that bob up in Q&A were clearly re-runs from Henderson's column in today's Fairfax rag, Comedy or not, the producers are green.

A favourite tactic of the commentariat is to turn arguments topsy turvy to score a point. So in the matter of climate science, scientists become crazed fundamentalists, true believers, irrational zealots, the font of a new religion, doomsday mongers, computer model rapturists, while sceptics are rational, thoughtful and incisive (except when eating the flesh of Christ in the form of a wafer).

Similarly people who wonder what the world might look in a few hundred years time if we keep devouring the world's resources at the current rate, without introducing a few more sustainable policies, can be shown to be religious cranks, secular end of worlders:

It was not so long ago that anyone who proclaimed that "the end of the world is nigh" was regarded as a suitable target for laughter, even ridicule. Not any more. Today members of the extreme green movement, who predict the cooking of the planet, are invariably treated very seriously indeed.

(Above: ya talking to me, greenie punk? Well are ya? Do you feel lucky punk? Seeing as how I've got the most powerful institute in the world in my hand ... did you count the briefing papers and the seminars and the lectures? Well did ya punk?)

Of course if you happen to think this is the only tour you get, and the grave is the end of the line, you tend to take an interest in the planet, especially if you fondly imagine that humanity might go on and on forever, and even get itself into a position to flee the planet when the sun does its amazing expand and shrink routine, and better still, perhaps take over the universe, or at least cruise around it like Captain Kirk, introducing good human values ... like inter-galactic warfare, defeating the greedy Trade Federation and saving the small planet of Naboo .

But back to Henderson, who, after loading up greenies with Christian end of world raptures, turns his bizarre attention to the wretched ABC sitcom At Home With Julia.

Naturally Henderson is incapable of telling the difference between Max Gillies style sketch comedy (sending up John Howard) or musicals, as in the Keating romp, but leaving that aside, he manages to get amazingly indignant, take umbrage, flee the room because At Home With Julia isn't an equal opportunity political offender, because, gasp, oh the shock, the horror, it turns out that the Greens aren't in the show:

The problem with At Home with Julia is that it is not an equal opportunity political offender - because no Greens politicians make an appearance in any of the four episodes. In other words, Senator Bob Brown does not turn up. Nor do Adam Bandt (the Greens MP for Melbourne) or Christine Milne or Sarah Hanson-Young or Lee Rhiannon. Yet without Bandt's support for Labor in the House of Representatives, Gillard and Mathieson would not be residing in The Lodge.

(Above: Dr. Smith did twenty sneers an ep? Well cop this one).

Yes, yes, the bitterness and envy is naked - where are the conservative commentariat in the show as well, where's the Andrew Bolts and the Tim Blairs and dare we mention Gerard? -but it turns out that according to the show's creators, as quoted by Henderson, this is all by happenstance, because the Greens were due to turn up in the final two eps of what was to be a six part series, before the ABC realised it had a clunker, an absolute dog, and cut the show to four parts.

That's what you do when you have a dog, but it speaks enormous volumes of the paranoid mind of the commentariat that out of this sow's ear can be woven into a finely honed silk purse rant about the ABC:

It speaks volumes for both comedy and political comment in Australia that no one at the ABC or Quail TV realised the implications of leaving the Greens out of what is supposed to be an equal opportunity bagging of all sides of Australian politics. At Home with Julia has become yet another taxpayer-funded program on the ABC which either criticises or laughs at Labor and the Coalition - but only from the left. It is as if the Greens are in a ridicule-free zone.

Actually it speaks volumes about Henderson, and his lack of empathy for the doltish commissioning editor who got into bed with the clunker in the first place.

This humour-free approach to commentariat scribbling is pure, rich comedy gold, of a kind guaranteed to produce a braying fit of laughter.

Naturally Henderson is keen to show he's at one with the comedy gods:

Yet, to some of us, the Greens and their supporters are a suitable target for humour. There is something inherently amusing about the likes of Al Gore in the United States and Bob Brown in Australia, flying from conference to conference on carbon-emitting jet aircraft, urging the rest of us to reduce our carbon emissions. Gore even travels in a private jet.

Yes, it's a laugh a minute, and best of all, even better than turning science into rapturous religious thinking of a 'last drinks gentlemen please' kind ...

But the end of the world routine is an oldie but a goodie, always ready to roll out and get those jaffas pouring down the aisles (or should it be an M and M worrying about the villain eating the hostage?):

Then there is the ''end of the world is nigh" phenomenon. Such a millenarian outlook used to provide much food for comedy. But it seems that predictions of the end of the world are only funny these days when they are the product of a religious, rather than a secular climate-focused, mindset.

Well it might have provided some food for sketch comedy, but truth to tell, in the United States - the major exporter of film and televisual product to Australia - there's bugger all in the way of comedies about fundamentalism, or the end of the world or the rapture in the mainstream media (hands up if you've seen Kevin Smith's Dogma). With a bit of luck, The Book of Mormon musical will be the start of something big ...

Of course if you watch movies - clearly Henderson doesn't - you'd realise that disaster porn of the 2012 The Day After Tomorrow kind is a favourite with the punters, with aliens providing a handy secular variation to the secular climate shows (Battle: Los Angeles anyone).

And truth to tell, hippies, and their new sub-set greenies, have been copping it for years ...

Yes, you've guessed it. The reality is, Henderson just wants to slip the knife into Lee Rhiannon one more time ...

There is no conspiracy here. No one at the ABC or Quail TV consciously decided that At Home with Julia should not laugh at Brown's doomsday world view or Rhiannon's insistence that her Communist Party member parents never, ever supported the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

It's just that no one made a conscious decision, in Kalowski's words, to have Bandt, Brown or Rhiannon turn up in At Home with Julia.

Actually to use co-creator Kalowski's own words, as related by Henderson, there was a conscious decision to have the Greens turn up, but they turned up in the episodes that got the chop.

It's truly awesomely funny to read a writer seemingly incapable of understanding what he's written ... and in the very same piece, no less.

And from all this storm in a teacup, Henderson produces an apocalyptic vision of despair:

This provides yet another example of the relative weakness of the conservative intellectual tradition in Australia. The British-based Barry Humphries or the American P. J. O'Rourke would see humour in the Greens. But there are few such comedians the world over and virtually none working in Australia.

(Above: where are the comedians, there ought to be comedians, please send in the clowns, oh don't bother, they're here).

Which isn't in any way true.

Henderson is a fine comedian, and his performance defending Islamic homophobia is a comedy gem, and his beats and asides, and little looks to the sky in the current Q&A would make Constantin Stanislavski himself green with envy ...

If he works a little harder, I can see a prime time spot opening up for Henderson. We might call it Married with Islamic Greenies.

In the pilot, which takes place in the living room, Henderson dominates by sitting on a couch watching a giant plasma screen, clicking and clucking his tongue and making jokes about the parade of hopeless ABC shows flickering before him.

In saunters his defiant homosexual Islamic son, who announces he wants to get married, followed by his insolent sniggering Greenie daughter, who announces the world is going to end unless they get a composting and recycling system right now ...

Henderson cracks a six pack and begins dispensing comedy wisdom ...

What's that you say ABC? Henderson should be held back until the fifth episode, and you intend to cancel after four? Oh noes, the world has lost a comedy master and the ABC has utterly lost its sense of inclusive fairness, and equal opportunity balance ...

He's comedy gold I tells ya, pure comedy gold ...

(Below: how could anyone other than Henderson handle the 'oh the poor puddy tat' scene which marks the end of the first act in the B strand in the second show?)