The Best Australian Humorous Writing by Andrew O'Keefe Page A

makes
Girls of the Playboy Mansion
so ferally watchable. Like everybody else in LA, she talks all the time but, unlike everyone else, she says exactly what she means. This, oddly, has given her the reputation of being a bit thick.

    Nowhere is the disconnection between actions and words more apparent than in the press conference given by Dr Robert Rey, one of several cosmetic surgeons who feature in the E! reality show
Dr 90210
. Oleaginous, predatory, handsome, slim and egomaniacal, Rey laughs confidently, nervously and hysterically, talks patronisingly,excitedly and apparently disinterestedly, flirts, flatters, takes us into his confidence (“I’ll be very honest with you”), calls us baby, calls himself baby, and at one point appears to refer to a penile implant as “baby”.
    Rey, the story goes, was born to a poor family in Brazil, and brought to the US by Mormon missionaries.
    â€œLet’s start with a question from Brazil,” says PR Gendreau. So a Brazilian journalist asks a question in Portuguese.
    There are no lines on Rey’s face, and there is no fat on his casually displayed midriff. Somebody asks the secret of his youthful good looks. “It’s diet!” he says. “Diet and exercise! And happiness! You can decide to be happy and, when you’re happy, you don’t age!”
    This is the first of several bizarre replies that avoid entirely the question of cosmetic surgery and are punctuated with audible exclamation marks.
    â€œCoffee’s no good for you!” he declares. “Eat like Palaeolithic people!” he advises. “Spirituality!” he spruiks.
    Then he gives a spontaneous presentation about fashions in contemporary cosmetic surgery.
    â€œ[Implanted] chins are very popular,” he says. “We are an-drogynising women. The little nose that went like this [he presses his nose upwards], like Barbie, that’s long gone. Today, a natural nose is in. I had my nose done so it’s a natural look,” he says, and I think it is the strangest thing I have ever heard.
    There has also been “a shocking increase in butt augmentations”, he says. “We do lots and lots of butts: either the Brazilian butt lift [whatever happened to impenetrable Latin names for operations?], which is the transfer of fat from one area to the behind or, for girls too skinny, we put an implant in.
    â€œWe’re doing a lot of vaaaginoplaasty,” he says. He relishes the word, drags it out. “Laaaaabioplasty.” He almost flicks it withhis tongue. “Women have these beautiful lips down below,” he says. “When they give birth, those lips may get dragged down.
    â€œAnd sadly, sadly—remember, I was brought to America by Christian missionaries—sadly, fashion in sex is unfortunately driven by the porn industry and unfortunately today everyone shaves their genitals. Hair, you don’t see any more,” he announces. “I’ve undressed about 11,000 women—about 50 girls per day— and, I tell you today,
no one
is hairy. So what you could hide before, today you cannot hide. So that little extra lip down below now starts to erode the girl’s self-confidence.”
    â€œIt” can be inherited—“from your mom”, he adds, help-fully—or it can be a result of pregnancy. Luckily, however, “It can be fixed by a half-hour operation.
    â€œI’m glad plastic surgeons have took over this area,” he says. “I’ve got nothing against gynaecologists, but they’re not delicate. They don’t care so much about the
looks
. They’re just worried about function.”
    Rey later explains that somehow, bafflingly, a situation has emerged where there are people who want cosmetic surgery but
don’t really need it
. Objectively speaking, their butt might already be Brazilian enough, or the nose they were born with sufficiently natural. The reason they might want to