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

change it is as puzzling to Rey as it is to you or me. It is a medical condition with a Greek name: dysmorphia. Rey says this is “a huge problem”.
    So, what makes somebody beautiful? “Beauty starts from the inside,” he says, and advises us to help mothers struggling with prams, after which we will find we “seem to radiate light”.
    â€œIf you want to erode the inner core, if you want to hate yourself, if you want to have a very bad self-opinion: live one thing, and preach something different,” he says.
    â€œI’m going to ask this question for everybody,” says Gendreau, helpfully. “Do you feel like putting yourself on TV, and doing whatyou do, in front of the world, has held you up to a higher standard of ethics? Has it made you a better doctor?”
    â€œI always get the best questions with the foreign press,” says Dr Rey, apparently unaware that Gendreau is his PR.
    The answer is yes, he does, and yes, it has.

    There are two kinds of stars, real stars and reality stars. The difference between them is the difference between rapper Snoop Dogg and everyone else we meet over the week. When Snoop enters the lobby of L’Ermitage—fabulously late—he glides across the floor on a sheen of impossibly relaxed charisma, fuelled by joints as strong as his two colossal bodyguards. He must have helped a lot of mothers with their prams, because Snoop glows like an amber light at an intersection.
    An interview with Snoop is worth serious money to any jobbing journalist, so we’re divided into four groups of six, to make sure nobody in the same market gets the same quotes. Snoop disappears into a room, the smell of burning dope fills the corridor, and an announcement comes through the haze that Snoop will only do two sessions, which means nationalities represented by more than one correspondent will have to double up.
    It is fine by me, and almost everybody else, but there are two kinds of journalists: the visiting foreign press and members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (whose Golden Globes ceremony has just been officially cancelled). Today we are joined by one of the latter, and she is furious that she might lose her exclusive. The rosters are revised over and again, but it is impossible to cosset her in a room with only Spanish and Hebrew speakers. Eventually, as the appointed hour for the two sessions passes without Snoop emerging from his cloud, she storms out without meeting him, whilethe rest of us sit or stand or pace, waiting for our 45 minutes with the most honey-voiced, treacle-tongued rapper in the world.
    When Snoop finally floats in, his eyes are half closed. He folds himself onto a throne (a throne!) at the front of the room. He is wearing glass beads in his hair braids, and what looks like the gusset of a stocking on his head.
    He says he made the show
Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood
to present himself to the public in a positive light, not as a playa and a gangsta, but as a loving husband and devoted father.
    â€œI’m a French journalist,” announces a woman from the floor. (This is always a sign of a perplexing question to come.) “You’re addicted to chicken,” she says.
    Snoop smiles, as if this were a compliment.
    â€œAren’t you scared to eat all the chicken of the world?” she asks.
    This thought is alarming enough for a man who is so stoned that his hair beads are weighing down his head, but there is more to come: it is a probing, two-part question. “What would you eat if there is no more chicken?” the French journalist continues.
    â€œErm … if there’s no chicken … ” says Snoop, stroking his chin. “I don’t know about it. Hopefully, that’ll never happen.”
    It is left to the Brits to give voice to the question on nobody’s lips.
    â€œYou’ve had loads and loads of fame,” says a man from the tabloids, reasonably, “and, obviously,