Stirling Hunter presides over the Post-humourist Society, where the mere hint of a chuckle is cause for medical intervention. As the head of The Institute for Humour Disorders and Comedy Related Harm, he has helped to orchestrate a cultural coup, identifying comedy — and its pernicious offshoots of systemic bullying, ridicule, and 'micro-derisions' — as the root of all social ills.

Stirling and his cadre of earnest researchers and activists have reengineered society. Comedians are now medicated into submission, governments and corporations enforce anti-joke edicts, and the youth are indoctrinated against the evils of toxic humourism. Their ultimate goal? Nothing short of the complete decomedification of human communication.

As he embarks on his most ambitious research project yet – a root and branch deep dive into the Post-humourist Society he fought to create – disturbing revelations from his family’s past propel him into the black comedic undercurrent bubbling just below the surface of the safest society ever created, threatening to upturn his world and post-humourism itself.

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Gregory Bird, at various times, to varying degrees of success - from almost none to a great deal - has been, or still is, amongst other things, in no particular order, the following:

singer-songwriter; medical school drop-out; Melbourne Comedy Festival award winning comedian; funeral director’s after-hours and corpse viewing attendant; Jacques Brel & Tom Waits impersonator; lions club youth of the year contestant; anatomy school cadaver pusher; teepee meditating hippie; serial technology start up founder; feral lead singer of the band that almost was almost more than almost any other band that should’ve been; artificial intelligence postgrad and software developer; tv comedy writer and showrunner; digital nomad; music festival producer; and satirical novelist.