BY FLETCHER PITCAIRN BLIGH, PHILOSOPHY DESK

IT USED TO be that Ashkenazi Jews were, as a group, the most intelligent humans on the planet.

Well not any more.

Because Australian Larrikins have passed them out.

In a remarkable turn of events, the Aussie Larrikin now has the highest mean IQ in the world.

“It’s a tricky one to be sure of,” said Bruce Bruce, an intelligence specialist from Tasmania. “I mean who is a Larrikin? Unlike other groups, it’s hard to pin down. Your ethnics, they all have their markers: DNA, skin colour, physical features, culture, language, all that; with your Larrikin, it’s all behaviour, isn’t it?

“Another problem is it’s all men, and young men at that. That’s probably why it’s slipped through the research net until now. Gender and group identity politics have no love for the Aussie Larrikin. A feeling which is utterly mutual, believe me. Your Larrikin’s attitude to women would make a caveman blush. So there’s all that and the fact that your average Larrikin usually acts like a bloody idiot most of the time. Good hearted or no.

“And Larrikins can be subdivided into -groups. Most are temporary Larrikins. They stop when they finally grow up or go to jail, whichever comes first. But you have your permanent Larrikins, too; and, of course, your retrospective Larrikins: they’re blokes who were a pain in the arse when they were alive but due to something they did well, maybe in footy or cricket or something, they are labelled Larrikins in hindsight to excuse their bahaviour. So they go through their whole lives as fuckin’ idiots, only to be held up as geniuses when they’re gone. The tabloids are full of them.

“I think the sheer complexity of Larrikinism is actually its attraction. And the fact that a fella can go through his whole life sticking fire crackers up his arse and getting pissed six days out of every seven, acting the bloody Gollah, and you don’t even suspect he has an IQ of 250.

“Which brings us to the cause of this IQ leap. Which the Ashkenazi, and the Japanese who hold the top prize for National IQ, both contest, I understand. Well, I’ve got even more bad news for them: the only thing we can come up with as a cause for this intellectual triumph of the Larrikin is beer. Yep, the suds. We have yet to figure it out, but the suds appears to be the common denominator. Who’da believed it? Anyway, we think what might be happening is that underneath the wretched Larrikin antics is a hidden and enigmatic intellectual code, being exchanged between young men mostly, something beyond rooting sheilas in threesomes, owning a ute and a purple hoon-mobile and getting your cock tattooed by your girlfriend’s mother. And all triggered by being on the piss too often. It’s actually sublime. Intellect as a by-product of behaviour that would shame Attila the Hun, or those Bullingdon Club bastards from Oxford. Well, Attila anyway. You gotta give it to evolution though. Charles Darwin rocks, I say.”