Graham Kennedy, Australia's King of Comedy, reigned over local television for 40 years as talk-show host, game-show presenter, satirist, commentator, and iconoclastic jester.

This biography is an engaging portrait - written with an incisive insider's eye - of the little man Sydney critics called "the platinum blond rabbit".

Blundell elegantly traces the career of the star from working-class Melbourne, who tilted Australia's television to an alarming, unforgettable angle with his style of disrespectful buffoonery, then mysteriously disappeared somewhere in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, where he lives with Clydesdale horses and an ever present pack of cigarettes.

'King' is also the story of the comedy that Kennedy borrowed from vaudeville, burlesque, stand-up humour, satire and revue. It looks at the way he examined humour's traditions and invented new comic genres for television.

While this is an unauthorised biography, Graham Kennedy requested his agent "to pass on to Graeme his best wishes for the book". Mr Kennedy declined to be involved "for no particular reason, other than he believes he has a limited memory of many of the facts of his life".