Get Krack!n Sends a Sign

So, of course, after we spent last week going on about how the Kates often seem to be slightly loosely-defined as comedy characters on Get Krack!n, this week’s episode once again proved us wrong by having them firmly positioned on the wrong side of the comedy topic from start to finish. Who knows about comedy? Not us.

And that topic? “International Day of People Living With a Disability Day”, which provided them with plenty of opportunity to be condescending and awkward while the people they invited on the show to exploit stared at them wondering exactly what the hell they were going on about.

The line “you’re disabled, but you’re not inspiring?” pretty much summed up the comedy, largely based around the sadly still surprising idea that disabled people are people first and inspirational slogans pretty much never. Get Krack!n tends to roam far and wide with its comedy targets, but this week’s episode returned to the idea of sending up breakfast television – and the Australian mainstream media it embodies – and got in a bunch of good punches to the dismissive and disposable attitude said media has towards anything not firmly mainstream.

All of which meant the Kates were the butt of the jokes this week (aside from the Auslan interpreters, whose growing dislike of each other and – we assume – occasionally inaccurate translations of what was going on eventually boiled over), which is probably the best angle of attack for the show in general. Put another way, “Everyone on twitter is saying disabled people should be hosting the disability show” might have been 100% correct, but the whole point of Get Krack!n at its best is that pretty much anyone else should be hosting the show – it’s the segments where the Kates are the voices of reason that sometimes fall flat.

A big part of having comedy on television from people who aren’t white men fresh out of an inner Sydney private school is to expose people to, and then get laughs from, a whole new range of subjects. So while Adam Hills isn’t quite as funny as Adam Hills sometimes seems to think he is, having him deliver pretty much a straight lecture about the NDIS being under funded and therefore replaced by a “US meets Hunger Games style ‘fend for yourself’ model” was both welcome and not exactly something you’d see pop up on The Weekly. Mostly because while The Weekly works hard to be worthy and important, it also works hard to make sure it doesn’t give serious airtime to anyone who isn’t Charlie Pickering and Tom Gleeson, which undermines its authority when it comes to discussing just about anything not firmly mainstream.

So while this episode had serious issues on its mind, for the most part it struck the right balance between treating the issues seriously and making fun of the Kates’ disinterest and misunderstanding of those issues. The guest stars all got to make valid points (even if they were just “this show is shit”), the Kates got to steal the show by being comically ignorant before reminding us that this was basically a “very special episode” and they’d never be dealing with any of these issues ever again, and the crawl made a joke about the pointlessness of jazz. The season’s still uneven, but the hits are outnumbering the misses.