Dancing With The (comedy) Stars

While watching Shaun Micallef on the current season of Dancing With The Stars, it was hard not to think: has it really come to this? Or that’s we would have thought if we’d actually been watching the show and not just a clip of Micallef on social media.

But why would we expect anything better of Australian comedy? The whole point now is clearly to make something that’s as disposable and forgettable as possible. And then edit that into tiny chunks so it doesn’t matter if your attention span is measured in seconds.

That doesn’t mean the end product isn’t funny. Working Dog have got this kind of thing down to a fine art. The Cheap Seats and Have You Been Paying Attention? are stone cold comedy classics week in week out. But if you missed an episode, you wouldn’t feel compelled to catch up when there’s a new one just around the corner. It’s hard to imagine even the show’s biggest fans watching an episode more than once.

Which is the whole point. The free-to-air networks want their comedy to be exactly like reality TV, or game shows, or sport, or news. That is, something that must be consumed immediately. If you don’t watch it live, what’s the point? Which explains why so much comedy now is basically competitions or game shows.

While these formats can often be funny, they’re also completely disposable. And not just for the folks at home. Being good on a panel show or a game show is like being good on radio. The best case scenario is that it gets you another job on radio. You go around for a few years doing the same thing, then you’re no longer an exciting new face. If you’re lucky the music stops when you’re a regular on a show that isn’t axed the following week.

People hate on sketch comedy and rightly so. But back when Australia made sketch comedy, if you made a sketch that was good enough, it could give you a career. People would talk about it, they’d rewatch it, you could bring the characters back and do it all over again. Which just doesn’t happen with even the funniest moments on a panel show.

Micallef has done almost everything you can do as a comedian in this country. The reason why he’s been able to do that is because first he did a bunch of sketches people loved. People still share online the sketches he made for Full Frontal and The Micallef P(r)ogram(me). That documentary he did on the evils of the demon drink, not so much.

Likewise with Working Dog. They made their name with The Late Show, Frontline, The Castle – if you want to go back further, there’s the D-Generation sketch shows. People might tell you they fondly remember The Panel. Good luck getting them to actually quote anything from it. Well, unless they remember the time Rob Sitch said he thought a car commercial looked great and Mick Molloy laughed at him.

It’s a bit simplistic to say that sketch comedy (or sitcoms or just character-based comedy) are the foundation of a television career. But it’s that kind of comedy – something with a bit of narrative, a bit of character – that makes fans out of people. Con the Fruiterer and Kylie Mole were mainstream figures; pretty much everyone on HYBPA? is funnier, but nobody’s making a board game about them.

On the flipside, the two shittiest TV comedians Australian television has produced in the 21st century are also the ones with the most devoted fanbases: Chris Lilley and Paul Fenech. They built a rusted on fanbase that enabled them to spend a decade churning out crap while actually funny people struggled. And they did it because they did character comedy. People might laugh at comedians, but they become fans of comedy characters.

But because the ABC are shit and the commercial networks gave away everything to streaming, we don’t do comedy characters any more. Decades of television built around comedy characters – pretty much every comedy-related ratings hit – and the industry just decided “nah, we’re not doing that any more”.

At least for a few minutes on Dancing With The Stars we get to see the comedy antics of that much-loved character “Shaun Micallef”. Sure, he’s no Milo Kerrigan. But who is?