The Logies and comedy in 2025

There’s plenty you can say about the Logies – TV Tonight called it “broken” last week, and they’re not wrong. But it’s so much more than a televised evening of backslapping and blatantly handing awards to stars linked to whoever holds the broadcast rights. It’s a show that, this year at least, got it right as far as comedy goes.

Let’s remind ourselves who won the comedy awards last night…

The Graham Kennedy Award for Most Popular New Talent went to Guy Montgomery of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee, who beat Taskmaster’s Jenny Tian, amongst others.

The award for Best Comedy Entertainment Program went to Have You Been Paying Attention?, a clear winner against the dismal and long-running ABC shows Gruen, Hard Quiz and The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, 10’s Sam Pang Tonight, which hasn’t quite found its feet, and Thank God You’re Here, which… continues to get greenlit for new seasons for some reason.

The award for Best Scripted Comedy Program went to Fisk, another clear winner in a field which consisted of Austin, Colin From Accounts, Good Cop/Bad Cop, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (what? All of it?), and Optics.

There were also Silver Logies for Fisk cast members Julia Zemiro, Glenn Butcher, Aaron Chen, and Kitty Flanagan. If Fisk doesn’t come back for a fourth season, there’ll be riots in the streets!

What this shows us is that not only do the members of the public who vote for these things enjoy the better comedy shows on air, but so do those who sit on juries for the “Best” awards. Not that anyone at any network will join the dots and wonder if they should make more shows like the ones that people like, of course.

We should also mention host Sam Pang, who did another good job this year. His opening monologue was strong, playing well at home partly because he made so many in the room squirm with embarrassment.

And then there was the Hall of Fame award, which deservedly went to Magda Szubanski. Szubanski, who didn’t attend the ceremony following her recent diagnosis with stage 4 mantle cell lymphoma, gave a moving and defiant speech, tackling head-on the criticism that she was only receiving the award because of her cancer.

The idea that Szubanski doesn’t deserve this award is crap, obviously. She was a stand-out performer in The D-Generation, Fast Forward, Big Girl’s Blouse, Kath & Kim and more, and has been one of this country’s most loved entertainers for decades. It’s hard to think of anyone more deserving from that generation of comedians, apart from Working Dog, who already received the AACTA’s Longford Lyell Award earlier this year.

So, in a world where there seem to be fewer comedy shows each year, at least the country’s best-known television awards ceremony picked the best ones. That’s one thing the Logies doesn’t need to change. We’ll leave the organisers to have a think about what TV Tonight had to say.