John Safran Speaks!

It’s been a long time between drinks for John Safran. His last starring role on our screens was back in 2016 with The Goddamn Election; a decade later he’s looking at the touchy topic of free speech with Shut Your Big Fat Mouth John Safran!. Is Australia’s most notorious prankster finally about to say the unsayable?

Well, no. Safran interviews both mainstream-ish figures who’ve been cancelled or lost work for their views, and the kind of fringe figures that have been his stock-in-trade for the last few decades. If you believe that Nazis should never be given a platform, Safran hears you. He just doesn’t agree with you.

Taken as a whole it all feels more like a summary than an in-depth investigation. Many of the interviews are pretty short, though Safran does make sure to give more time to the fringe dwellers we don’t usually hear from. Some of his conclusions are unsurprising as well. We learn that a lot of “free speech” is a front for money making scams, the ABC doesn’t want anyone talking about the Middle East from either side, Nazis are smirking buttheads, pretty much everyone charged with offending people feels they were just misunderstood, and Safran feels it’s more important to expose dodgy views to the light of day than ban them outright.

It’s the kind of argument that justifies Safran’s earlier, dodgier material. To be fair, he admits it. There’s a (comedy) segment where he talks about the golden age of the 90s, when everyone could be offensive to everyone else and it all worked out. But that was when offensive and extremist views rarely got much of an airing. And when they did, you had to personally track them down – if only by tuning into a John Safran series. These days they’re everywhere and coming at people full volume as part of cultural warfare. The calls to silence them are as much from people just wanting some peace and quiet as from those those trying to stifle opposing viewpoints.

And those that do want to silence people usually fumble their attempts, causing more harm than good. It’s not news that Safran’s interest in religion is more from a personal faith side than a cultural one. That means that preachers wanting to quote religious texts that others find hateful or protesters using political beliefs to attack faiths are given a bit more sympathy here than you might expect.

(again, Safran’s views can feel a little old-fashioned. He believes in a separation of personal beliefs and public speech in a way that a generation brought up on social media, where silence on topical issues is often read as support for the bad guys, probably don’t)

So there’s no easy answers here. Who cares: what about the comedy? Well, Safran does expose some pretty funny views early on, if you find an old lady earnestly talking about secret “full term abortions” funny. He does do one good old fashioned prank, when he learns to paint so he can paint a flattering portrait of Gina Rinehart to make up for that one she didn’t like. Unfortunately he can’t give it to her, even when he pulls out the “Michael Moore megaphone” (one for the old school fans there).

There’s also a bit of a long running joke about Safran wanting to be able to give an “ironic” Nazi salute to an enemy of his. Only the payoff doesn’t quite happen. Or maybe it does? We don’t see him giving a salute (it’s illegal in Victoria), but he does give one to a dickhead out of sight. Is it the same dickhead who tried to get him cancelled a few years earlier? Answers on the back of a postcard, please.

Whatever this special’s flaws, it’s good to have Safran back, now in an all-white suit and hat (one of the Tumblies team reckons it’s to make him look like the opposite of a Orthodox Jew). Probably the most interesting angle here is Safran looking back at his old work. Boundary-pushing comedy hits different in 2026; one of his sketches was recently used by right-wing groups as anti-Indigenous propaganda. At times Safran’s plea to let all viewpoints speak sounds a little like him defending a world view the world has left behind.

Which would be a shame, as it would mean we’ve left satirists like Safran behind as well.