Vale Urzila (the show, not the person)

Okay, so Urzila turned out to be slightly less varied than we’d hoped. Still (mostly) funny tho! And as it’s unlikely we’ll see a second season – or any other local sketch comedy on the ABC before they give up terrestrial broadcasting and become just another website – we can just space out our viewing to make every sketch seem fresh. How’s one every six months sound?

So to say the nice stuff first, Urzila Carlson herself is very funny; even the wobbly sketches were saved by her performances. The supporting cast were also good – and up for some edgy stuff at times – while the big name guest stars threw themselves into proceedings. Sketch comedy is back, baby! Is the kind of thing we wish we could say after watching this.

Most successful stand-ups, or at least those with name recognition, do an hour show a year. Come up with 50 minutes of gags, wrap them in some kind of overall theme, test it out in a few low-key venues and then hit the road! Which is why a big part of being a successful stand up is your performance skills; writing an hours worth of decent comedy a year is probably the easiest part of the job.

Urzila was based on the stand up of Urzila Carlson (duh -ed), and based on the previous paragraph it seems likely that Urzila’s stand up work is what you’d expect. She’s a funny mate who turns up once a year with a bunch of solid gags, and if those gags are largely covering the same ground, great! That’s what you go to see her for.

But distilling over a decade’s stand up into six half hour episodes? That’s going to reveal some consistent themes and subjects. Ideally you want a show that feels like a peek inside the (twisted) mind of whoever’s name is up front. But you also want to discover that they think about some things you wouldn’t have expected.

A massive positive about this show is that we get sketches from a middle aged woman perspective. After decades of TV sketch shows looking elsewhere, it’s a goldmine of untapped material. It’s great to have in-depth sketches about bras, nipple hairs, the menopause, all the things women experience.

The downside is that it’s all based on stand-up material, which works differently to sketch comedy. With stand-up, you can spend a whole hour explaining something that happened over five minutes. You can go deep with the detail, wander off on tangents, hold back information, and so on.

With a sketch, you have to show what happens. Which means you have to hope the dialogue and action is funny – you have to go from telling to showing. It’s a different type of comedy; these sketch adaptations of her stand up highlight those differences.

The subject matter is the show’s big strength. Adapting a bunch of stand-up is its big weakness. Too often Urzila ends up being relatable rather than funny. That’s still better than nothing, and there is a lot of funny material here.

It’s just that Urzila is a lot funnier than Urzila turned out to be.