Game Shows Are No Laughing Matter

This week Australia greeted the arrival of two new game shows featuring comedians: Shaun Micallef’s Parents Evening and Class Clowns. Regular readers will know that comedy games shows – even the good ones – aren’t really our thing. Looking for praise for Taskmaster? Can’t get enough of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee? Tell your story walking, pal. So in light of our obvious and frankly somewhat repetitive dislike for the combination of answering questions and telling jokes, does anyone think we’ve been having a good week?

Pretty much the best thing we can say is that it could have been worse. Parent’s Evening is, individual quirks aside, pretty much a regular game show; you could even do a non-celebrity version. Class Clowns is basically just Shit Taskmaster. Comedy fans can safely give both a miss.

Unfortunately we didn’t realise this until after we watched both. So we’re going to waffle on about them a bit more to try and get something out of the experience.

Parent’s Evening does have one advantage: it’s hosted by Shaun Micallef. As always, he provides a base level of quality. The trouble here – from a comedy perspective – is that like every game show he’s hosted since the first run of Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation, the actual show feels nothing like him or his comedy. He’s parachuted into a format almost anyone could host, and a few decent quips aren’t going to change that.

Then there’s the guests: who cares? Most Australian celebrities are barely interesting in their own right. Having them sit next to their even less interesting parents or children does not improve matters. The single joke the entire show is based around is “watch a semi-famous person squirm as it turns out their relative doesn’t give a shit”. We say again: who cares?

Family awkwardness has been mined for comedy and drama since the ancient Greeks had Oedipus go on a bad date. These days even real life examples need to be insanely brutal to cut through. This is not that show, no matter how many times the chairs move back and forth or someone shakes their head in dismay. These are not polished comedy teams; the banter rarely rises to the level of Christmas dinner conversation.

Once it’s clear we’re not going to see families torn apart, what’s left? A bunch of pop culture questions one group or another can’t answer? Charities getting a few thousand dollars? Shaun’s son Gabe actually being not bad as the low-key sidekick? Just because they’re things happening on television doesn’t mean we want to watch them.

At no point during the first episode of Class Clowns does Dave Hughes start ranting about Albo destroying the economy. Which is a shame, because it could certainly do with some livening up. It’s not that it’s a bad show; in fact, it was slightly better than we expected. It’s still an educational ABC panel show. Our expectations are so low we’re worried they might cut a gas main.

Hosted by Julia Morris as the fake headmaster at a fake school, the three teams of two comedians (the others are Becky Lucas and Matt Okine, Luke McGregor and Bron Lewis, and Nina Oyama alongside Hughesy) first answer a bunch of educational questions, then attempt a couple of slightly less obviously educational challenges. Did someone say “Shit Taskmaster“? Oh wait, it was us.

Everyone here is a comedian, which is good for comedy. But all the questions and challenges are at least slightly educational, which is bad for comedy. Wombat shit is square; hilarious. Pin the organ on the lycra-clad comedian; thigh-slapping. And so even when this is funny, which is some of the time, it’s still frustrating because it could easily have been funnier.

That’s the problem with just about every “comedy” game show. Unless you really work hard to cut the game show part to the very bare minimum (that’d be something like Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee or Have You Been Paying Attention?), the game show side of things kills the comedy. Random challenges can be funny, but they’re usually not as funny as a funny situation funny people worked out beforehand.

But this is the ABC and for some bizarre reason they think their audience wants to learn about things. Which they probably do. But instead of simply making decent informative programming about interesting things, they instead make zany panel shows where comedians demonstrate their lack of knowledge.

If the point of the show is to be educational, why do we have to sit through comedians answering questions wrongly before we get the information? If it’s a quiz show, why is there so much other non-quiz stuff going on? And if the point of the show is to be funny, why not make something that’s funny?

Like a lot of ABC programming, the whole thing reeks of ambivalence. Rather than committing to be the best possible version of one thing, it’s three or four things mixed in together to create a bland substance nobody’s all that excited about.

Maybe it’s stew, maybe it’s spew. Either way, it’s not worth a taste test.