It’s claimed he berated the audience for not laughing at his jokes, told one woman watching the recording to “f*** off” when she said the segment was boring and later stormed off stage.
One audience member told news.com.au Anderson appeared to have a “meltdown”.
“It was a complete dummy spit. To be honest he was a bit of a brat.”
For his part, Anderson said it was a “terrible audience … just sitting back in their seats”.
The ABC played down the incident and said there was “nothing untoward” during the filming and it was simply Anderson’s regular audience “interplay”.
Gruen to Audience: Get Plucked
Look, we all know News.com has an agenda as far as the ABC goes, and that agenda is “shut it down”. So despite us reprinting pretty much the whole thing because it’s hilarious, you should maybe take this shocking report with a grain of salt.
FUNNYMAN Wil Anderson has been accused of being not funny at all and in fact downright rude to the audience during the filming of the episode of panel show Gruen, which aired on Wednesday evening.
“Funnyman Wil Anderson has been accused of not being funny at all”. That’s comedy gold, that is.
It’s claimed things went south quickly at Tuesday’s filming during the first segment of the show, an analysis of the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal.
While it appears on screen for only minutes, the segment on Wednesday’s show took a full 40 minutes to film with few laughs coming from the bleachers.
Anderson was not happy, said the audience member, who asked not to be named.
“Afterwards, Anderson stood up and said (words to the effect of) ‘that took 40 f***ing minutes to film. I don’t want to be out of line but you guys are the worst audience I’ve ever had’”.
A plucky audience member then appeared to take Anderson on, saying the reason there had been little in the way of laughing was because the segment had been “boring”.
A “plucky” audience member you say? Are you sure they weren’t “feisty”? Or even “nuggety”?
“When one woman called out the topic was boring, (Anderson) was like ‘why don’t you f*** off then’”.
The audience member that news.com.au spoke to said the berating worked up to a point, with the next two segments taking far less time to film.
But when the show was done, rather than hanging around for selfies, Anderson went off in what appeared to be a huff.
“Storming off at the end made him seem like a real pr***.”
People at the filming, in the ABC’s Sydney studios in Ultimo, were taken aback by his abruptness, said the audience member.
“It was a complete dummy spit. To be honest he was a bit of a brat.”
Let’s be honest, Anderson does have a point – complaining about being bored at a taping of Gruen is like complaining you’re getting wet on the Titanic.
On Triple M Sydney on Tuesday morning Anderson continued berating the audience putting the blame on them for “sitting back”.
“We were doing Gruen last night and that audience was just a terrible audience,” he told The Grill Team.
“Usually we have a fantastic audience and it wasn’t that they were bad people, but they were just sitting back in seats not giving you the energy that you need so you try to rev them up. I literally just told them they weren’t doing a good job.”
He said if they wanted to “sit back” they could do that at home.
The ABC said the interaction with the audience was Gruen business as usual.
“There was nothing unusual or untoward about last night’s live recording of Gruen,” a spokesman told the Daily Telegraph.
“Wil interplays with the live audience on a regular basis to ensure high energy in the room and the audience feel engaged and entertained. Last night’s audience took this interplay with the good humour with which it was intended and Wil thanked them for their enthusiasm at the end of the recording.”
Gruen is one of the ABC’s highest rating shows and is a backbone of the network’s schedule.
So Anderson is actually some kind of… energy vampire? Guess that explains the hair.
*and yes, for those playing along at home, this week’s episode of The Weekly did once again keep that bizarre “here’s Charlie’s upcoming monologue topics” list on screen during his opening chat. Why?
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Curse this hilarious article! It made me actually watch this segment of Gruen, something I usually actively avoid…
And having seen the segment in question, I’m surprised at the premise of this article. They seem to have buried the lede.
To me its not that the audience failed to laugh (it’s Gruen… outside of pumping nitrous oxide into the studio, what the fuck was supposed to elicit laughter?) its more that they managed to suppress their audible horror.
After all, this subject seems like the quintessential representation of everything wrong with Gruen. The segment explores facebook, a company whose business model is designed around harvesting everyone’s private information, being exposed as violating its duty of care, allowing malicious actors to access private information and spread noxious lies that may have perverted democracy itself. It’s about how advertising is a pervasive, intrusive, manipulative, dissembling invasion of your basic human freedoms.
…And the host of Gruen gets pissed off at the audience for not laughing through that horror show when he makes a tepid callback to a shithouse joke about Bunnings?
I mean, the subject is literally: ‘Can you believe that this lying company lied to you through advertising, sold you out to lying advertisers, and is now trying to win you back with further advertisements that are lies?!’ and they are surprised when the audience doesn’t titter along joyously as a group of advertisers (and Will fucking Anderson, more meme than man) gab among themselves about how their almighty deity Advertising might be better utilised to sell their fraudulent message?
The audience didn’t laugh?!
They’re lucky that when Russel Howcroft leaned in to comfort everyone with the knowledge that facebook’s share price has bounced back to ‘normal’ after the senate testimony that the audience didn’t burn the ABC building to ash.