13 schoolyards, Author at Australian Tumbleweeds - Page 92 of 112
Worst Friday Book Club ep 1: Bargain Bin Scab
One of the big advantages of being a comedy fan when it comes to books is that pretty much everything ends up in second hand stores. Even the cruddiest used bookstore usually has an A-grade collection of comedy books on their shelves, simply because comedy books are the most disposable, throw-away books there are. A... Read More »
A Twenty Year Old Corpse
Is The Late Show the most overrated Australian comedy of the last twenty years? The answer may surprise you: yes it is. Not only is it massively overrated, it continues to be overrated to this very day – which, considering we’re currently celebrating the twenty year anniversary of its initial airing on the ABC, gives... Read More »
Vale Hamish & Andy’s Euro Gap Year
Well, that’s Hamish & Andy screwed. To explain further: like pretty much everything in life, once a comedian’s act stops growing it starts dying. Once you settle in to doing the same thing again and again, no matter how successful you are at it eventually people will get bored. It’s a great problem to have... Read More »
Gonna Make Ya Sweat ‘Till Ya Bleed
What’s that you say? The Olympics is nothing but a massive marketing exercise thinly disguised as a sporting event? SAY WHAAAAAAAAAAAohfuckoff. Yes, once again the smug arseholes behind and in front of the camera at the Gruen sweatshop are back to tell us the fucking obvious – and just to warn you up front, this... Read More »
Great Comedy Mysteries of the 21st Century #17: The Wedding Party
So back in 2010 the opening night film at the Melbourne International Film Festival was Australian big-screen comedy The Wedding Party, in which Josh Lawson agrees to a fake marriage with Isabel Lucas even though he’s deeply in love with Kestie Morassi. Wait, we mean those actors play characters who’re doing all that, the actors... Read More »
A Presumption of Shared Humanity
If you’re going to be a comedian, you have to make a choice: do you make comedy designed to appeal to the masses, or do you follow your heart? On the one hand, appealing to the masses seems like the smart way to achieve mass appeal but idiots will call you a sell-out; on the... Read More »
July 2012: A New Golden Age?
It might be hard to spot from beneath the cloud of gloom and despair that hangs over the Australian televised comedy scene, but at the moment we have two – count ’em – decent local comedy programs currently airing on Australian free-to-air television. We’ll spare you the suspense: we mean Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell... Read More »
What’s So Funny About the Future of Australian Comedy?
For a few years now – well, it feels like years at least – we’ve been complaining / warning that Australian television likes everything about comedy but the making-people-laugh stuff. Of course, who listens to what we have to say? And so it has come to pass that in a few short weeks (July 25th)... Read More »
Thinking About Political Comedy?
Here’s a question: when exactly did Australian political comedy go soft? Put another way, when Shaun Micallef, cuddly game-show host and master of light-hearted surrealism, can moderately startle at least one of the hard-boiled Tumbleweeds team by confusing John Howard’s biography with Mein Kampf and making a Tony Abbott joke based on not quite calling... Read More »
The Plummeting Value of the Euro
Hamish and Andy are back! And why shouldn’t they be? Yes, their 2011 show Gap Year didn’t quite deliver the kind of gangbuster figures Nine was no doubt hoping for, but it’s not like they soiled the rug with Live From Planet Earth numbers either. Whatever you think of them as comedians, having them back... Read More »