The most wonderful time of the year
We look at two end-of-year comedies: The Chaser's War on 2020 and Shaun Micallef's Mad As Hell Pagan Holiday... Read More »
Comedy TV
It’s Square to be Hip
Australian comedy’s biggest problem probably isn’t a lack of ideas, but that’s got to be somewhere up near the top of the list. Point at a sketch show and chances are the same set-ups turn up time and time again; most sitcoms are little more than the same episode over and over again. Character comedy... Read More »
And the winners are…
Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell won the award for Best Comedy Entertainment Program at this year’s... Read More »
Vale Seven’s entire comedy output for 2020
As the year draws to a close, so has Housos vs Virus and Regular Old Bogan, the only comedies made by Seven in... Read More »
Welcome to the House of Fun
It's not until you've watched the new Netflix series Aunty Donna's Big Ol' House of Fun that you realise that comedy on Australian television is... Read More »
A Nasty Reputation as a Cruel Dude
This week on Reputation Rehab: “Reputations exist in the minds of real people”. Could have fooled us. Here’s something else that exists in the minds of real people: what exactly is this show about? We didn’t review Reputation Rehab after last week’s episode because being built around a big “celebrity” interview left us feeling it... Read More »
The Fart of Storytelling
The decision by Seven – well, 7Mate to be exact – to show Housos vs Virus and Regular Old Bogan back to back has provided us with an exciting opportunity to examine how storytelling works in the Australian sitcom. Because they sure as shit didn’t give us anything to examine as far as comedy goes.... Read More »
Gruen in Lockdown
“Necessary advertising”. Even Wil Anderson says it’s an oxymoron. And yet here were are in 2020 and Gruen is leading with a story about just how important ads – or as they used to be called but if they used the correct term then there’d be a distinction between important information and the blatant lies... Read More »
Vale Mad as Hell season 12
Earlier this year we wrote a little about how Mad as Hell, as basically the last ABC comedy program still in existence, was having a bit of fun using all the old laff-getting tricks that other shows used to mess around with. Back then we were generally approving: little did we realise they were about... Read More »
The Bicentennial Man
This week saw the two hundredth episode of Have You Been Paying Attention? and the show feels as fresh as it ever did. We say “fresh” but we could have gone with “timely”, or “thrilling”, or “topical”, or any number of words that don’t necessarily start with “t”: HYBPA? came out of the gate strong... Read More »