Comedy TV

Pissed At the Wheel

So Channel Ten’s finally realised they still have the Australian version of Drunk History on the shelf and figured they’d slot it into the coveted “stand up clips from that Canadian comedy festival” slot. Has anyone ever mentioned before just how good-looking most American stand up comedians are? It’s like it’s an audition for a... Read More »

Vale Rosehaven series 4

So ends another series of the slight, very slight, adventures of Emma and Daniel in Rosehaven. And by Rosehaven standards, this episode was action-packed. Four episodes previously, Emma (Celia Pacquola), Daniel (Luke McGregor) and Barbara (Kris McQuade) had attended a regional real estate conference, where they’d met big-shot agent Donovan (Josh Quong Tart), who’d tried... Read More »

Vale Retrograde

In the first ten minutes of its final episode Retrograde slapped down the “whoops, someone’s dead, time to get serious” card so hard for a moment we thought we were watching Please Like Me all over again. Was there an eulogy full of “confronting” swearing? Was there a slowed down super-sad cover version of Talking... Read More »

All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating

You can tell when Mad as Hell is angry at the ever-increasing rightward tilt of Australia’s media and politics because they start making jokes about Labor. So it was no real surprise that Mad as Hell came roaring back onto our screens this week with a few extremely cheap shots at the nominally left-ish side... Read More »

Vale The Weekly 2020

“Let’s do this baby one more time” said host Charlie Pickering at the start of the final episode of The Weekly for 2020. Here’s a suggestion: let’s not? Oh wait, Pickering already said he’ll be back for The Yearly as part of his sappy moralising end speech that said we’ll all get through this just... Read More »

Stories from a different age

There’s never been a better time for broadcasters to plunder their archives to keep us locked-down folk entertained, but there’s been a disappointing amount of decent archive comedy dropping on the various streaming platforms. So, it’s nice to see that Stories from the Golf is on SBS On Demand. Originally aired in 2004, Stories from... Read More »

Rolling Your R’s

Not for the first time, we’ve realised we’ve been going about this comedy thing all wrong. For years we’ve been watching sitcoms while shouting “be more funny” and “where’s the jokes” and “are they ever going to get out of the bloody car”, when what we should have been focusing on was the most important... Read More »

Vale Kinne Tonight

Most Australian television comedy of the past couple of decades has been made at the ABC. In fact, if it weren’t for the ABC, there’d barely be any locally made comedies at all. So, on the one hand, we have a lot to thank the ABC for – even if they’ve made a lot of... Read More »

Vale At Home Alone Together

In the end, At Home Alone Together turned out to be pretty average. It’s also exactly the kind of show the ABC should be making more of. Not just because it’s an increasingly rare example of ABC comedy output featuring comedy either, though with Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery currently interviewing tech bros and Hard Quiz... Read More »

Vale How to Stay Married season 2

This week saw the final episode of the current season of How to Stay Married, a sitcom that revolved around the hilarious idea that a marriage could somehow survive a wife writing a book titled My Shit Husband. It’s funny because it’s true! Or it’s true that it’s not funny, one or the other. The real... Read More »