“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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
“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 »
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 »
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 »