She’s All Woman, Hear Her Roar
Judith Lucy’s spent the past six weeks exploring womanhood in Judith Lucy Is All Woman, and what have we learnt? That it’s virtually impossible to answer any of the questions she set out to explore?... Read More »
Comedy TV
Weekly As Piss
So we now have this to look forward to: If somebody doesn’t put together a sketch where *all* the cast members of Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation are hosting identical news comedy shows, we’ll… well, we’ll continue to throw all our sketch ideas into the bin where they belong. Ok, let’s be realistic here: Shaun MIcallef... Read More »
Let Loose Live
Ok, we’re just going to come right out and ask: do comedians make a shitload more money from live tours than they do from television? Because pretty much the only way we can figure out how this – THE serially selfconscious Bondi Hipsters are about to get up off their couch — to star in... Read More »
Lined Up For the Chop
The trick with parodies is to make sure there’s more going on than just the parody. Those classic Mad Magazine movie spoofs had great art; Get Smart had a whole lot of jokes that had nothing to do with the “spy-fi” craze of the 60s. And the other end of the scale, SBS’s recent action... Read More »
Womanly curveballs
“Why do comedians always make this sort of program these days? Why can’t they make proper comedies?” a friend of this blog enquired recently. He was talking about Judith Lucy Is All Woman, the latest in a line of personality-led, comedic explorations of a... Read More »
Mad as Hell in a Cell
Mad as Hell is back! And, uh, yeah… ok, it’s taken us a couple of days to get around to mentioning it because we don’t really have all that much new to say. Shaun Micallef and his skilled team have created a finely honed satirical machine and by now they’re capable of hitting any target... Read More »
Comoedia ad Hitlerum, or Godwit’s Law
…Aaaannnddd we’re back after our traditional summer break during which, as usual, we’ve recovered from all that slipshod Australian comedy we’ve watched over the past year by slagging it off one last time in our annual awards. Yes, it is a kind of therapy for us. But now it’s time to start the cycle again... Read More »
Vale A Whole Bunch Of Shows
As is the way of things, the ABC likes to backload their comedy output for the year, piling on the shows through October and November then bringing things to a screeching halt the first week of December when the ratings period ends. With so much going on and our desks still looking pretty cluttered –... Read More »
Vale Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell (series four)
Surprisingly – or not, depending on how closely you’ve been paying attention – for a news satire the final episode of Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell contained a lot of swipes at other comedy shows. And well deserved swipes at that, whether the targets were lazy ABC “comedy” panel shows (the ‘Blather’ sketch even contained... Read More »
I Said Hey Hey, What’s Going On?
We were going to talk a little about the surprise revelation that Fairafx’s chief TV writer thinks Australia is crap at comedy – What shows like Black Comedy and Mad as Hell do, however, is demonstrate that despite the persistent belief that Australia cannot “do” comedy, our funny bone is actually in pretty good shape,... Read More »