Australian Tumbleweeds
What About Ja’mie – It Isn’t Fair
Week four of Ja’mie: Private School Girl, and what have we learnt? Seriously, what have we learnt? Private schools create monsters? Well no, as Ja’mie’s sister seems kind of un-monstrous – as do a bunch of Ja’mie’s fellow students – and they all go to a private school. Teen girls fabricate relationships where little more than friendship exists? So… like everyone else then? Chris Lilley thinks that treating a bitchy cartoon character’s superficial heartbreak as a serious matter is something people would like to watch? Now you’re talking.
When people write things like this:
Ja’mie: Private School Girl is terrifyingly akin to watching a documentary.
Or this:
The portrait he paints of what it’s like to be a girl growing up in this impossible, contradictory world is disarmingly honest
It’s important to realise that they’re full of shit. How is this like a documentary? Ja’mie is not like a real teenage girl. Oh sure, she has elements that real teenage girls have, but even if she was a “real teenage girl” and not a forty year old man in a dress, the show he’s created around her only shows an extremely limited range of her behaviours.
C’mon: would a real teenage girl be a bitch to everyone all the time? Would she be so consistently vapid that she would say half the things Ja’mie said about suicide this week? Would she be so totally unaware that teen boys are, you know, somewhat interested in having sex with their girlfriends when she spent half of an earlier episode talking about how boys are really into tits?
There’s always been a strong element of “it’s funny because it’s true, even if it’s not actually funny” in Lilley’s fanbase. Back during Summer Heights High people were claiming that Mr G was spot on as far as high school drama teachers go. Were they still saying that after he tried to make it look like a special needs student had taken a shit on the floor of a classroom? Ask your friends.
But with Ja’mie, that seems to be the only basis on which anyone is defending it: “teenage girls are just like that!”. Only if you watch the show for more than a minute it’s clear the show itself is completely unrealistic on every level. For example, last week’s party: did anyone else think for something with a three episode build up what we saw was extremely watered down and fake, especially for 17-18 year olds? Didn’t we just get three minutes of Ja’mie talking about dick pics? Would they really jump into the pool in their party gear? Wouldn’t they have to have been drinking to make looking like shit for the rest of the night seem like a good idea?
Meanwhile, why did the boarders even show up dressed to party at a party held by their arch-enemy at her own home? Why has Ja’mie been allowed to take a black teenager away from his family to live at her place? Why hasn’t someone taken Ja’mie aside and said “you know, you’re coming off as a bit of a bitch”? Why haven’t the teachers noticed that Ja’mie a): is the biggest bully in the schoolyard, b): abuses her detention powers like mad c): never seems to go to any class that doesn’t involve her singing terribly or dancing horribly and d): seems to have some kind of deep-seated sexual issues considering the number of times she’s started taking her gear off in public?
If you think the show is actually funny, fine. But if you’re claiming it’s basically a documentary, then you should examine it as such and not just base your verdict on “yeah, teenage girls are such bitches” or “teenagers are so random, nothing they do makes any sense!” And if your reply to that is “you’re not meant to take it seriously”? So you’re going to defend it on the basis that it’s packed with jokes? This should be good.
Picking Up the Pieces
It was announced last year, then languished in the ABC’s “too hard” basket for most of this year but now it appears Spicks and Specks is finally back.
The hit music quiz show is set to return early next year hosted by comic Josh Earl with Melbourne radio host Adam Richard and former Killing Heidi singer Ella Hooper.
The series return was to have been announced at the ABC’s 2014 upfronts event later this month but with the pilot due to be recorded this week, news of the much-loved series return has leaked.
You say leaked, we say “isn’t this news like, six months late at least”, lets call it even and move on. Presumably the ABC have been conducting a lot of top-secret rehearsals in a barn somewhere out bush, because this is the kind of line-up that doesn’t get put together by chance. None of them are nobodies, but it’s the kind of mildly risky set-up – well, “risky” in an ABC panel show context where the host could have just as easily been Peter Helliar – that suggests they’ve actually spent the extra time since the relaunch was first announced trying to make sure they got it right.
That’s not to say this will work of course, but we’re going to be slightly more optimistic about this than we were 24 hours ago. Only slightly mind you; if they really are recording the “pilot” later this week (and haven’t, as we suspect, been recording numerous pilot-like efforts with various possible cast members) then there must be an awful lot of people at the ABC hoping it doesn’t turn out to be a big steaming turd.
But hey! We never really liked the original Spicks and Specks much either. Just so long as it rates well enough to make the actually funny shows that follow it look good – and also rates well enough to kill off the ABCs numerous other crap stabs at panel comedy programming – all’s right in our world. Until the Adam Hills guest appearances start.
Our biannual post about Clarke & Dawe
Given the locally-made comedy that’s served up to us – dull attention-seekers playing dull attention-seekers, B-list celebrities falling off sets, Tractor Monkeys – it would be easy to assume that large numbers of Australians wouldn’t be interested in watching two men in their 60s, sitting on stools, delivering three minutes of hardcore political satire. It’s doubtful a focus group representing the key demographics would react favourably to that concept, anyway.
We ourselves were a bit concerned that Clarke & Dawe – despite its successful 20+ year run – wouldn’t survive for too long after it was put in the “doomed to fail timeslot” of 6.55pm on a Thursday following its axing from 7.30. But guess what? We were wrong! We Australians watch them in droves.
If you head over to TV Tonight’s section on Timeshifted Ratings and trawl through the ratings for Thursdays you’ll see that Clarke & Dawe has been in the Top 20 most weeks for at least the last six months, averaging around 550,000 viewers per episode. Which is pretty good for a show that requires effort to watch – in more ways than one. Add to that the thousands of views each sketch quickly accrues on YouTube and, well, it’s probably safe to assume we’ll see them again in 2014.
The Lights Comin’ Over The Hill Are A-Blinding Me
Well, at least now we know where all this Ja’mie malarky is heading. It’s not exactly a positive sign for a character when pretty much the only question – well, the only question in the non-teen-girl circles we move in – about Ja’mie: Private School Girl is “will Lilley man up and give his much-loved creation the savage kicking she so clearly deserves?”
Of course not. And with that said, let’s continue.
Tonight’s episode pretty much laid down the tracks for the back end of the series: Ja’mie’s sister was again sidelined, Ja’mie’s dad was again sidelined, we got loads more talk about Ja’mie’s tits and some crappy singing and bad dancing. Groundhog Day!
But of slight interest was the way the confrontation with The Boarders played out. In case you may have missed it / fell asleep / stopped giving a shit back at episode one, all the girls Ja’mie hates turn up at the gates of her house wanting to get into her party… presumably because they’re all idiots who actually thought Ja’mie was going to let them in? Yeah, next time your local TV writer talks about how this show is “practically a documentary”, keep in mind the way that none of the plot makes any sense whatsoever. But we digress.
The Boarders, enraged at being shut out, tell Ja’mie she’s ugly and fat and shit at dancing – all of which is, objectively, true – so she promptly chucks a hissy fit then breaks down in tears, only to have totally recovered three minutes later after making out (oh so briefly) with a boy. So she’s flighty, superficial and capricious; what else is new?
With three episodes to go and Ja’mie little more than a nightmarish bitch on wheels AND YET she also has a massive and devoted fanbase Lilley wouldn’t dare let down by allowing anything seriously yet deservedly bad to happen to her, the end of this series seems clear: Ja’mie will not achieve all her goals (thus satisfying those wanting her bitchy behaviour to be punished), yet her setback will be brief as she promptly shifts her focus to something she has achieved (thus satisfying those who for some insane reason think she’s awesome).
As for satisfying those who’d like to get a decent laugh out of this series… yeah, good luck with that.
Women FTW?
Our recent guest post by an anonymous female former comedy writer got us thinking…how well are women doing in comedy in 2013? Because if you look at some of the shows that have been on over the past year there’s a much more even gender mix in Australia comedy than, say, a decade or two decades ago…sort of.
Twenty years ago the second series of The Late Show had just finished, and it had starred and was written by eight people – six men, two women. Behind the scenes were male producers and directors (Joe Murray, Mark Gibson, Michael Hirsh) but a small number of significant production staff were female (Annie Maver). Over on commercial TV was the sketch show Full Frontal, which had a male-dominated cast, production team and writers. In sitcom land Hey Dad..! had an even mix cast-wise but its writers and production team were male-dominated. All Together Now was pretty much the same gender-wise, although with a male-heavy cast. Nine’s biggest contribution to comedy at this time was Hey! Hey! It’s Saturday, which was even less equal with the main cast being about 10 men to one women, and again with men in most of the high-level production roles. The Panel, which started up towards the end of the ‘90s was also male-dominated on and off screen. And notorious for only having a certain type of woman on it (Kate Langbroek!).
What’s a bit odd about all this (particularly with The Panel, whose team should have known better) is that the live circuit in the ‘80s and ‘90s included lots of women – Mary-Anne Fahey, Rachel Berger, Lynda Gibson, Gretel Killen, Gina Riley, Jane Turner, Madga Szbanski, Marg Downey, Wendy Harmer, Jean Kittson, Judith Lucy, Sue-Ann Post, Tracey Bartram, Mary Coustas, Miss Itchy and Libbi Gorr amongst others. Interestingly (and possibly debatably) many of them seem to have had less high-profile work over a sustained period than many of the men who came up in the same era. You can largely blame this on sexism – commercial radio for instance has always been dominated by male hosts – but also possibly on the fact that quite a few of these women had kids (we don’t wish to cast a slur on their male partners, but we’re going to assume that, like most women, these comedians did the bulk of the childcare!).
What’s also interesting – and here we paint a very broad brushstroke – is that many of these women were less about the kind of straight-up-and-down, fast-paced stand-up that most easily translates to commercial radio or panel show appearances, and more about character and storytelling. And in a country where sketch comedy kinda died in the early 2000s, and has only since been revived by the pre-existing team that are The Chaser and the odd new talent-type initiative (i.e. The Gentleman’s Guide To Knife Fighting), comedians had to adapt to the growing trend of panel-shows.
There grew up a sense (rightly or wrongly) that women “couldn’t do panel shows”, or at least a lesser percentage of women could do them. And it’s only very recently that you see the likes of Dirty Laundry Live and Tractor Monkeys having an almost equal gender mix in their panels. Perhaps women who started doing stand-up in the 2000’s were either more naturally included towards, or started honing their craft towards, the sort of act that would lead to panel show appearances? Either way, quite a few of them are pretty good (Hannah Gadsby, for example).
It’s also interesting that women are taking on high-profile leadership and productions roles in increasing numbers (Courtney Gibson, Laura Waters, Daina Reid), and that sitcom/sketch writers and stars are increasingly female: Jess Harris and TwentySomething, Marieke Hardy & Kirsty Fisher and Laid, Upper Middle Bogan, which had a female lead and a female-heavy cast and Robyn Butler as one of its driving creative forces, and Audrey’s Kitchen which stars Heidi Arena (although the show is made mostly by men). Even Ja’mie: Private School is female-dominated. Sort of.
What’s possibly key to this, though – and this came across very clearly in our guest blogger’s post – is that where women have a certain level of power they do well, and where they have little power they don’t. There’s no doing your time and working your way up; if women are outnumbered in the writer’s room or on a panel (or The Panel) those places become places for men, but where there’s a more even mix in the writer’s room or on a panel those places become places for everyone.
The same sort of thing happens in all sorts of workplaces, and this is well documented by websites such as The New Girls Network. If you don’t believe it take a look around the place where you work. 1) What gender are most of the managers? 2) Which employees are best at playing the political games? 3) Which employees are consistently doing good work but becoming increasingly frustrated that no one’s recognising this? If you answered 1) Men, 2) Men and 3) Women then we’re not surprised*. We also suspect the lady in 3) is actively job hunting. Good luck to her.
Anyway, if you think this doesn’t apply to the world of comedy think about this: French & Saunders famously withdrew from club work relatively early in their careers because the male-dominated and consequently blokey environment wore them down, but when they were given their own TV show they blossomed. And before those of you with long memories say “Kittson/Fahey” there is, happily, one great leveler – whether you’re funny or not. French & Saunders were, Kittson and Fahey were not. The end.
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* If you didn’t then maybe you should enter your workplace for some kind of gender diversity award?
Halloween is When the Dead Spirits Rise
Hey, a guest post! We think it’s an interesting look at a dark-ish corner of the Australian comedy business. As you’ll probably figure out, there’s a reason why it’s anonymous.
Many years ago, in 1999, I had a short conversation with a well-known lawyer-turned-comedian. He was in an office in one of the ABC buildings, which, he said more than once, was not his. He was there writing a sitcom set in a legal practice, and seemed relieved to have an excuse to stop for a minute.
“I’m writing about lawyers because you have to write what you know,” he said.
“Yes but you know this business as well now,” I said, meaning the business of show.
“I would never write about this business,” he said, with a serious look.
“Yes,” I said. “Corpses everywhere.”
I knew what he meant because I was one of the corpses.
I was at the ABC being one of the faces on a current affairs sketch show, called, shall we say, Frontburner. It was to be another frustrating experience. You’re given a script that is kind of satire-by-numbers – it isn’t very funny, but it’s making a point. You know if there’s going to be any laughs you’ll have to make them happen in the performance – so I opted for a Pixie-Anne Wheatley, vacuous but insanely cheerful persona. Three rehearsals later, everyone liked it. Everyone except the leading lady of the series. Just before the show was to be recorded, the director came over and had a word.
“Eloise doesn’t like that you’re playing the character dumb. She doesn’t like the female characters to be dumb. So could you play it more straight please.”
There were no more rehearsals. I had to kill my buoyant bimbo and do it like an ABC bitch. I did it, with one small fluff. There were no laughs. At the end I bowed my head too quickly because I was pissed off.
I had to do it again. So I thought, fuck it, let’s just enjoy ourselves. I did it all Pixie-Anne, and there were several laughs. The director was happy. But I knew I would never be asked back.
The intense competitiveness of what is really a small industry in a small country, combined with the massive overrepresentation of men at the helm of most comedy vehicles at that time, meant one thing – the women felt that they had to kneecap each other to keep their jobs. And they did it with gusto. A similar thing happened at another show on a commercial network, shall we call it, Empty Façade. I was a writer there, and was offered a spot playing a newsreader. Immediately a woman in the cast went to the producer and demanded a promise that I not be offered any more roles. Of course he acquiesced. He called it ‘ruffled feathers’.
So returning to the conversation I began with, what on earth did that popular comedian mean when he said he would never write about this business? Surely there’s an Australian version of 30 Rock just waiting to be written. There at the centre of it all you have put-upon Liz, holding everything together, surrounded by diva performers, slovenly writers and a crazy boss. Poor Liz, she’s the hero that makes the magic happen. Only it isn’t magic – it’s mediocre.
You can’t write about the business because you would have to change it beyond recognition to make it amusing. This is a business where there is no right and wrong, there’s only success and failure. The scandal that erupted around Hey Dad did not surprise me, nor would it surprise anyone who had seen behind the curtain – the show was high in the ratings, why on earth would anyone have rocked that boat? They all had mortgages to pay, after all. It’s an amazing, enabling, all-excusing thing, a mortgage, I’ve found – just drop the m-word and everything is justified. I’ve never had a mortgage, I got the impression early in life that it makes you do unpleasant things.
Maybe that’s a bit harsh – the Hey Dad example is probably the worst imaginable scenario. But it’s the calibre of the people attracted to the business that creates this environment. They are people with something to prove, and they crave attention, power, influence, and of course money. Recently a project I was involved with came to the attention of a producer. For a brief moment it looked possible that my series might actually be made. But the man who had hooked me up with the producer was the kind of amoral low-life I knew all too well. I thought – if this goes ahead, I will have to spend a vast amount of time with the most awful, insincere, manipulative, grasping arseholes, as opposed to spending time with, say, my daughter. So when nothing came of it, a large part of me was massively relieved.
Oh dear, such a jaundiced view! I am a corpse, remember. While working on Empty Façade (loving that name) I was bombarded with unwanted sexual attention. My friend and I decided that this was happening mainly because I was the only female in the writers’ room. Eighteen men and me. It’s OK at the start, if you like the company of funny men, which I did, but after a while the constant gags wear thin. You realise you’re not a part of it, you’re not a part of anything, you’re just there. I was not the only female writer who worked on that show to get to the point of going home and crying to the point of retching. I know that for a fact.
So you can’t take the heat, huh? Too emotional. Sad. Well that’s OK if everyone is happy with only a certain kind of personality making their entertainment for them. The tough ones, the aggressive ones, the ones who understand the politics. That’s great, and we’re all grateful if there’s a little bit of talent there as well. That’s just a lovely bonus.
Let’s skip to the endgame, to the nail in the coffin of my experience at Empty Façade. Perhaps I brought it on myself, by renting a room in the house of another writer, only this writer was on the up. He was, shall we say, politically gifted, he knew who mattered and who didn’t, knew what words to say into which ear, and was driven by a horror of ever being poor. He was perfect, and clearly had a great future ahead of him. We got along alright in the house, I was amiable enough – he even called me the perfect housemate. But as my so-called career crashed and burned, and his was on the rise, it became intolerable to stay in the house, and I left. But a friend of mine decided to tell him, “I think she hates you,” when the subject came up. And this writer who I had lived with, who had now attained producer status, now had the power to decide who worked on the show and who didn’t. And when my name came up for an acting gig, he delivered the decisive blow. Can you guess which word he used, ladies? It’s a d-word.
“She’s difficult,” he said.
And that was it. Job done. Game over.
Foolishly, I thought I would be able to move on to something else. But it is a small industry in a small country. And eventually I left both.
Wednesday Night Is The Loneliest Night Of The Week
Has there ever been a returning television show so committed to failing to capture the imagination of Australians than Tractor Monkeys? Geez, don’t ask us, we couldn’t give a shit about a show that thinks giving Peter Helliar a venue for telling a story about how he once went to sleep in a tent wearing sunglasses is a worthwhile use of resources during the decline of Western Civilisation. Oh look, Adam Zwar. This episode’s a keeper.
C’mon, for fuck’s sake: when you’re halfway through your second series and Merrick “this is as good as it’s ever going to get” Watts is STILL making “women on surfboards? what’s next – women drivers?” jokes, give up. If all you can do with your chosen format of showing old clips from the ABC’s archives is make jokes about how people in the old days didn’t hold the same views we do today, you’re just wasting everybody’s time. Yeah, it was one joke: one too many.
And so it goes on. “Aussies love sport: that’s because we’re good at it.” In contrast to making panel shows. Though if you wanted a crash course in “shit, we better laugh at that guy’s jokes, otherwise we’ll never get our heads on television”, the line-up on this episode can’t be beat. Unless you’re Dave O’Neil, then you’re pretty good at laughing at your own jokes – especially that one about Bob Hawke being hit in the face with a cricket ball: “No wonder he went on to make some bad decisions!” Because Bob Hawke is known for making bad decisions! Oh yes he is! Shut up!
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Up next: Gruen Planet. “The Earth Spins: We Don’t” remains the tagline. Still got Julia Gillard in the opening credits too. You’d think it’d be difficult to find something new to hate about this show, but here goes: ever noticed the way it now positions itself as the one voice of sanity in a world controlled by spin? And then they-
-sorry, just got distracted by them showing an ad for “my first rifle”, followed by Wil Anderson deadpanning “my first bodybag sold separately”. Yeah, because guns have no other use than shooting other people. Christ, we’re hardly pro-guns around here but guns are legal in some parts of the world – including Australia (where at least one of us had cousins running around shooting rabbits before they were teenagers) – and a commercial advertising the fact that if you want to train your kids to shoot maybe you might buy them a gun specially designed for kids is just… whatever. Make a better joke or leave it out.
Of course, we know why they put it in: to pander to the “socially aware” audience that thinks Gruen is sticking it to the evil forces of right-wing oppression. Cue a “good” commercial – we’re all aware that Gruen subtly divide the ads they show into ones we’re meant to laugh at dismissively and ones we’re meant to admire, totally undermining the show’s supposedly cynical take on the world of advertising, right? – about gay marriage. Here’s something fun to do: try and imagine an episode of Gruen where they laughed at a shit ad promoting gay marriage and were impressed by a great ad for pre-teen gun use. Let us know how you go. We’ll be over here thinking about how across large swathes of the globe you could make a version of Gruen where everyone was appalled by Australian commercials featuring women with their heads uncovered.
Our point being, for a show happy to talk itself up as cutting through the world of spin, they’re extremely happy to put their own spin on things. When one of the panellists says about an anti gay marriage ad “the ad says ‘they’re asking me to choose between my beliefs and my job’ – fuck you, do your job!”, everyone is shown laughing and we cut to the audience applauding. Which they probably wouldn’t do if someone said the exact same thing about, say, an ad featuring someone in the navy complaining about having to turn back refugee boats.
“Is there a point where you’re insulting everyone’s intelligence?” Anderson asks about the anti gay marriage commercials, thus providing us with the best straight line ever. Remember “The Earth Spins: We Don’t”? Time to file that under “lying sack of shit”. They’re not tackling advertising from a spin-free perspective: they come at advertising from a direction where some causes and issues are worthwhile and deserve to be taken seriously, and some are not. Sure, we all do that all the time and it’s not like we don’t mostly agree with the tack they take: still, last time we checked, most of us don’t go around claiming “The Earth Spins: We Don’t”.
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Oh Ja’mie: Private School Girl. “It’s so big” “It’s kinda chunky” “It’s so much pinker than I thought it’d be”. Why not tell us what you really think of that African guy’s dick? Week two and the jokes remain the same: Ja’mie’s a bitch. We get it. She flirts with guys, treats other girls like shit and keeps on talking about her tits. Four more weeks of this, you guys. “FML my life for having small tits, it suuuuucks”. Is having Chris Lilley constantly talking about his small tits starting to creep anyone else out? Like really starting to seriously seem kind of off-putting and unsettling and suggestive of some kind of underlying pathology rather than, you know… “comedy”?
Plus it looks like Lilley has absolutely no idea how to mine his impression of a bitchy teen girl for comedy. C’mon, dancing as badly as Ja’mie does in her dance class would open her up to a world of mocking in a real school situation, but because Lilley only thinks three things are funny (bad dancing being one of them) we get two close-ups of Ja’mie squeezing her boobs because, uh… “comedy”?
And then she sings a crap song, which is once again one of the three things Chris Lilley finds funny. Hey what about finding something funny in the behaviour of a teenage girl that a): is something a high-flying private school teen girl might actually do, and b): isn’t just her being a bitch to everyone else? For a show basically marketed entirely to teenage girls (and maybe the parents of teenage girls), isn’t it kind of insulting that Australia’s supposed master of disguise can’t see any deeper into his teenage girl character than hey, she’s a total bitch?
Unless you’re watching Ja’mie: Private School Girl because you think Ja’mie is awesome and a total role model, this show just doesn’t work. The comedy doesn’t come from Ja’mie being a realistic high school girl, and Lilley’s performance as a realistic high school girl isn’t funny. “It’s so true-to-life” say the fans. So why not just make a documentary? And if it’s not true-to-life – if Ja’mie is a cartoony exaggeration – then why is she set in a totally realistic setting? And if the comedy comes from the tension between the two approaches – she’s a cartoon in a real-world setting – what’s the point of all the shithouse dancing?
The first episode set up a couple of foils for Ja’mie that, if given a lot more air time than Chris Lilley was ever likely to give anyone on-screen who isn’t Chris Lilley, could have provided enough variety and conflict to generate some actual comedy. But week two skipped over all of them in favour of a bunch more lines about tits and dicks with some bad dancing mixed in. Which just throws the focus back on Lilley’s performance. Which, going by past outings, is just the way he likes it.
The big problem with this series focusing entirely on Ja’mie is that if we laugh at her too much the character stops working. It’s okay to laugh at her arrogance and self-obsession and cruelty because that doesn’t undermine the basis of the character – she’s an arrogant, self-obsessed, cruel teenager. Anything else though – making mistakes, having authentic interactions with other people, having real challenges, having to actually be good at doing something – and the premise of Ja’mie, as we said, stops working.
So yes, Chris Lilley has made a show that only works if it’s the same note struck over and over and over and over and over and over again. Yay.
Conan the Barbarian
Well, it seems the path to success in the United States for Australian comedians is clear: get your arse onto Conan O’Brien’s talk show:
“YOU’RE a very strange fellow,” said Conan O’Brien after watching Aussie comedian Sam Simmons perform a stand-up routine on his talk show on Tuesday.
The five minute set was an opportunity of a lifetime for the 35-year-old funny man from Adelaide who now has a real chance at cracking the lucrative US market.
The former Triple J radio presenter only moved to Los Angeles in June and was invited onto the popular late night show after Conan’s talent scouts saw him perform in Montreal.
“I got picked up in a limo which was weird,” Simmons told news.com.au.
“I had to get my content approved but they (the producers) were amazingly supportive, like I’d never be able to do this stuff on TV in Australia. I sent them an initial script and they said to me, ‘yeah it’s good but why don’t you do your weird stuff?’ And I was like ‘really?’ They just told me to go hard and represent myself.”
Simmons impressed many and confused others as he joked about Vikings riding sheep and used an audience member as a prop.
“It was so fun and the energy was amazing,” Simmons said.
“Conan said he’d love to have me back. He was just so supportive of having something different on the show.”
First Rebel Wilson, now Sam Simmons – don’t nobody let Conan know about Hughsie or we’ll have a comedy drought on our hands over here.
Of course, on slightly closer examination we discover that the only source to date for Conan’ love of Simmons is Simmons himself. But why would he lie? After all, he did appear on the show and Conan did seem to enjoy his work and it’s not like talk show hosts spend their days pretending to like things they don’t really like.
Put another way, after Rebel Wilson spent years talking herself up at every possible opportunity and eventually managed to get herself a television series out of it, why wouldn’t you do exactly the same thing? After all, clearly his “talking shit about how Australians don’t ‘get’ me” approach didn’t really pay off in Australia:
I was just over in Edinburgh and was widely embraced but I think in this country, it’s Hughesy or nothing – but I can understand it because he is a funny bastard. I suppose I am the only one who does (this type of comedy) in Australia. I guess that’s a good thing. I am, at least in this country, a bit of an innovator when it comes to doing the absurd whereas over in the UK it’s quite commonplace to do this sort of stuff [2009]
The first episode [of Problems] is really f—ing out there,” he says. ”It’s anarchic, subversive and dark. Lazy journalists are going to say, ‘It’s like The Mighty Boosh,’ but it’s nothing like the f—ing Mighty Boosh. That’s what they’ll write, though, because we can’t get our head around absurdism in this country.” [2012]
In Australia, I’m a weirdo,” he adds. “In the UK, I’m a colonist ‘trying’ to be absurd and emulate the Brits, but in the States I am just me. I know that sounds kinda negative, but they don’t have a cultural cringe or a sporting rivalry – they just enjoy who you are.” [August 2013]
Yeah, we never really did embrace Simmons in this country, did we? Sure, he had that regular segment on jTV and then he had that 12 part, five minute per episode series The Urban Monkey and then he had his own half-hour prime time sketch show Problems plus regular gigs on Triple J plus that live stand-up DVD and a whole bunch of panel show appearances, but yeah, we never really got our heads around his act*, did we? He was just an obscure weirdo. With a prime time sketch show.
The strange thing is that while all these offbeat Aussie comedians (Jason Gann, Jim Jeffries, Rebel Wilson) are currently making it big-ish over in the USA, it’s not exactly like American pop culture is known for its wall-to-wall embrace of the offbeat. Sure, there’s loads of small corners where lots of strange stuff is happening, but Simmons isn’t talking about getting an Adult Swim series while Wilson is off making indie arthouse films: these are comedians whose acts are supposedly about them being edgy and different but who are being embraced by Conan O’Brien, former Tonight Show host.
[yes, we know that he was the “edgy” Tonight Show host who got shafted for Jay Leno. We also know his career since then has not been on an upward swing.]
Perhaps the thing to pay attention to here is the way that O’Brien managed (briefly) to juggle being seen as something of an edgy comedian while getting to host The Tonight Show. Perhaps the real story here is that he’s a television producer who can – or maybe just thinks he can – package offbeat material to the mainstream in a way that just might click.
Wilson’s sitcom Super Fun Night (which O’Brien produces) seems to be doing a pretty good job of sanding off whatever rough edges Wilson may have once had while not exactly shitting the bed ratings-wise just yet; who’s to say a Sam Simmons’ sitcom wouldn’t be a smash hit lighthearted romp about a nutty zookeeper and a bunch of lovable kids?
Fuck knows he’d never be able to do that stuff on TV in Australia.
*Actually, considering his live act does seem to occasionally involve him being a bit of a dick towards the audience perhaps all those interview quotes were just an extension of his act – delivered “in character”, as it were. But to prove that we’d require some examples where he broke character, and looking through the correspondence we’ve had with him over the years we couldn’t find anything like that.
Ja’mie and the Magic Torch
Well, that sure showed everyone who said Chris Lilley was a one trick pony. Why, there had to be at least three separate jokes on display in the first episode of Ja’mie: Private School Girl: Ja’mie’s a bitch, Ja’mie dances in a sexually explicit fashion in front of the school, Ja’mie talks about tits a lot… wait, is that part of her being a bitch? We were laughing too hard to tell. Oh ho ho. Ho ho. Cough.
It’s been obvious since at least Summer Heights High that Lilley seems to think being accurate is at least as important as being funny, only not in the way that comedians usually prize accuracy – you know, that whole “it’s funny because it’s true” deal. Lilley’s commitment to accuracy isn’t really connected to the comedy (or “comedy”) in his shows at this point. Did anyone watching the slutty dancing at the school assembly scene think “wow, that’s exactly how teenage private school girls are in 2013”? Thought not.
And yet, for much of Ja’mie Lilley’s clearly trying to serve up a somewhat accurate look at teenage girl behaviour. Well, either that or he’s doing a whole lot of weird shit for no reason: why else have endless “love you!” “love you too!” exchanges every time the girls say goodbye? As for the loads and loads and loads of swearing plus Ja’mie insulting pretty much everyone around her who’s not part of her inner circle… yeah, that could go either way.
For all the praise heaped on Lilley over the years there hasn’t been a whole lot of attention paid to the fact that his actual sense of humour is pretty darn stunted. Swearing is funny; unselfconsciously crap public performances are funny; being a two-faced bitch is funny; that’s pretty much it. To give him the benefit of the doubt – this is only episode one of six – maybe we’ll get some kind of critique of private schools themselves and the power structures they foster. Just kidding: has Lilley ever shown any interest in anything beyond his own performance?
But at least Lilley’s only focusing on one character here, right? Surely that’s got to force him to inject some depth into his characterisation, even if he is playing his shallowest, most two dimensional character and this is the guy who invested S.Mouse? Aw hell no: it just means more scenes where he surrounds himself with actual teenage girls and they all babble away about how hot Ja’mie’s looking and how she’s certain to be head of the school and how they’re going to build a freakin’ statue of her, she’s just that amazing.
[that whole statue thing is so clearly over-the-top we actually thought that here at least we had something Ja’mie wasn’t going to get, some prize kept out of her reach that would result in some kind of public meltdown – slash – comeuppance. But then we remembered the end of Angry Boys, when every single character turned up for the twin’s party despite it making no sense whatsoever. So now we reckon she’ll be told they’re not making a statue of her but in the end they will because… yeah]
The big problem with this Ja’mie-focused approach is that Ja’mie is boring. She’s a shallow, self-obsessed bitch and constantly shouting “grow some tits” isn’t the same as saying something funny. There’s a few minor character moments here – she has an enemy, she likes a boy, she has a family that’s clearly heading for a breakup and considering the way she cracks onto her dad that’s not such a bad thing – but none of that is particularly well developed at this stage.
So what’s supposed to be funny here? Maybe it’s possible that we’re meant to think “oh, the joke is that this bitchy teenage girl who thinks she’s hot is being played by a forty year old man”, but that’s not a reading the show supports in any way. Ja’mie is surrounded by characters who act like she actually is hot. Her teachers aren’t constantly saying “oh Derrick, take off that schoolgirls uniform and go back to being the janitor”. We’re meant to think “wow, Chris Lilley is a master of disguise”, not “gee, guess some people still think drag acts are funny in 2013”.
Ja’mie is a monster, which is good for comedy in general but terrible for Lilley’s style of comedy (or “comedy”, or “wasting our time”). Over the course of his three previous series he’s proven himself totally incapable of treating his characters as anything but very special petals who deserve at best happy endings and at worst sad endings of the “awww, that’s so sad” variety (Jonah being shipped back home, Gran having Alzheimer’s). It’d be nice to think Ja’mie is going to end with Ja’mie plunged into poverty and / or a vat of acid, but we’re not getting our hopes up.
What we’re left with is a show that feels surprisingly desperate. Lilley’s returned to the setting of his biggest triumph with his most popular character and he’s clearly trying so hard to get the teen girl stuff down pat so people will say – like they did with Summer Heights High – that he’s really nailed what kids today are like. But he’s got no idea how to extract comedy from any of that, so we’re left watching a foul-mouthed bitchy teenager swan around treating everyone like shit for half an hour. Only she’s played by a middle-aged man and all the talk about tits is kind of creeping us out.
Maybe things will happen over the next few weeks. Maybe Lilley will figure out a way to make Ja’mie a convincingly authentic teenage girl who can be funny without doing the usual “Chris Lilley thinks this shit is hilarious” stuff (you know, bad songs, bad public performances, blatant racism, the usual). Or maybe Lilley is so in love with Ja’mie that she’ll just be a bitch for four episodes, suffer a minor setback in episode five, then overcome it (or just act like she has in defiance of all logic) and come out a winner by episode six.
Yeah, that sounds about right.