Australian Tumbleweeds
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!
*
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”.
*
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.
Short Order
Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery finished up last week after just five episodes. Five is an odd number of shows to make in this sort of series but its shorter than usual run is probably more to do with it needing to make way for the almighty force of comedy that will be Ja’mie: Private School Girl than anything else.
While we weren’t too keen on the first couple of episodes, the latter ones with Noeline Brown and John Safran were worth a look. This is the kind of show that needs a good autobiographer as a guest, and both Brown and Safran had some well-honed stories to tell.
What also worked particularly well in the Safran episode, and in the third episode of the series with Shane Jacobson, was that the show diverted slightly from the “visit the childhood home, then the primary school, then the high school formula” of the other episodes, and took Safran and Jacobson to other locations they’d frequented as a child. In the case of the Safran episode, the religious bookshop and Safran’s vivid description of the bizarre titles he’d purchased there showed the, er, genesis of his comedy career.
For the second series, and we’re assuming this program will be back, it will be important to get good talent who’ve got something interesting to say about their early lives and their hometowns, ideally people who can really articulate the ways in which their childhoods shaped their careers. Shaun Micallef, Judith Lucy, Andrew Denton, Hannah Gadsby, Fiona O’Loughlin, and even Josh Thomas would all be ideal subjects. (As would Tony Martin, but we kinda promised not to talk about him.)
A Very Wide Turning Circle
Oh Mr Pobjie, two weeks of us reacting to your TV review column with words like “ire” and “irk” and then you go and do this:
I hesitate to say this, and it is said with a heavy heart, but … I think I might be a bit over Ja’mie King. In fact, to be honest, I think I was a bit over her halfway through Summer Heights High.
Lucky he hesitated to say it or we might have thought he’d been possessed by the evil spirit of someone who actually had an opinion. But seriously, all bitchiness aside – well, aside from the show being discussed, which runs entirely on bitchiness – Pobjie has manfully stepped up to the plate with this one:
In all of these shows Lilley has demonstrated an uncanny Sellers-esque ability to inhabit his characters that brings them to life with a humanity seemingly at odds with their ridiculous premises.
Okay, not that bit, because comparing Lilley with Sellers is like saying Mahatma Cote is on par with Dame Edna because they’re both a man in a dress. Yes, we know Cote isn’t actually wearing a dress: that’s just how wrong the comparison is. But this, this we can get behind:
It looks like Private School Girl is the same old mannerisms, the same old situations, the same old teen-grotesque routine. Eventually Ja’mie will need to find a way to make us care, a way to make herself the character in a story, rather than just a snapshot of satirical horror
Still, to paraphrase a famous Chris Rock comedy routine, you don’t deserve praise for just doing your damn job and Ja’mie: Private School Girl is a project that deserves to have an extremely sceptical eye cast over it from day one. After all, stuff like this –
Of all the loveable, though self-deluded, ogres Chris Lilley has foisted upon us – miscreant schoolboy Jonah Takalua, nerd-turned-theatre impresario Ricky Wong, country-hick twins Daniel and Nathan Sims – none pierces the nerves quite the way Ja’mie Louise King does.
So it’s unsurprising the self-obsessed, privileged and potty-mouthed teenager would get a ”one-woman” show of her own in the multi-talented writer-director’s latest enterprise.
– isn’t helping anyone. Why exactly is it “unsurprising” Lilley’s doing a series focused entirely on Ja’mie? Sure, you say it’s because none of his other characters “pierces the nerves” like she does, but isn’t it slightly more likely that after the critical and ratings flop that was Angry Boys Lilley has retreated to creatively safer ground? Isn’t that the kind of thing you should mention in passing at least once in a story about Chris Lilley in 2013? And don’t get us started on “multi-talented”: what’s the bet Private School Girl has the exact same sweeping choral opening music every other one of Chris Lilley’s shows has because he writes the opening music for them all and he can only write one tune?
Sure, ratings aren’t everything and plenty of good comedy shows either rate poorly or have a fall in audience numbers across a series. But from highest point to lowest, Angry Boys lost a million viewers: the only way most comedy in this country could lose a million viewers would be by murdering strangers door-to-door.
Blah blah iView figures blah blah international sales blah blah globally recognised. Yes, all those things are nice and with them in his back pocket there’s no reason why the ABC shouldn’t have leapt at the chance to give Lilley yet another series of the same old tat. The fact remains: the ratings dropped alarmingly across the course of Angry Boys, critical reaction was – for an Australian show – increasingly negative, and no-one walked away from Angry Boys thinking it was an unqualified success the way Summer Heights High was. This is Lilley attempting a comeback; that’s your story about Ja’mie: Private School Girl.
Instead, we get this:
The next obvious step after year 12 is university. Will you be going or do you have another career in mind?
I’m taking my gap year next year to focus on modelling and I’m gonna do aid work in Africa. And like stop child slavery and stuff. And because it’s Africa there’s hardly any food so I’m gonna look SO thin. I can’t wait!
Eh, we can’t really blame the Murdoch press for going down the “wacky in-character interview” path here, as otherwise their (often slightly-more level headed when it comes to local product) coverage actually would have to point out that Angry Boys tanked. Don’t go there, girlfriend!
What that faux-interview does reveal is that Lilley is running on empty. It’s the same old same old wall-to-wall in that article and while you wouldn’t really expect anything less from a promotional puff piece you can’t keep selling the same three jokes forever. She’s a bitch who thinks she’s hot who is played by a man: we get it. Even Ben Pobjie gets it.
That said, we’d be remiss in our duties here if we didn’t point out that for a scathing take-down of Chris Lilley’s upcoming series, Pobjie sure does have a lot of nice things to say about the guy. Things like:
This is not to put down Chris Lilley, who I believe is one of the most brilliant comedic minds and greatest actors Australia has produced
and:
Summer Heights High brought Lilley the big hit he deserved and was followed by the ambitious Angry Boys, not such a hit but in my view, a greatly underrated series.
and:
it would be a shame to see a pull-back from the whip-smart inventiveness that has characterised his career to date
and:
If Lilley can find a way to make that happen, Private School Girl could be another triumph for this bona fide genius.
Stretching the Boundaries
Is Super Fun Night an Australian comedy? Well, since you ask… no. It’s made in the USA by an USA network for USA audiences. And yet here we are, about to have a whinge about it anyway. Our excuse? It stars “Australia’s own” Rebel Wilson as both lead and series creator. Plus we talked about the US version of Wilfred that one time so it’s totally fair enough, okay?
We’re filing this one under “overseas sales” even though it’s not a remake of a local series because if you squint your eyes a little it’s kind of obvious that this is just Wilson’s latest attempt to peddle a comedy persona she’s been working pretty much non-stop since she left Pizza: the fat chick with a heart of gold who’s also kind of a tramp but not knowingly so but she’s still a tramp so yeah. Hey, remember when she said this:
“Kimmie is prissy in a way.” Wilson paused. “It would be nice if there were hearts on her clothes. She believes in true love, and that’s part of what gets her out of the house.”
And then dressed like this:
So yeah, there’s that. Sometimes you just have to go for the big laugh.
Meanwhile, what did Fairfax TV reviewer Tony Squires have to say about it?
Super Fun Night copped a hammering from US critics, but its first few episodes gathered a strong following from audiences. People want Wilson to succeed because she appears to be an everywoman, dealing in knockabout, self-deprecating humour.
Give it a crack. You only stand to lose half an hour of your life.
Gee, so the people with an educated opinion thought it was crap but morons loved it so you’re going to side with the morons? Clearly we place a value on our time slightly higher than “whatever, you’ll be dead soon anyway”.
That said, we did actually watch the first episode and… yeah, it was crap. Two minutes into the episode and we’d already seen a toilet joke, a “whoops, check out my embarrassing underwear” joke (different underwear than the photo above, mind you, which suggests we’re going to be seeing a lot of Ms Wilson’s scanties) and a cutaway joke which… okay, they’re an accepted part of comedy now, but if you can’t do them better than Scrubs (or The Simpsons, or even Family Guy), then don’t bother.
What follows is a bog-standard US sitcom of the “utterly generic” variety featuring the occasional scene designed to play to Wilson’s strengths, which are fat jokes and singing. She has two friends – an Asian Nerd and a Butch Gal – there’s a Cute Guy at her workplace who already seems into her and she likes him back so presumably the only reason they’re not together is because he doesn’t root fat chicks, and a Blonde Bitch type who by week six will turn into either everyone’s friend or Ms Babcock from The Nanny. Wasn’t The Nanny a good show? Yes, yes it was.
Reportedly Super Fun Night is doing well in the ratings in the US, but some seem to think that’s more due to it getting a massive lead-in from Modern Family than any inherent quality in the show itself. It’s hard to see Super Fun Night being any kind of long-term hit: Wilson’s act works best in small doses, while the supporting cast are totally forgettable and the set-up is clearly going to be ditched the second they can think of something better.
Ironically, the one thing that seems to be dragging in all the praise – having Wilson playing a strong, independent woman despite her size – is the thing that seems certain to kill the comedy. Elaine on Seinfeld was a bundle of neuroses, and 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon was a slobby sexless nerd. In contrast, Wilson’s character is outgoing, good at her job, is briefly worried about singing karaoke but overcomes that, and likes a workmate who seems to like her back. Being a self-confident winner despite her XXL size works fine for comedy in tiny doses, but week in week out? Comedy and role models don’t mix.
Time for a change of Tone?
Occasionally we’re accused of having a slave-like devotion to one particular Australian comedian or group. Usually Tony Martin. For example…
So, your apparent mission in life is to attack every comedy and comedian on Australian television as being unfunny, untalented, hacky, unworthy of your time and superior tastes, etc? The only conspicuous talent to escape your ranting is the Melbourne comedian Tony Martin, who is certainly uniquely funny but I know takes your fanboy love for him as incredibly “Mark David Chapman-esque”. Is being a “snark” now a job? You clearly have talent but why are you wasting it on this bizarre little hate blog? Anger makes dull men witty but it keeps them poor, as Helen Razer wrote once. Write something worthwhile! You clearly have the ability but you are frittering time away on this nonsense.
Fair enough, we are permanently camped in Tony Martin’s garden. And when we aren’t we’re following him down the street carrying a copy of Kylie Mole’s Diary with DIE MCFADYEN DIE scrawled on the cover. Just the one of us, mind. A big, burly male one. And that man’s been unemployed since the second season of Totally Full Frontal, so he’s got lots of time to do this. Seriously Tony, look out! He’s going to start reading out his Col’n Carpenter fan fiction!
Anyway, we accept that lots of people disagree with our point of view, and guess what…we don’t mind! What we’re primarily doing on this blog is critiquing Australian comedy – new and old. We come at the subject from a particular point of view, now well-established, that we think comedy should be laugh out loud funny first and foremost. And we make arguments as to why comedies or comedians succeed or fail in doing this by drawing on our knowledge of Australian and world comedy (principally TV comedy) produced in the last 40-50 years.
Tony Martin and the shows he’s been involved in are inevitably going to be critiqued and used as points of comparison in this process. As is the work of Shaun Micallef, John Clarke, Working Dog, Chris Lilley, and lots of others. There’s no real point going on about how we think some shows are bad if we don’t occasionally mention what it is that we happen to think is good. If you don’t agree with our views on certain comedians or shows, or don’t think we’re comparing these shows to appropriate comedians or shows, fine. You’re allowed to disagree with us.
One of the things we always try to do here is to give reasons for our views – ranting or otherwise. If you don’t like our point of view or our approach you may prefer other critics and we suggest you seek them out. If you want to read about how great Chris Lilley or Rebel Wilson or Laid are you really shouldn’t hang around here.
What we take issue with is baseless claims, conspiracy theories, false accusations or anything else that can’t be backed up. As mentioned previously, we try to back up our claims and we prefer to deal with people who do the same. So while you’re here, here’s a list of all the times we’ve mentioned Tony Martin in a blog in the past six months:
9 July 2013 – We compare Hamish & Andy to Martin/Molloy in this review of Hamish & Andy’s Asian Gap Year
13 September 2013 – We review Upper Middle Bogan and say nice things about Episode 4, written by Tony Martin
6 October 2013 – We farewell Upper Middle Bogan and mention that Tony Martin wrote two of the best episodes in the series
10 October 2013 – We argue that Tony Martin isn’t very good on panel shows
In the same six month period we’ve written about a number of Australian comedians and comedies with greater frequency, including Chris Lilley, Tractor Monkeys, Wednesday Night Fever, The Chaser, Rebel Wilson, Josh Thomas, Twentysomething and the Gruen franchise.
So where does the idea come from – and Mr Hughs isn’t alone in expressing it – that we have a laser-like focus on Tony Martin? Is it just that when we do mention him we’re generally complimentary (in much the same way as we’re complimentary about Shaun Micallef, John Clarke, Gristmill and a variety of lower-profile comedians like Jess Harris and Ryan Shelton) and some people don’t like us being nice? Then again, Mr Hughs is disapproving of us a): hating on everything and b): liking Tony Martin, which seems like he wants to have it both ways.
The short version of all this is that we like the comedians we think are good, we don’t like the ones we think are bad, and the whole point of this blog is to point out the difference – which means that yes, we’re going to name names on both sides of the equation. And if we’re packing heat for any Australian comedy figure right now it’s probably Chris Lilley. That is, until that Ross Noble series that Tony Martin’s directed hits the air. In fact, we’re already calling it “an extraordinary achievement” as we field-strip our guns over and over Travis Bickle-style.
No, that’s not a Late Show reference.
Martin Plaza
People occasionally ask us why we’re not big fans of the panel format. “It’s got comedians on it and they’re being funny’n shit” says this almost certainly fictional idiot, “what’s not to like?” Well, a lot of things really, but let’s stick to one: some very good comedians are no damn good on panel shows.
We’re big Shaun Micallef fans here, but let’s face it: unless you let him do something like this-
-he’s pretty much wasted on a panel show. He’s just not that kind of comedian: he works by creating his own world, and while he can be great interacting with a host, once you have comments coming from more than one direction any attempt to build anything more complicated than a one-liner is doomed to fail.
Then there’s Tony Martin, a comedian we usually have a lot of time for around these parts and a man you’d expect to do well on panel shows, what with his years of commercial radio experience and, you know, being funny. But as a guest on a panel show? It’s probably fair to say he sometimes struggles.
There’s a bunch of reasons why this might be. He could be more of a monologist, who does his best work when he’s given a bit of time to tell a story. It could be that his best material requires a bit of set-up, which often gets drowned out or taken in another direction by the rest of the panel. He might just not be that good at talking over the top of other people. For whatever reason, while he usually gets a few good lines out in a panel setting, it’s rarely a setting that shows off his skills to best advantage.
Let’s come at it from another direction for a moment. We were never the world’s biggest fans of The Panel, but that show did have one major strength at least some of the time: it featured a panel full of people who’d worked together for years. These guys knew each other’s sense of humour, they knew each other’s timing, they knew when someone was building to a joke and they knew enough to let them get to it. And then you had Kate Langbroek, who was seemingly hired because she had none of those abilities. Yes, they needed at least one woman and yes, they needed someone who would speak up and not let the boy’s club run roughshod all over them – but comedy was still the big loser.
Panel shows encourage a certain kind of comedian, and generally speaking that’s a kind of comedian we don’t have a lot of time for. Sure, there are people out there who are fast, loud and funny, but generally speaking you only need to be two of those things to get semi-regular panel show work. Guess what usually falls short? Here’s a clue: it’s not “loud”.
Part of the reason why we’re currently enjoying This Week Live slightly more than we expected to is because it adds a few twists to the panel show formula. The first ten minutes or so are just various members of the regular panel doing various bits, and the rest of the show has non-panel sketches and segments scattered around the place. Plus the four regulars have a bit of chemistry between them – we’re not talking Panel levels just yet, but increasingly they seem to know enough about how each other works to let them get on with the job.
So it’s not all that surprising that Tony Martin’s appearance on last night’s show was probably his best panel show work in a while – Meshel Laurie feeling the bizarre need to explain his Chopper / Heath Franklin joke aside. They let him talk on the panel, he got to dress up like a pimp, and if he spent a lot of time promoting the upcoming Ross Noble show he directed, at least it led to a couple of Howard Jones jokes.
Of course, once the panel chitchat began in earnest Martin rarely got a word in edgeways and then vanished from the show altogether, but that’s business as usual. Let’s leave the last word to fellow guest Denise Scott, who at one stage summed up pretty much all the problems with panel shows when she apologised to Tommy Little for continuing with a story. “I thought you had a gag coming,” she said, “and I felt I cut you off.”
Cooking in the Kitchen
Audrey’s Kitchen is back on ABC2, and we believe this news should be filed under “good”. Last year’s run of two minutes (fake) cooking episodes in which Working Dog creation Audrey Gordon (Heidi Arena) put together actual edible meals while dispensing casual racism and thinly veiled insults was one of the more impressive comedies of the year and has been pretty much in constant repeats ever since. So more of the same? Please pass the plate.
Yes, we know it’s nothing original. Yes, it’s the kind of comedy Working Dog can do standing on their head. Yes, it’s only two minutes long. But this is the kind of non-flashy, solid bedrock material Australian comedy needs if we’re ever going to restore Australian comedy to its rightful place as “something people watch willingly”.
Australian comedy can’t survive solely as destination viewing. We need to have fun stuff that travels under the radar, that people can stumble on and enjoy and think “I’d like more of that”. By being short, funny and to the point, Audrey’s Kitchen is perfect for that, and it’s a spot-on parody of cooking segments as well. Here’s hoping it leads to bigger and better things – in all manner of directions.