From if.com.au comes this…
Angry actor returns fire at critic
Tue 11/06/2013 09:15:19
Actors who get lousy reviews usually ignore them or suffer in silence- but not Kevin Harrington.
The veteran actor was so incensed by a review by News Ltd.’s Leigh Paatsch of the DVD of Cliffy, he vented on Facebook.
The ABC telemovie features Harrington as Cliff Young, who became an unlikely hero at the age of 61 when he won the 875km endurance race from Sydney to Melbourne.
In Saturday’s Daily Telegraph and Herald-Sun Paatsch dismissed it as a “dreadful telemovie that turns the ripping true story of the late ultra-marathon legend Cliff Young into a crap-tastic cartoon. How the ABC ever ponied up a commitment to this dim-witted affair beggars belief.”
Paatsch advised readers who want the “real tale- much of which was ignored or changed by this TV calamity,” to read Julietta Jameson’s book Cliffy: The Cliff Young Story.
His verdict: “1 star, run the other way.”
Harrington, whose credits include the movies Red Hill, Australian Rules, The Honourable Wally Norman and The Dish and TV series Underbelly, Winners & Losers, SeaChange, Blue Heelers and Neighbours, wasn’t going to let that pass, blasting Paatsch on his Facebook page.
The actor queried the critic’s tastes, contrasting the sole star for Cliffy with the 3.5 stars he awarded Fast & Furious 6. He told IF, “A critic is useful if he or she has some academic or practical knowledge of that which they are criticising. The public become enlightened as to the artistic merit of the piece because the critic has the qualifications to steer them towards superior quality work. [The Australian’s] Graeme Blundell is one of these critics. Alternatively a critic may represent Everyman tastes and can therefore steer his constituency towards the popular. [Paatsch] has proven himself hopelessly inadequate according to both criteria.”
Harrington’s Facebook friends were quick to offer their support, with some making uncomplimentary remarks about Paatsch. Judging by some of the comments, film critics are about as popular as politicians.
Ouch!
Even though this story wasn’t about comedy we were intrigued when we read it. Even more so when our best efforts to find Paatsch’s review on www.news.com.au and www.newstext.com.au resulted in nothing (has it been removed from those sites?). Also out of bounds for us is Kevin Harrington’s Facebook page. Oh, and we haven’t seen Cliffy either. But…
Is it just us or does the Australian industry prove itself to be unbearably petulant by reacting to bad reviews in this way? (And Kevin Harrington’s Facebook venting is far from the only example of this sort of thing.) Isn’t it best for all concerned – industry and audiences – that a range of critical voices gets a platform? At least then when someone says a film or television show is good there’s a chance they’ll be believed.
Put another way, do we actually want endless newspaper and magazine reviews praising locally-made films and TV shows to the skies when anyone with any sense can see that quite a few are less than perfect?
(don’t answer that – plenty of creative types have made it perfectly clear over the years that they see reviewers as being their publicity arm “for the good of the local industry”. As if the local industry benefits when the public no longer trusts reviewers to tell the truth about shoddy local product. As if the general public can’t tell when they’re being treated like chumps.)
Graham Blundell’s review is well written and says lots of nice things about Harrington’s performance, but if another reviewer can make a reasonable argument for Cliffy being “crap-tastic” (and Leigh Paatsch has enough experience as a reviewer to do so) then it’s reasonable enough to let that review be published. The public can then chose which reviewer to read and/or agree with.
Negative reviews of something you’ve been personally involved in may be difficult to read, but the solution’s simple: don’t read them. They’re not aimed at you anyway. Reviews and reviewers serve the public – not the industry. Or at least they should.
In Sydney? Free next Wednesday night? Why not pop down to the Belvoir Theatre and check this out:
Want to be part of the audience for a free comedy show? triple j’s Debate Night is a new radio program, hosted by Tom Ballard. Featuring a bunch of comedians arguing about a range of topics, ranging from: Is Kanye West a douchebag? to That Generation Y is the best generation to Do Music Festivals Suck? and plenty more!
Host: Tom Ballard
Debaters: Scott Dooley, Zoe Coombs Marr, Rhys Nicholson, Chris Taylor, Zoe Norton-Lodge, Michael Workman, Michael Hing
When: Wednesday June 12th – doors open 6pm
Where: Belvoir Theatre, 25 Belvoir St Surry Hills
The first 20 people to email us their name and address will score a double pass to this awesome new comedy show. Hurry!
tickets@token.com.au
The show will be pre-recorded to be aired on triple j on Sunday Nights
Okay, so you’ve probably missed out on one of the 20 free tickets (maybe you can sneak in ‘round the back instead?)… Personally, we’ll be waiting for the broadcast, because a scripted comedy show on radio is a real rarity these days and Triple J haven’t bothered to make one since 2010’s The Blow Parade.
Not that this scripted, arguments-based comedy show will necessarily be that funny. Ever listened to ABC Sydney’s Thank God It’s Friday (we mention it in passing here)? That follows roughly the same format as a comedy debate show – comedians gets asked to talk on a topic, they go away and write a couple of minutes of material, then read it out on air to ensuing hilarity – and it’s mostly shithouse.
One of the problems you get with shows like this is that unless each comedian’s several minutes of material is utter genius the show can sink into the ground. Generally speaking, there’s not a lot of scope for hilarious interactions in a debate. A planned interjection can seem lame, and a spontaneous one can really stuff it up for the person who’s meant to be speaking. Part of the problem is that the participants tend not to have worked together much – sometimes they’ve never met – and because they don’t have much chemistry there’s not much hope of them bouncing off each other in amusing ways. Then there’s the problem Mike Moore faced in that episode of Frontline, where he appear on World Series Debating and the host did all his jokes before he could.
Some of the debaters scheduled to appear on this show we like, and they all have experience either on shows like this (Thank God It’s Friday, The Unbelievable Truth) or as stand-ups. This show could be an amusing Sunday night muck-around that turns out to be surprisingly good, or simply a cheap airtime-filler that doesn’t even particularly harm the small numbers of people who happen to tune in for it. Good luck to those involved, obviously, but it’s a shame someone can’t think of a more innovative way to make a scripted radio comedy than to re-hash the comedy debates concept. And making those comedy debates about “youth” topics like Kanye West doesn’t necessarily make them a good idea in 2013, or for Triple J.
Press release time! Wait, is it April Fools already?
GET READY FOR ANOTHER HIT OF NOSTALGIA; TRACTOR MONKEYS IS BACK!
ABC TV Entertainment has just begun pre production on the second series of the comedy quiz show that puts the funny filter on the iconic and best loved pop cultural gems of recent decades.
Comedian Merrick Watts will once again be in the host seat with regular team captains Dave O’Neil and Monty Dimond joining him for the eight part series.
Each week a different crop of Australia’s smartest comedians and entertainers will join the Tractor Monkeys regulars for thought and laugh provoking encounters about the twists and turns of being us!
Each themed episode will be a call back to when milk was delivered to the school yard, Summer holidays lasted forever, mix tapes were the new playlist and technological advances like playing pong blew our minds.
Head of ABC Entertainment Jennifer Collins says, “The first series scratched the surface of the moments that defined what it was to grow up in Australia. Merrick, Dave and Monty will put us back in touch with the music, the TV shows, those first celebrity crushes and the best and worst of our fashions.”
Tractor Monkeys will record in its Sydney studio, if you want to be part of the audience please go to: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/tractormonkeys/
The much-anticipated return of Spicks & Specks will kick off 2014.
Jennifer Collins said “It’s an exciting way to launch next year. Casting for the new team will begin later this year. We plan to welcome back some of your favourites as well as testing the musical knowledge of some new and surprising guests.”
Not so much reading between the lines as just plain reading the press release, we can gather the following:
A): They didn’t get their shit together in time to bring back Spicks & Specks for 2013;
B): This left a gaping hole in the schedule;
C): ????
D): Tractor Monkeys is back!
If there wasn’t a new ABC Head of Comedy already on his way – and gee, won’t he be stoked to see the present the departing regime have left him – this would be the kind of bullshit move that should lead directly to sacking whoever the hell is currently in charge.
Lest we forget, no-one liked Tractor Monkeys. Not even regular Australian TV critics, and they like everything. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t car crash television, it wasn’t insanely misguided – it wasn’t anything. Let alone anything even remotely resembling something worth a second of your time. And now it’s back!
Your ABC at work, Australia. Jesus grumpy stumbling Christ, it’s almost enough to make you vote for the coalition.
If you’re of a particular political bent, chances are you’ve been waiting for The Guardian to set up their Australian branch for a while now, what with Fairfax staggering around like a drunk at a child’s birthday party when it comes to providing a non-Rupert Murdoch perspective on things. Even we’ve been excited: in the UK The Guardian has Charlie Brooker as their humour columnist and he’s generally considered to be fairly competent at it. So naturally their Australian branch would be going after A-grade comedy writers, right? And so we waited.
And waited.
And now it’s here! And it’s hiring all the people sacked from Fairfax for being crap. Ha ha ha, this is what happens when you expect good things. If you read Andrew Bolt you’d know that.
To be fair, only Catherine Deveny was sacked from Fairfax for being crap – well, sacked for making sex tweets about a minor according to the official version, sacked for being too much for the old men at Fairfax to handle according to her and feel free to decide which version has more basis in reality ’cause we’re saying nothin’ – because while Helen Razer was dumped by The Age as a columnist in the 90s she’s been back writing reviews and opinions for them over the last decade. But she was dumped by the ABC in 2008:
In the September 15 episode of Media Watch, presenter Jonathan Holmes charged Razer with “patronising” Berkoff during the live interview on September 7. Less than a minute into the exchange, things became tense when Razer addressed Berkoff as “dear”. He told her he had trouble understanding her accent. Razer then called the playwright a “curmudgeon” and a “pugilist”, before abruptly terminating the interview.
Anyway, that’s all in the past, as they both now have regular gigs in the new left-wing voice of Australia. Razer is the local TV critic:
I’ve been meaning to have a word to my local Labor branch about the quality of their newsletter for some time. “Dear Comrade”, it begins; a salutation that now seems every bit as apt to me as “Yo, Bitch”. Comrade? I am no longer a comrade but lapsed rank-and-file who would rather stay at home and yell at the television that endure another moment spent in hopeless love with a vanished past.
And Deveny seems to be the food critic:
Perhaps it’s genetic. Mum tells a story of driving home late from work one night in the 70s after a long day and deciding to treat herself with a Choc Mint Drumstick on the drive home. It was a perfect summer night, no one on the road and she sang along with the Bee Gees, window wound down, Drumstick in hand, elbow hanging out the window. Luxury. Suddenly she heard through a megaphone: “Two hands on the steering wheel lady, this is the police.” Which it was. She got such a fright she dropped her ice cream on the road. Did it teach her a lesson? She just bought another one. STICKING IT TO THE MAN! YEAH
And The Guardian AU’s comedy? Oh look, it’s the team from The Roast. What, Rodney Rude wasn’t answering the phone?
We bring this up not to point out that despite the new venue these two are operating firmly according to type – Razer’s very first word is a reference to herself, Deveny is “STICKING IT TO THE MAN!” – nor to suggest that opinionated women by their very nature are going to have a rough ride in the Australian media. Nope, today we just want to talk about a sadly familiar wider trend: hiring people not for their expertise in a subject matter, but because they’re meant to be amusing.
We’ve written before on this “just add comedy” approach and why we don’t like it – see pretty much every post we’ve ever made about The Gruen Transfer and its offspring. Basically, if you’re going to be funny JUST BE FUNNY. And if you’re going to discuss a topic then said topic deserves to be treated with respect, not just as a launching point for a bunch of shithouse gags.
Put another way, people who are meant to be actually amusing write humour columns. They don’t need a wider hook to lure people in: they’re funny, and that’s enough. Unless they’re not funny, which is every single Australian humour columnist because it’s hard work writing 800 funny words a week and if you really are funny it’s much easier writing jokes for television. Or advertising.
On the other side, if you’re actually interested in television (we are) or food (kind of), then you want to read someone who knows what they’re talking about. Razer at least has a history of reviewing live shows – reviewing in a snarky, self-obsessed, look at me fashion yes, but she occasionally provides some insight into why something is or isn’t working that you couldn’t get just from reading the poster.
Deveny, on the other hand, seems to treat every single paid writing gig she gets as an opportunity to foist a bunch of her half-arsed stand-up material on her readership. At least when she was writing about television she had a history of writing for television that on the surface justified her employment; as for food, presumably she eats it. Like every single other human being on the planet.
By the way, The Checkout wrapped up its first series last night. Much as we usually hate that kind of thing we didn’t mind it for the most part, because when it tried to be funny it usually was and when it wasn’t trying it had real information to impart. We’re still going to file it under consumer affairs rather than comedy – there’s a comedy show to be made about consumer issues, but it probably wouldn’t have long segments explaining how extended warranties are a rort – but the comedy material was a lot stronger than many of the ‘straight’ local comedies we’ve seen of late.
Our point is, if you’re going to do two things you need to be good at both. To take a non-Checkout example, Clive James’ television reviews were both bang-on regarding the shows he was discussing and funny in their own right. And if you’re not good at two things, you should stick to just the one: if you’re reviewing television (or food), figure out how television (or food) works, figure out how to explain that intelligently to your readership, then JUST DO THAT. Don’t do a half-arsed job then think if you talk about yourself a lot it won’t matter because it’s not a “real” review anyway.
Because just quietly, no-one gives a fuck about you.
Submitted without comment.
Wednesday Night Fever cast
set for late night comedy antics
Premieres Wednesday July 3 at 9:30pm on ABC1
7×30’
ABC TV today announced that Wednesday Night Fever – its new, late night, weekly comedy series from the makers of controversial hit At Home with Julia – will premiere on Wednesday, July 3 at 9:30pm on ABC1.
Hosted by rising comedian and first-time frontman Sammy J, and featuring tasteful metal outfit Boner Contention as house band, Wednesday Night Fever’s ensemble cast includes some of Australia’s best comic performers and impersonators including: Amanda Bishop (At Home with Julia); Paul McCarthy (Comedy Inc. – The Late Shift, At Home with Julia); Genevieve Morris (Comedy Inc. – The Late Shift); Dave Eastgate (A Moody Christmas, Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting); Heath Franklin (‘Chopper’ of The Ronnie Johns Half Hour); Melbourne Comedy Festival sensation Anne Edmonds; music theatre star Lisa Adam and Robin Goldsworthy (At Home with Julia, Paper Giants).
Airing over seven weeks, the 30 minute weekly program will feature an array of topical impersonations, satirical characters, musical comedy and special guests – all in front of a live studio audience.
Jennifer Collins, ABC TV’s Head of Entertainment, said “It’s a stellar cast with the smart and witty Sammy J at the helm. The series will be a playground for these great comedic talents. We’re thrilled to have satirical sketch comedy in prime time, delivering a unique take on the latest news from around the world and here at home.”
Creator/Producer Rick Kalowski said, “I’m relieved to finally have a host and cast after it fell apart with Rolf Harris and The Comanchero bikie gang”.
Wednesday Night Fever is a Quail Television and ABC TV co-production for ABC1. Quail Television Executive Producers are Rick Kalowski and Greg Quail. ABC Executive Producer is Sophia Zachariou.
“We’re thrilled to have satirical sketch comedy in prime time”. So no-one at the ABC actually watches Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell then?
Okay, we do have a comment: Sammy J is good, some of the other cast members are not. Well, not bad-at-their-job bad – they’re just people who’ve been associated with so many duds at this stage that they really need an extended break (the old “you’ve got to leave before you can make a comeback” theory) to avoid that feeling that we’re just seeing the same old faces. And as that’s the feeling that’s killed at birth pretty much every single ABC panel show of the last five years, that’s not a good thing.
This is a problem that’s hardly ever addressed: after so many lean years Australia’s professional comedy talent pool, for whatever reason, is largely tainted with the stench of failure. Again, it’s not a slight on them as comedians, as often the problem with the failed shows wasn’t their fault. But it remains a fact: there are comedy performers out there whose names are associated with failure, who are firmly linked in the public’s mind with unfunny shows that tried too hard or not hard enough, who actively turn viewers away from trying something new by reminding them of shows they didn’t enjoy.
Whether seven episodes is enough to turn around those perceptions remains, like everything else about this show, to be seen.
We liked Ed Kavalee’s Scumbus – mildly controversial move on our part there, but what can we say? Being stupid isn’t always a bad thing – so we’re actually looking forward to this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPEL82KplX4
Your mileage may vary.
Considering how often we used to bang on about how shit The Chaser’s War on Everything was, it’s hard not to feel a little nostalgic for the team’s comedy days (as opposed to their consumer rights TV days) when you read Charles Firth’s recent article for The Citizen, which recounts the early history of the group. Having met at university, The Chaser team really got started almost a decade and a half ago when they brought out a satirical newspaper. This quickly achieved legendary status, but principally online – finding a print copy was difficult, especially if you didn’t live on the east coast.
But halfway through his article Firth brings us back to the present day with some musings about The Roast…
In my latest venture – The Roast (on ABC2 – 7:30pm weeknights) – our correspondents travel the world without ever leaving the comfort of the green screen. There is a charm to this that has surprised me…
The green screen is an invitation for the audience to imagine what this show could be if its correspondents were able to go anywhere. The gap between its actual resources and its ambition allows the audience a role in its success. The Roast requires the audience to fill in its (considerable) gaps with their imagination in order to enjoy it. It’s far more satisfying – and far more theatrical – than, say, Iron Man 3, where every twist and turn is replicated in such detail that no imagination is necessary. That’s not to say Iron Man 3 is bad (it is), but simply that it is not theatre – it’s spectacle…
…at least part of the enjoyment, and part of the reason why people became so evangelical about it [The Chaser newspaper], and why our readers would continue to turn up to our parties despite their increasing frequency and rising entry price, was because of the theatre surrounding it.
The audience was imagining the mythical drunken brainstorm that led to the front page where we published John Howard’s personal phone number, when in fact, the decision to do so was made at the last minute and was largely because we couldn’t think of anything else to put on the cover…
It was the theatre rather than the actual subscriber numbers that kept The Chaser growing. The Chaser was appealing to read because it invited the readers to use their imagination to fill in the gaps. You could just imagine how amazing it would be to be one of The Chaser editors. Constantly drunk, constantly witty, constantly partying, and rarely even turning up at the office. It was a wonderfully attractive conceit, even if it was completely untrue.
Thus, if I have any advice for the editors of The Citizen, it is this: allow your readers the space to imagine what you want to be. Don’t let reality get in the way of your ambition. Let the readers fill in that gap. That way, it’s much more satisfying for them, and it’s much cheaper for you.
…which is all very well, but doesn’t really justify the continued existence of The Roast:
Obviously most of the team from The Roast are barely out of university and perhaps when they’ve got as much experience under the belt as The Chaser they’ll be producing shows of the quality of, say, The Hamster Wheel, but the only way they’ll get there is if they spend a bit more time off-off-Broadway. The Chaser team didn’t just turn up on the ABC one day, they struggled to survive as a newspaper and gradually did more and more radio and TV. They built up experience and learnt what did and didn’t work. The best we can hope for The Roast team and the comedy they produce is that the show’s axed and they’re forced to learn the hard way.
If you gave a video camera to a student revue and asked them to make a news parody The Roast is probably what you’d get. Indeed, if you look at the biographies of the show’s cast and writers it’s notable that many of them are barely out of university. Not that this automatically makes them or the show bad – inexperienced writers can’t be expected to produce a good program – what we question is why a show which was a proven dud in its earliest incarnation as WTF! (2010), and then as a web series (2011), made it to TV for a first series (2012) and is now back yet again. For 150 episodes.
The Roast sets itself up as a long-running news show which reports from around the country (and the world) on the issues of the day. Its team of reporters play it relatively straight (unlike in news parodies such as Mad As Hell and Brass Eye which got laughs by making their reporters “characters”) meaning that on The Roast the stories have to do the heavy comedic lifting. The Roast has also chosen to keep it very topical, focusing on real world headlines rather than current affairs. In the hands of a more experienced team these restrictions wouldn’t be such a problem, but it’s hard to avoid wondering whether a bit more freedom in the format might have given the team at The Roast a better chance of getting laughs.
The best episode of The Roast that we have seen was a “from the archives” special parodying period reports of the disappearance of Harold Holt and the introduction of Random Breath Testing. Here, the writers and cast could get a decent amount of laughs from old-style clothes and modes of TV production and presentation. Whereas in a story about a contemporary issue they have to find a way of making that issue funny.
Often, The Roast’s formula is to take an aspect of a topical issue to the extreme and hope for laughs. When Myer boss Bernie Brooks said a levy to fund disability care would mean less people spent money shopping, The Roast did a sketch about a new government levy to help big department stores. They also sent one of their reporters around stealing money from people on behalf of the retail giant. While the basic satirical ideas for this were fine – you could imagine Mad As Hell doing something similar – Mad As Hell would also have done it a lot better. The reason for this is tone – Mad As Hell’s angrier, rantier approach is a lot funnier than The Roast‘s reporter David Ferrier playing it alternately straight and cheeky.
Great topical comedies like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Mad As Hell and Clarke & Dawe are fuelled by anger. One of the many problems with The Roast is that there just doesn’t seem to be any drive or passion behind it. And that’s the death knell for a topical comedy, because if there’s no passion or rage behind the material why make it topical? Why not just broadcast 10 minutes of dinner party sketches? Or Justin Bieber gags? Or dead air?
Wow, good thing we didn’t bother reviewing The Kath & Kim Kountdown:
Clip special The Kath and Kim Kountdown has been dumped from Seven’s Sunday night line-up after just one outing.
Could Australia’s legendary goodwill towards the foxy morons finally have run out? Or perhaps someone should have told the programming team at Seven that Kath & Kimderella was, er, not that great and there hasn’t even been a new episode of the TV series in over five years.
Much as we enjoyed the first series, that was a decade ago and they’ve been treading water since then: stick a fork in them, they’re done.
And in comedy news, Helen Razer’s written a long article on how the twitter hashtag #destroythejoint has betrayed feminism. We’re mentioning this why now? It’s not like anyone really sees Razer as a comedian these days – probably not even herself, as her last (that we know of) stab at hilarity here was last updated August 2012. Remember The Sponsored Lady? Seems to only have been a thing for two months. Guess we wasted our time reviewing it. Here’s hoping her current article has more of an impact.
Like pretty much everything Razer writes, it’s over-long and self-obsessed (like you can talk – ed), but the short version is that Helen grew up (yes, it starts with her childhood) being aware that feminism could easily be co-opted by marketing (insert reference to “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby”), but had hoped that #destroythejoint could avoid this fate, what with being at least a little bit about being funny.
Here comes the sad music: It’s stopped being funny, it’s been co-opted by marketing, and it’s now a waste of time.
Destroy the Joint had turned from an organisation that fought sexism with a mocking wit to one that did nothing but reproduce miserable sexism. For both the advertising industry and the patriarchy.
It’s not just her that thinks this: she’s also got “34-year-old Sydney-based marketing strategist” and former administrator of a Destroy the Joint Facebook page Aaron Darc backing her up. So a self-styled internet funny lady and a marketing guru think #destroythejoint needs to be funnier and better handled marketing-wise? Quelle surprise.
Just to engage with the substance of the article for a moment: Marketing using a social movement to market a product? That’s what capitalism does (cue Kyle Reese voice: “That’s all it does!!“). We’re hardly experts, but we dimly recall William Gibson saying that grunge – remember that, 90s fans? – was the last bohemia that had a chance to develop before it was co-opted by marketing. That was pre-internet and 20 years ago: come up with a social movement today and it’ll be harnessed to some kind of marketing push by, um, later that day.
The reason we even bring this article up – considering Razer and professional comedy are pretty much strangers these days and yes, we do know that if the writer starts talking about themselves in the first sentence of an article about an issue that involves at least half the population we really shouldn’t act surprised if the whole thing is basically “WHY ISN’T THIS SOCIAL MOVEMENT FOLLOWING MY BRIGHT AND SHINING LEAD” – is that this is a prime example of the kind of thinking that leads to thinking that The Gruen Whatever is a worthwhile effort. Fight marketing with marketing! That way, marketing wins.
What if #destroythejoint had followed Razer’s wishes and remained a “mocking wit”-based takedown of misogyny in the media and Australian life? For one thing, it would still be exploited by marketers; yes, it’s easier for marketers to exploit you when your online movement is entirely built around stoking OUTRAGE (it’s pretty much the only marketing tool the ABC used for its comedy programs for a few years there), but if your movement involves drawing attention to things*, it can be used as a marketing tool to expand the reach of those things whether you’re laughing or crying at them.
Wait, doesn’t this mean that all comedy is actually supporting the things they’re making fun of? Duh, no. But comedy making fun of advertising is supporting advertising pretty much all the time. That’s because advertising is about getting people to pay attention to you. Of course, there’s such a thing as negative attention, which is what #destroyingthejoint wants to apply. But you can’t really apply that to an ad, because as the saying goes, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”. Especially when misogyny (at least, in the mild “women are sex objects and household providers” form many ads use) actually still appeals to some consumers. That “What’s wrong with being sexy?” line from Spinal Tap was funny for more than one reason, after all.
Gruen doesn’t work because it tries – well, it pretends to try – to fight marketing with marketing. “These lies are bad lies,” says the panel, “they should have lied like this”. In contrast, The Checkout (no matter what you might think of it as a comedy) at least works on this level, by fighting marketing with facts. “Marketing says this burger looks good” says someone against a wacky backdrop, “reality says this burger looks bad.” Marketing can’t get around that, because that’s the kind of issue marketing is designed to avoid.
[Which may be the reason why googling “lawsuit against The Gruen Transfer” turns up no examples of anyone important getting annoyed while “lawsuit against The Checkout” gives you this.]
We are in no way saying that misogyny doesn’t exist in the Australian media. It’s all over the place and it’s a disgrace. But it’s something marketers can use, because for the most part it doesn’t relate to the product they’re marketing. No-one (Men’s Rights Activists and some politicians aside) is selling “misogyny” as their product: they use misogyny to get your attention because what they really want is your attention.
But surely comedy is powerful enough to defeat even the most evil forms of marketing? Well, considering the most evil forms of marketing usually involve comedy, maybe not. Good comedy should open our eyes to the truth; marketing wants to open our eyes to whatever it is they’re selling to us. Basically, comedy fails when the message becomes more important than getting a laugh. “These examples of sexism in the media are hilarious” works as an approach to comedy. “These examples of sexism in the media are horrible” does not**.
Then you’re just back to fighting marketing with marketing and unless there’s a deeper truth on your side – one that goes beyond “this ad or person is sexist”, because as we’ve pointed out, that’s probably what the marketers want you to think as sadly not everyone agrees that “being sexist” is a bad thing – marketing will win. As regular Gruen watchers know all too well.
And no, we’re not saying “ignore it and it’ll go away”. We actually kind of agree with Razer here: there’s no simple solution to the problem of entrenched misogyny and retweeting a joke on twitter isn’t going to change anything. But we’re not a social activism blog, we’re a blog about comedy. And selling this kind of social activism as comedy doesn’t work as either social activism OR as comedy.
It’s probably appropriate Razer was the one who brought it up, come to think of it.
*Basically, #destroythejoint was and is a method of marketing that attempts to over-write the original message with “this is sexist”. Razer thinks that comedy was a more effective way of doing that than outrage, because comedy is harder for marketing to co-opt. We disagree; ads are trying to get ‘in on the joke’ all the time.
**The difference being, when the joke stops being funny you have to move on, which is a bit tricky for a social movement supposedly naming and shaming society’s creeps over an important and on-going issue.