Australian Tumbleweeds
Great Comedy Mysteries of the 21st Century #17: The Wedding Party
So back in 2010 the opening night film at the Melbourne International Film Festival was Australian big-screen comedy The Wedding Party, in which Josh Lawson agrees to a fake marriage with Isabel Lucas even though he’s deeply in love with Kestie Morassi. Wait, we mean those actors play characters who’re doing all that, the actors themselves are just doing acting stuff. Anyway, for a slightly more coherent take on what’s going on in the film why not try here.
You’re back? Good. More eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the “coming soon” Empire story we just sent you to is dated July 19th, 2012. Wait, you mean the film that played opening night film at the Melbourne International Film Festival two years ago still hasn’t been released? Surely that Empire story is announcing that this rare example of Australian movie comedy is due out any day now then… oh, it’s st to be released sometime “later this year”. Hmm.
A clue as to why it’s taken so long to be released could be that it doesn’t seem to be very good: reviews at the time ranged from not very positive to heavily mixed to “a bit odd” (which contains the line “a dynamic debut filmmaking team has been born” – uh, not yet they haven’t). None of which is exactly encouraging when it comes to big-screen comedy in this country, though reviewers have been known to be wrong and a lot of editing can happen in two years.
So at this point we’d usually blame its’ extended stint on the shelf on Australia’s well-documented hatred of seeing Australians trying to be funny on film. For every even slightly successful big screen comedy there’s a dozen that bombed spectacularly or vanished without trace. But earlier this year the equally wedding themed A Few Best Men actually did pretty well at the box office. That’s got to be a positive sign, even if everyone who saw A Few Best Men did so because they desperately needed to see Rebel Wilson in a wedding-themed comedy post-Bridesmaids and they couldn’t wait until Bachelorette comes out. So what’s the hold-up?
We don’t know. That’s why this one’s filed under “comedy mysteries”. It looks tolerable – let’s not forget, Big Mamma’s Boy was filmed and released between The Wedding Party‘s first appearance and today so the bar isn’t set all that high – and it’s got enough of a name cast by local standards to draw at least a few passers-by into the cinema. Is there something going on here we’re missing? Did a cast member commit a horrible crime that passed us by and they’re waiting until the media firestorm dies down? Is Josh Lawson box office poison after Any Questions For Ben? Is Adam Zwar box office poison after Agony Uncles? Is Bill Hunter box office poison after dying in 2011? Answers on the back of a postcard please…
Fancy a McFeast?
These days Lisbeth Gorr is just another media personality. She hosted a failed chat show a few years ago (Nine’s The Catch-Up), she’s put out a couple of children-themed books (mind you, which female personality of a certain age isn’t dabbling in that area?), and she’s got a show on 774 ABC Melbourne. But if you ever wondered how she got to where she is (Hint: it was in the guise of “Elle McFeast”) you can head along to a reasonably well-known torrents site and download some of her 90s comedy work, or buy them on this DVD.
Amongst the shows on offer is Breasts (1996), one of McFeast/Gorr’s better known specials, in which she, well, spends an awful long time in fruit shops handling melons. Clunkingly obvious metaphors aside, it’s actually quite a good, funny show, even with irritating 90s celebrity Kate Fisher pouting and pushing her norgs in the camera every 10 minutes. And for a show which is more than a touch influenced by Andrew Denton’s The Money or the Gun, right down to the sequences where McFeast (or sidekick Mark Warren) run up to people in the street and ask them provocative questions, it’s much more insightful. In fact McFeast and Warren are far better than Denton in lots of areas, mainly because they manage to be charming, funny and informative whether talking to the public, celebrities or experts. And for a show which could very easily have been sleazy or gratuitous, Breasts manages to both show a lot of tit and keep things warm and interesting (in a non-sexy way).
Less successful is the special Sex, Guys and Videotape (1994) which looks at male sexuality and safe sex. It’s very reliant on male celebrity talking heads discussing “the issues”, and like Agony Uncles is full of comedians and personalities either trying to be funny or failing to come out with an interesting insight. A better watch is a special on The Whitlam Dismissal (1996) which re-unites political figures from both sides of politics and manages to prompt a then 85-year old Sir John Gorton into some sexual innuendo-laden discourse with Elle. There are also a few interesting details about The Dismissal which are turned into some decent comedy sketches (and after years of Good News Week we never thought we’d describe anything involving Mikey Robbins as “decent”, but it was).
Somewhat more niche are some segments from sports comedy show Live and Sweaty (1991-1994), including a look at Collingwood’s “controversial” loss in the 1979 VFL Grand Final. Those non-sport fans who remember Live and Sweaty will recall that the show was full of ultra-niche segments such as this, and despite some amusing moments it’s really something for those with an interest in the topic. A sequence with James Hewitt, Princess Diana’s former lover, has a potentially broader appeal, but fails to work as intended. Hewitt is hired to give McFeast a riding lesson and the sequence is clearly designed to get him to give her somewhat more than that…except he remains a perfect English gentleman throughout, making McFeast look fairly try-hard and Hewitt look pretty stuck-up, neither of which is terribly funny.
But overall the work of Elle McFeast/Lisbeth Gorr is good, and it’s not hard to see why she was probably the most successful Australian female comedian of the 90s. You could argue that there were funnier female comedians of the era, but we can’t think of any who got as much solo TV work as she did. In fact, we can’t think of any female comedians who’ve had that level of success in this country since – and we say that whilst running serious risk of this post become another one of those that debates about female comedy. So, we’ll end by pointing out one of the other quite good things about Elle McFeast: unlike, say, the Hungry Beast team, who aimed to do both comedy and serious reportage but never managed to do either well, let alone the two combined well, Elle McFeast proved that it’s more than possible to get it right. Watch Breasts to see what we mean.
A Presumption of Shared Humanity
If you’re going to be a comedian, you have to make a choice: do you make comedy designed to appeal to the masses, or do you follow your heart? On the one hand, appealing to the masses seems like the smart way to achieve mass appeal but idiots will call you a sell-out; on the other, following your heart is how all great art is made but there’s a chance you have the heart of a pretentious wanker (or worse, Julia Morris). How to create a deeply personal work that connects with everybody?
In recent years in Australia the very idea of comedy having mass appeal has been so ludicrous comedians and their supporters have almost automatically fallen back on the line “does it matter if these shows find a large audience so long as they’re good?” They have a point too: in theory if you make an extremely funny comedy people will flock to it no matter what that comedy is about. The Games was about Olympic management; Cheers was about a collection of lonely drunks; Fawlty Towers was about a man completely unsuited for hotel management.
In practice though, ignoring your wider audience to follow your heart often leads to shows like Laid. That is to say, shows that expect the audience to come to them. The idea that if you do something intensely personal it will become universal thanks to our shared humanity is a good one, but only if you’re able to actually articulate and express something universal.
[When Louie CK makes a new friend on a trip to Miami then screws it up on Louie, the thing that’s universal isn’t the culture of Miami, it’s the thrill of being somewhere new and making a new friend and then screwing it up because you’re a klutz; when Roo on Laid discovers her ex-lovers are dying, the thing that’s universal isn’t the ex-lovers dying, it’s the friendship between Roo and EJ. Except that where Louie is about the awkward nature of human interactions in general, Laid is about a specific someone having their ex-lovers die because of their cursed vagina… which isn’t exactly an universal condition. Oops.]
Anyway, the real rejoinder to the “who cares if anyone’s watching, we’re making art over here” argument – apart from time itself, because if you don’t pull in an audience no-one is going to remember you long enough to acclaim you as art – is the work of one Shaun Micallef. Game show host, tonight show host, news parody host, sketch comedy host and creator of one of the broader sitcoms in recent Australian history, there’s almost no mainstream format he hasn’t tried. But once he’s inside the format – formats that decades of television have refined down to give them the broadest possible appeal – he delivers comedy that’s extremely individual*.
Micallef may have embraced the mainstream when it comes to formats – his one sitcom was “married lawyers tackle silly cases”, not “hipster girl discovers her ex-lovers are dying” or Outland‘s “gay science-fiction fans hang out” – but his actual comedy contains some of the most obscure and unusual references you’ll find on Australian television. Mad as Hell recently featured an extended riff on the Peter Sellers movie Being There; who even remembers that film today? George Formby isn’t exactly a current reference, yet Micallef sang the 1940s Formby comedy song “When I’m Cleaning Windows” to fill space at the end of an episode of Welcher & Welcher.
“A Shaun Micallef show” is actually a pretty broad remit: he likes wordplay, physical comedy, absurdity, pop culture references, pulling faces, silly character names, news jokes, political satire, pulling a gun on his audience, and so on. He’ll throw anything at the screen if he thinks it’ll get a laugh and he knows enough about how comedy works to give jokes room to breathe. He’ll get a laugh with a raised eyebrow; he’ll also get a laugh by having two equestrians angrily wrestling on his desk while he tries to introduce the next segment.
While Micallef has a firmly developed sense of humour (and he’s not willing to mess with it; these days he’s almost never seen doing anything outside his admittedly broad comfort zone), what he is willing to do is work to find the easiest way to bring audiences into his world. Time and again he’s done his best to remove obstacles to people getting into his shows, to the point where now the least interesting thing about a Micallef program is the format. If you could figure out a way to let Micallef do what he wants to do on a home renovation or cooking based reality show, chances are he’d be on it like a shot. It’s almost as if he actually wants as many people as possible to watch his comedy.
In recent years we’ve seen way too many comedies where the niche interests are up front – ones that seem to say “this is what we’re about, take it or leave it”, with audiences usually choosing the latter**. Micallef clearly has his own obsessions (old comedy for starters), but he takes care not to let his personal interests overwhelm his comedy. He’s not going to make Micallef’s Wacky World of Movie References any time soon. The joke is usually simply that the reference is to something out-of-place and unusual; if you actually get the reference the joke is funnier, but it still works if you don’t.
These references personalise the material too: for example, Micallef’s chair on later seasons of Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation said “Tyrell Corporation”. If you got the Blade Runner reference that was fine, but there was no joke there past the joke of having the host of a mainstream game show sitting in a chair that made an obscure movie reference. Micallef likes Blade Runner; we all have favourite films; the personal becomes universal.
*Yes, we know he works with a regular team of collaborators, including writers Gary MacCaffrie and Michael Ward, and performer Francis Greenslade. When we say “Shaun Micallef”, we mean “Shaun Micallef and friends”.
**We’re also aware that his decades of experience have earned him a level of trust other comedians don’t have: he can say “I want to make a cooking show” and producers know it’ll be a funny cooking show. Less experienced comedians have to pitch show ideas that are “funny”, even if it means by episode three the hilarious concept is burnt out.
Audrey’s Kitchen
Premiering tomorrow tonight on ABC1 in the not terribly good timeslot of 6.25pm is the new Working Dog series Audrey’s Kitchen, ten 3-minute episodes based on their 2010 parody cookbook Audrey Gordon’s Tuscan Summer, and featuring Heidi Arena (Dawn from The Librarians) in the title role. Audrey Gordon is a British TV chef and cookery writer who takes a “no nonsense” approach to food; in Audrey’s Kitchen she presents a series of simple and delicious recipes in her own unique style.
Audrey’s Kitchen gets the look and feel of a real cooking show just right, from the slightly irritating soft jazz in the background to the unrealistically stylish home kitchen filming location. But while the recipes are also real to life (in that you could actually make them), Audrey isn’t – initially she comes across as a more homely Nigella Lawson, but as the series progresses it becomes increasingly clear that she’s a racist snob who hates, or at the very least is hugely intolerant of, the rest of humanity. Some of her less savoury utterances include tips on feeding the elderly and children – the latter is pure Working Dog gleeful silliness and a particular highlight.
A few months back we reviewed one of Working Dog’s recent efforts Any Questions For Ben?, a disappointing and bland film which quite rightly made a quick disappearance from cinemas. In that blog we put forward our theory that there are several types of Working Dog project – the gag-heavy, script-led efforts of Tom Gleisner, the mildly comic but stylish-looking work of Rob Sitch, the casual piss-farting about of Santo Cilauro, and the commercially-minded formats ripe for flogging overseas. Audrey’s Kitchen has the Gleisner style all over it; it’s like a rich and complex dessert, small in size, gone in a flash, but chock full of the good stuff. And as such it’s one of those shows that’s worth watching again to pick up more of the detail –did she really suggest adding a “light vajazzle of pomegranate seeds” to that dish?
Audrey’s Kitchen may succeed in restoring your faith not just in Working Dog but in Australian comedy itself. It also suggests a possible model for future scripted shows: give comedians old and new a small number of 3-minute timeslots to do whatever they like, and see what happens. The reason so much scripted comedy in this country is crap is because there aren’t many people who have a decent amount of experience of making it anymore – where are team sketch shows for new writers to get work on, for example.
6.25pm on a Saturday isn’t a great timeslot, and there’s no guarantee that comedy shorts like this will get much attention on iView either, but as Audrey’s Kitchen shows it’s more a question of quality than quantity when it comes to good comedy.
July 2012: A New Golden Age?
It might be hard to spot from beneath the cloud of gloom and despair that hangs over the Australian televised comedy scene, but at the moment we have two – count ’em – decent local comedy programs currently airing on Australian free-to-air television. We’ll spare you the suspense: we mean Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell and Hamish & Andy’s Euro Gap Year.
You can disagree with us, but you’d be wrong: both shows feature highly competent and experienced comedians (albeit with very different styles) putting out weekly shows that, while not exactly ground-breaking, are the kind of skillfully made and well-targeted laugh-getters we don’t see anywhere near often enough. And one of them is on commercial television! When was the last time this happened?
Actually, while that wasn’t a serious question, let’s do the math: the ABC hasn’t had a really strong comedy series on since Very Small Business, though let’s cut The Chaser some slack with their post War On Everything efforts. Either way, it doesn’t matter: the ABC never has two good shows on at once, because one is always Gruen-related or Chris Lilley or Randling or The Glasshouse or The Sideshow or Lowdown or Outland or Laid or even Woodley. Some of which aren’t really bad – they’re just weren’t consistently good.
So first we need to look to other channels. Commercial networks: zero. But SBS had Newstopia in 2007-2008, so if the ABC had anything decent on during that period, there’s our previous Golden Age right there.
(yes, we realise we’re setting the bar amazingly low here. We’ll get to why in a moment)
Good news; Very Small Business DID overlap with the final series of Newstopia! Not only that, before VSB was the second and much improved season of The Hollowmen. Of course, no-one was calling that a Golden Age, because a Golden Age requires more than just a series of decent programs across a variety of networks. A real Golden Age requires comedy to not just be good, but be seen to be good, to be an up-front part of the national discourse in the same way that reality television is now.
And there’s that gloom and despair again, because that isn’t going to happen. The last time it did happen – the comedy boom of the late 80s – there was no internet, no DVDs, only four television channels, Daryl Somers was moderately funny, and so on. Short version: all that happened before many of today’s comedy fans were born.
Today thanks to the proliferation of media platforms, television itself isn’t even at the heart of the national discourse. The only way it can manage to wrangle even part of the spotlight now is by manufacturing must-see “events” like reality show finals. Nothing else on television – not news, not current affairs, certainly not drama – matters all that much any more. And apart from a few isolated moments, it’s not like comedy ever really did.
So we have to adjust our scales. First thing to go: media attention. After all, it’s not like Australian comedy hasn’t had plenty of that in the last few years. But the media landscape has changed too, and comedy only attracts attention now if the increasingly struggling and desperate mainstream media can use it to attract attention to itself – which means stories about outrages and plenty of them. When was the last time a comedy show got any non-promotional media attention, unless it was for falling ratings or some community group kicking up a bogus stink?
Second thing: mainstream attention. After all, what’s mainstream these days? Thanks to the internet and DVDs and [insert new social media fad here], the idea of everyone marching in lockstep through a banner that reads WE LOVE YOU, HEY HEY IT’S SATURDAY is long dead. Okay, dead since 2009. Many people we know are watching and loving Mad as Hell; we know plenty of people who wouldn’t call themselves hard-core comedy fans who are really enjoying Euro Gap Year. It’s not everyone, but the only time “everyone” ever watched the same show was when there was nothing else on.
This isn’t to say comedy should turn it’s back on attracting a wider audience. Part of the problem with the ABC’s Wednesday night line-up this year is that it’s lacked shows that were a): good and b): of interest to a general audience. And declining ratings are always a bad sign, whether it’s from a high point or a low one – they mean people are trying a show and deciding they don’t like it.
[interestingly, if these figures are correct, it looks like Mad as Hell on the non-comedy night of Friday is outrating both Randling and Nice on the traditional ABC comedy night of Wednesdays. It seems the problem with the ABC’s Wednesday night line-up isn’t shifting viewing habits or changing demographics, it’s that people just don’t want to watch the shows the ABC is serving up then.]
But it’s important to realise that the goalposts have shifted. It’s easy to believe that comedy is dead or dying in Australia – Lord knows we feel like it is often enough – and it’s certainly got more than its fair share of problems today. Fortunately, so does Australian television in general; been enjoying a lot of high-quality local drama lately? How about insightful current affairs? Decent US sitcoms? Any UK comedy that doesn’t involve Ricky “rerun” Gervais?
Today’s comedy scene isn’t a new Golden Age. But it’s closer to being one than you might think.
This Post For Sale
Australia is without a doubt a thriving hub of on-line comedy. Problem is, unless it’s being made by someone with an already significant media profile, it can be a little hard to find. Which makes our covering The Sponsored Lady slightly ironic: not only is it a comedy site we only discovered due to the fact that one of its contributors is Helen Razer, but it’s a site that – in part – exists to make fun of online advertising. One specific kind of online advertising in particular: “sponsored posts”.
In case you don’t know – and having different things to do with our time than read blogs about child-rearing (which is where this stuff supposedly happens), we didn’t until we read this post on the topic by Razer – sponsored posts are good old-fashioned “live read” ads from the golden age of radio, only in blog form: the blogger, either due to direct sponsorship from a company or in an attempt to win some sort of prize from a company, posts positive stuff about a product or service. It’s not a big deal to us, but it is to some people. Hence, The Sponsored Lady.
Problem is, if the joke behind that site is “we’re making fun of people who say nice things about stuff for money” – and we’re going to guess it is, considering that their masthead says “In It For The Free Shit” and this introductory post spells it out even more clearly* – it’s not exactly coming through loud and clear. On the one hand, there are posts like this one, reviewing a bunch of Playboys from the early 70s. Once you get past all the references to bush, it’s basically a straight (and fairly positive) review with a few sassy comments thrown in. Fair enough.
On the other, there’s this post reviewing abortion. Let’s quote the intro, shall we?
There are many common injustices women of the developed world endure. Perhaps chief among these is the very, very poor available variety of post-abortion snacks. Feminism has been regrettably silent on the matter of Women and Post-Termination Amuse Bouche. Until now.
What follows is pretty much what it says on the tin: people talking about their real-life abortion experiences with a focus on the ‘keep your strength up” food they had afterwards. Not exactly funny to us (the food being supplied is mostly bland, dull and kind of sad, as you’d expect), but fair enough. It’s how this fits in with the blog’s comedy premise that remains something of a mystery: a close reading seems to suggest that premise-wise these posts are there to just mark time until some actual paid product placement rolls in. Which kind of makes sense comedy-wise until you read the actual posts which, whatever their merits, don’t exactly feed into the premise in any way.
If the joke is “we’ll say anything for money”, presumably you want to make fun of people that will say anything for money. That would be the joke you would be trying to make. Presumably you’d make it by writing earnest but crap endorsements where you reveal you only care about money, the product is toxic or shithouse, you go on about something else entirely and only mention the product at the end… don’t ask us, we just review comedy, not make it.
What The Sponsored Lady serves up is more about people writing the kind of thing best described as “internet snark” – vaguely smart-arsed, trying to shock a little, you know the drill by now. There’s nothing wrong with that but if that’s what you want to do – talk about random stuff in a mildly ironic, bitchy way – why set up the whole “sponsored lady” angle as your hook? It’s a solid idea for comedy, but the site itself doesn’t actually seem interested in using it in a funny way.
And then there’s this post, which is somewhat surprisingly a played straight example of the very thing they’re supposedly making fun of: a glowing sponsored review, in this case of Ben Pobjie’s book SuperChef: A Parody. This one misses the comedy target by going the other way – it actually is a sponsored post in every way that counts. No fun is being poked at, either at the book itself or the kind of person who would write a post promoting their own book. At the very best it’s an in-joke for people who know (or think they know) author Ben Pobjie well enough to laugh at the fact that Pobjie is not really trying to hide the fact that he’s written a post designed to get people interested in a book he’s written.
That’s what the whole site really feels like; a string of in-jokes for those already in the know. That’s why the non de plumes being used are so obvious – you have to be able to figure out pretty easily that “Helen Rasin” is “Helen Razer”, pre-established media celebrity (another clue: the photo of “Helen Rasin” on the contributor’s page is of Razer herself), because the material here isn’t really strong enough to sustain interest on its own.
[it’s not just Razer tipping her hand here – co-lady “Glenda Von CoCo” seems to be – if her contributor photo and FUCK YEAH catchphrase are any guide – Nadine Von Cohen, a writer currently best known, according to this self-penned article at least, for starting off all her tweets with FUCK YEAH]
The thing is, this approach works. If Razer hadn’t dropped some heavy hints that she was involved in this website, we wouldn’t have bothered checking it out. If we didn’t know she was involved, we probably wouldn’t have mentioned it here – after all, we clearly don’t think it’s funny enough to bring it to your attention based on its merits. It’s a side project from a name celebrity using her profile to get you to look at her side project: like a lot of things on the internet, it’s an in-joke where being in is a lot more important than the joke.
*there’s a very small chance they might claim they’re doing all this non-ironically. That is, instead of mocking the idea of sponsored posts, we should take the site at face value – they really are just doing it to score some free swag. In which case: oh, fuck off.
What’s So Funny About the Future of Australian Comedy?
For a few years now – well, it feels like years at least – we’ve been complaining / warning that Australian television likes everything about comedy but the making-people-laugh stuff. Of course, who listens to what we have to say? And so it has come to pass that in a few short weeks (July 25th) the ABC’s Wednesday night “comedy” line-up will consist of 14 episodes of The Gruen Whatever at 8.30pm followed by the remaining 14 episodes of Randling at 9.15. We put “comedy” in inverted commas for a good reason.
It’s hardly an isolated trend – Myf Warhurst’s Nice was many things, but comedy was not one of them – but in the past a couple of factors traditionally conspired to keep comedy at least somewhere in the mix. For one, Spicks & Specks was a comedy variety show disguised as a game show. How do we know that? The same way we know that Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation was a showcase for Shaun Micallef’s waky worldview disguised as a gameshow and Thank God You’re Here was an attempt to turn theatresports into a money-making scheme disguised as a gameshow: no-one gave a fuck about the scores.
Randling, on the other hand, not only cares about the scores, it has a league ladder at the end of each episode. It may seem minor, but it’s not: once the scores come first, getting laughs comes second. Once getting laughs isn’t the point of the show, it’s not a comedy. Which also helps explain why Randling isn’t funny.
Gruen, on the exact same hand as mentioned in the previous paragraph because that hand is attached to Andrew Denton, the man single-handedly turning the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy line-up into an two-fisted attempt to convince viewers that “smug” is another word for “hilarious”, is a consumer affairs show featuring a bunch of smart-arse pricks. It’s not even trying to be a comedy in any but the loosest, most Wil-Anderson-allowing sense of the term. It’s advertising executives talking about advertising – presumably the fact it’s on the supposedly ad-free ABC is where the laughs come from.
It gets worse. Yes, it’s time to talk about ABC2’s Dumb, Drunk & Racist, which also screens Wednesday nights. Your host and failed stand-up comic turned professional News Ltd smarmy git Joe Hildebrand has collected a bunch of Indians for the purposes of presenting them to a variety of racist Australians and then turning to the camera while pulling the “ain’t I a stinker?” face. It’s been sold as a show that will “stir debate” – a debate, we’re guessing, that largely revolves around who’s going to change the channel.
It’s not comedy and it’s not funny and that’s not an insult because it’s not trying to be either; what it is, is the logical end product of the ABC increasingly focusing it’s “comedy” efforts on shows best described as “local comedian has a hobby”. There are plenty of international ancestors to these shows (ABC2 is currently showing Louis Theroux, who’s one of them), but John Safran’s the big local one. He made shows that were funny; Judith Lucy, Lawrence Leung and The Bazura Project (to name three) took different approaches to the same basic idea and also made shows that were funny. Now Myf Warhurst and Joe Hildebrand are giving it a go without bothering with the funny stuff. And with both shows rating well (or “well”, considering the ABC’s struggle on Wednesdays), it seems that funny stuff was just getting in the way of the host standing by watching people shout at and/or hug each other.
The worry here is that being funny is hard. If these shows can work without trying to be funny, in the future they’re not going to be funny. If DD&R rates well simply by being semi-competent at shit-stirring, then the future is shit-stirring because shit-stirring is easy. Make a show that says people are overweight because they’re lazy slobs, call it Fat Fucks, job done. Get a bunch of wiry Aussie bush types to come into Sydney and look appalled at the people chowing down at a western suburbs fast food outlet, there’s your promo right there. “Where has Australia gone wrong?” says the voice-over, “are we really a nation of… Fat Fucks?”
Bugger it, let’s end on a positive note: at the other end of the scale, John Clarke’s Sporting Nation – a show that is also not a comedy, despite being about sport – is proving to be, much like its’ host (who is a comedian), both funny and intelligent. Sure, he’s talking about sport, so he gets a lot more leeway that he would if he was talking about, say, the railways – you don’t have to sell sport as being interesting to Australians. But the show is well-judged, informative, full of familiar faces saying unfamiliar things, and not at all interested in buying into cheap and easy stereotypes.
Would that we could say the same about Dumb Drunk & Racist.
The un-late Clive James
It was revealed in the British press last Thursday that Australia’s own Clive James is dying of cancer. The story, which first appeared in the Daily Mirror, was based on a transcript of an interview James had given to BBC Radio 4’s Meeting Myself Coming Back (which wasn’t due to air until Saturday evening, and is now on the BBC website). In the interview James said:
I’m getting near the end. I’m a man who is approaching his terminus.
In this context it sounded pretty serious. Thankfully it isn’t quite that bad. Writing in Britain’s Daily Telegraph on Saturday, James said:
The newspaper [the Daily Mirror] had got hold of a transcript of the instalment devoted to me of the BBC radio show Meeting Myself Coming Back (to be transmitted tonight) and selected a few dozen quotes so that I seemed to be practically expiring in the arms of the journalist assigned to register my dying breath.
The process of lifting the transcript was made easier by the Beeb’s weird decision to dress it up as a news story and hand it to its website several days before the scheduled transmission.
And:
I’m not objecting, because I haven’t got time. In the interview I am represented as saying that I am losing my battle with leukaemia. Well, of course I am. Eventually I must. But the main thrust of the broadcast is, I can assure you, quite merry.
Indeed it is – take a listen if you’ve time – and it’s good to hear that James will be with us for a little while longer, because at the risk of this turning in to an obituary (as much of the coverage in the press and on social media last week kinda did) Clive James’ death would be a significant loss to Australian comedy.
Clive James isn’t strictly a comedian of course, he’s probably best described as a journalist, broadcaster and writer (and not necessarily in that order), but he has a background in comedy and has always produced erudite and witty work.
After spending his undergraduate years at Sydney University in the early 60s, Clive James sailed off to see world. Eventually he ended up as a postgraduate student at Cambridge, where he joined the university’s revue society the Footlights Club (whose alumni includes half of Monty Python, all of The Goodies, Peter Cook, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Mitchell & Webb, Miriam Margoyles, Sasha Baron Cohen and many others). In 1966 James appeared in and wrote some of a Footlights revue with Eric Idle and fellow ex-pat Germaine Greer; in 1967 he was Footlights Club President as well as a writer and performer.
After Cambridge James went to London and became a journalist and sometime comedy writer. He enjoyed most success a journalist, notably as TV critic of The Observer, a post he held for a decade. If you like good writing about television, track down copies of Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box, which contain his best columns.
In the early 80s Clive James stopped writing about television because he was getting far too much work on it. His shows, made for the BBC and ITV (he switched networks several times), included the Postcards series, where he travelled to various cities and gave his commentary, a number of interview programmes (including The Late Clive James – not another pre-emptive obituary, it was a late night show), various programmes about television (Clive James on Television, Saturday Night Clive, The Clive James Show), Fame in the 20th Century – a decade by decade show looking at the electronic media and celebrity, and several New Year’s Eve specials. If you were watching the ABC regularly in the 90s it was almost impossible to avoid his trademark witticisms and droll delivery (if you weren’t, Madman released a best of DVD, The Clive James Collection, last year).
James’ other works includes essays, novels, stage tours, poetry, some pioneering online TV efforts, and five volumes of autobiography. If you like good comic writing track down the latter; the first two volumes, Unreliable Memoirs and Falling Towards England, cover his early life in Australia, the third, May Week Was in June, his early life in the UK, the fourth, North Face of Soho, his early journalistic career, and the fifth, The Blaze of Obscurity, his famous television work. For those old enough to remember the Bicentenary, James’ account of Australia Live, of which he was one of the hosts, is fascinating.
It’s also a devastatingly frank critique of the Nine Network’s approach to television, in which he argues that Australia Live focused too heavily on heart-warming tales and celebrity success stories, forsaking cultural and scientific achievements. This is typical of Clive James; throughout his career he’s referenced history, art, literature and many other “high” disciplines in his writings, even his writings on commercial television and pop culture. His work is insightful and critical, but also funny – he once described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like “a condom stuffed with walnuts”. He’s not strictly a comedian, but he’s inspired many of them (Charlie Pickering was among those paying tribute to him last week), and like his fellow ex-patriot Barry Humphries he was one of the first Australians to prove that you can be funny AND intelligent.
May Clive James live as long as he can, uninterrupted by the Nine Network’s sensationalist approach to television, but munching on as many Cherry Ripes as he can get hold of. Anyone got his address? We feel like sending him a box.
Thinking About Political Comedy?
Here’s a question: when exactly did Australian political comedy go soft? Put another way, when Shaun Micallef, cuddly game-show host and master of light-hearted surrealism, can moderately startle at least one of the hard-boiled Tumbleweeds team by confusing John Howard’s biography with Mein Kampf and making a Tony Abbott joke based on not quite calling him a cunt, then you know things have been off the boil for a very long time.
Micallef’s Mad as Hell has been getting more and more sure of itself with each passing week and it’s not like Micallef didn’t make political jokes with Newstopia a few years ago, so his removal of the gloves wasn’t perhaps as shocking as the opening paragraph may have suggested. But still, since the end of John Howard’s reign political comedy in this country has, Clarke & Dawe aside, been basically non-existent. Why?
It’s not like Australians actually like their current politicians. Both Abbott and Gillard have astoundingly high disapproval ratings, and the prospect of being led by either isn’t exactly filling the nation with joy. You’d think now would be the time to take a few hard swings at our leaders – and, as Mad as Hell has shown, you’d be right. But how did it get to this point?
For one thing, it’s been a very long time since the ABC was serious about political comedy. Backberner was axed in 2002, and since then The Chaser have basically had the domain all to themselves (okay, there was The Glasshouse until 2006, but its political coverage largely consisted of Wil Anderson saying “look at me! C’mon guys… *crickets chirp*… um, hey, fuck John Howard! …are they looking now?”).
The Chaser’s approach to politics has always been a bit softer, more cynical – even, dare we say it, more “insider”. The Chaser come across – or did back when they tackled politics in The Chaser’s War on Everything – like they think one side of politics is pretty much interchangeable with the other. Basically, everyone involved in politics is kind of a dickhead but no-one’s really all that bad. It’s a perfectly reasonable view to have; it’s just not a particularly funny one.
The Chaser’s kind of political comedy often revolved around stunts and pranks, which were easily co-opted by politicians as a way to seem in on the joke. We were scathing about their pranks at the time as being little more than pointless fluff, but at least they were engaging with politicians: nothing anyone’s done since has managed even that.
Of course, there was The Hollowmen in 2008, but that was about politics as process. It was also pretty much out-of-date as soon as it aired: the idea that politics was just a smokescreen for processes that ground on no matter what anyone involved did was a standard of the Howard years, but with Labor in power it became clear that the actual government of the day really did have some say in how the country was run. Sorry to startle you there.
One thing The Hollowmen had in common with The Chaser was a kind of over-view of politics: it didn’t matter who was in power, the system would grind on reguardless. Again, it’s a perfectly valid point of view. It’s also pretty much the only even remotely intelligent point of view that fits with the ABC’s long-time obsession with “balance” when it comes to covering politics. If neither side really matters, it’s fine to give equal time to attacking each – or in The Hollowmen‘s case, ignoring the idea of party politics all together.
Oddly*, it seems in recent years the ABC’s obsession with “balance” when it comes to political swipes seems to have lessened. At Home With Julia wasn’t At Home With Julia and Her Wacky Neighbour Tony Abbott, after all. Then again, once Labor got in at a Federal level The Chaser have basically sworn off politics entirely and despite occasional rumbles The Hollowmen is yet to return. While At Home With Julia had its moments, it also felt a lot like a last-ditch attempt to get in a swipe at Labor before they fell in a heap.
So now – finally – Mad as Hell is taking real swipes at federal politicians. Swipes the ABC are actually using in the promos. Micallef has little to lose by going for laughs by going hard – he can actually get work outside the ABC if the ABC’s political masters take a serious dislike to him. Not that anyone at the ABC would ever make programming decisions based on anything apart from a program’s quality. Of course not.
Micallef being the new comedy attack dog** on the block might work out well for The Chaser too. The Chaser, despite having the “political comedy” brief largely to themselves at the ABC, have never seemed all that interested in going hard at politicians (two words: dodgy pranks). And as they’ve moved to put “The Chaser Boys” days behind them, they’ve put politics behind them too. No complaints there – their swipes at the media have often been their best work – but it has meant that for the last 6 or so years there’s been next to no political comedy*** on Australian televisions.
No wonder someone actually making a joke about Tony Abbott came as such a shock.
*Not really – Under Abbott the Liberals are basically getting equal media time with the government, making it easier to attack them without looking like you’re kicking them when they’re down.
**Not even remotely true
*** Clarke & Dawe are great, but five minutes of 7.30 once a week isn’t exactly high profile