Australian Tumbleweeds
In Search Of… Laughs
We all know television doesn’t work this way, but still: It’s tempting to think the decision to team the second half of Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys series with Lawrence Leung’s new series Unbelievable (ABC1, Wednesdays, 9.30pm) was guided by more than just the programmers grabbing whatever was next on the shelf after Hungry Beast finished.
While Lilley’s show is almost entirely populated by unpleasant, insulting morons (which doesn’t automatically mean they’re not good comedy characters, of course), Leung has rapidly built a reputation as the nice guy of Australian comedy. Yeah yeah, Australian comedy already has more than enough “nice guys”, from Adam Hills to Charlie Pickering to whoever else gets to host a show where they ask bland, inoffensive questions while pretending they could care less.
But with Leung’s first show Choose Your Own Adventure, he established himself as a guy who was nice to his parents, interested in things in a modest, nerdy way, and out to make people laugh by making a fool of himself instead of sinking the boot into others. Considering his television career started off the back of The Chaser – basically, The Chaser wanted to do less episodes in 2009 so stand-up Leung (who also wrote for them) was given a show partly to keep the crew in work and the timeslot filled – it’s refreshing just how different his approach was.
Choose Your Own Adventure was such a personal project for Leung – he mined his own childhood hopes and dreams for large parts of it – that it was difficult to see exactly how he was going to follow it up without spending a decade or so building up material. Mystery solved: like John Safran before him, Leung has chosen to take his personal approach to comedy and use it as a lens through which to examine an area ripe for mockery.
In his various television series Safran tackled music, religion and relationships: here Leung is looking at the supernatural with an eye to debunking pretty much all of it. Even if his approach isn’t exactly ground-breaking (talk to expert, use what expert said to construct comedy sketch; repeat) he gets a lot of laughs out of the material. Seeing Leung in episode one give psychic readings based on karaoke machine lyrics is as funny as anything shown on the ABC this year.
If all this feels a little familiar though, that’s because Leung’s show often feels like the kind of thing Safran would do – as in, pretty much exactly the same in format if not approach. Leung doesn’t quite have the edge Safran brings to his explorations, but he’s not as big a smart-arse either. Leung gets laughs from being surprised that psychics are all a con; with Safran you want to see what he’ll do with that information. Leung’s is a gentler approach, but underneath he’s just as ruthless a debunker as Safran – though less likely to make himself the butt of the joke.
It’s as likely the similarities come as much from ABC budget restrictions as from anything else. If Leung is just running around interviewing people Safran-style, that means the ABC doesn’t have to pay for a big cast. Plus it’s a good way to hedge bets content-wise: even if you’re not a comedy fan, you might be interested in whatever aspect of the supernatural he’s tackling this week. In the hands of a less assured performer, it could easily sink into the morass of stale, generic television. Fortunately for Leung – and us – he’s more on the ball.
Hating Angry Boys: A Beginner’s Guide
With Angry Boys debuting in the UK this week, the usual gushing waves of praise re: the genius of Chris Lilley have broken on a new shore. In Australia too, the fans have been fighting back against the dwindling ratings and general feel that this time out Lilley’s gone off the boil. Even the Melbourne Herald-Sun recently said “the jury’s still out” on Lilley’s latest series, which-
–hang on a second, how the hell can the “jury” still be out on a series that’s into its’ fifth week? Most Australian sitcoms only go for six weeks! This isn’t so much a case of the jury being out as eleven members calling for the death sentence while the twelfth sticks their fingers in their ears and shouts “not listening”.
Anyway, suffice to say that currently we’re in the best of all possible worlds when it comes to the world of Chris Lilley: there’s no clear-cut consensus as to how we’re all supposed to be thinking. Gone – for now at least – is the universal agreement in the press that he’s the second coming of a whole bunch of people who aren’t dead yet, including Barry Humphries and Ricky Gervais. Gone is the automatic assumption that simply by putting on a wig or a dress or a bunch of dark make-up he becomes a character with more intrinsic depth and substance than The Guru from the NRL Footy Show. Gone is… well, a whole bunch of things. Including, hopefully, the image of him as some kind of reclusive genius:
“I think the press have to have an angle on someone and the boring angle they have on me is that I’m this crazy, reclusive person who is media shy and makes these shows that are really shocking and controversial,” Lilley told Digital Spy.
(it’s true he’s not reclusive – we’ve seen him at a Shaun Micallef performance and at a preview of The Dark Knight!)
Unfortunately for Lilley, once you take away that media angle, all you’re left with is a show that isn’t all that funny. Which is why the media – who, by every possible objective reading of the situation, has gone out of their way to built Lilley up as the Great White Hope In Blackface of Australian Comedy – play up the “shocking and controversial” angle regarding his shows.
Lilley does have a point in that piece though: the media’s hyping of him as a controversial figure has next to no real substance behind it. If you’ve been here before, you know how the story goes. But it’s really the only angle the press can take as far as hyping up his shows. What else is there to say? He’s not all that insightful when it comes to wider social issues (unlike Kath & Kim, which at least sparked a “should we be laughing at the lower orders?” debate), he’s not mocking insitutions (like Frontline and The Games did), he’s not a funny guy outside of his characters (there go the panel show appearances) and he doesn’t provide any other obvious hooks to work with. He’s a theatre nerd who likes playing dress-ups and writing dubious parody songs: good luck marketing that.
That’s not to say people aren’t bravely trying to talk up Angry Boys the show rather than the controversy. Sadly for them, when you’re talking about a comedy, trying to claim this sort of crap as a positive just won’t wash:
It’s not pandering to the masses. No laugh track. No obvious gags
You know what? Obvious gags are good. Don’t believe us? Just watch, oh, every single classic comedy ever made. To be fair, the impression you might be left with after the fact is one of subtle character work and sly references, but at the time you’re watching it? The stuff that makes you laugh time and time again? That’d be what we call “jokes”. Name a comedy, we’ll point out the gags: a comedy without “obvious gags” isn’t a comedy at all, it’s a limp, aimless, not-quite-drama. Just like Angry Boys.
[laughs tracks are also perfectly fine, just not all the time in every show. If you’re a comedy reviewer and you suggest that laugh tracks are always bad – or that the lack of one is an automatic good – you’re not really much of a reviewer. C’mon, both Fawlty Towers and Seinfeld had a laugh track.]
Angry Boys is far from a disaster – at least by the standards of Australian television comedy in 2011 – but praising it constantly isn’t doing anyone a service. It’s this kind of relentless boosting that turned a once-promising young character comedian (yes, we’re talking about Lilley) back in his Big Bite days into a screen-hogging, self-obsessed, one-note bore.
If you want a reason to hate Angry Boys, don’t hate it because it’s “controversial” (it isn’t) or it’s “shocking” (it’s not) or it’s “pandering to the US market” (really? S.mouse seems pretty much on par with Ricky Wong race-wise, and his clear purpose isn’t to suck up to the States – it’s to allow Lilley to churn out more of his much-loved-by-him tasteless songs): hate it because it’s obvious that if Lilley actually had to stretch himself beyond the occasional dick joke and arsehole character, he could come up with something that was really worth all the hype.
Vale Hungry Beast?
The final episode – possibly ever – of Hungry Beast goes to air later tonight and, while we’ve sort of pointed this out before, we think it’s worth remembering that when it started out Hungry Beast was supposed to be at least as much about comedy as it was about current affairs. Which makes our number one question at this slightly pre-emptive wake for the programme: What happened?
The team exercised some quality control, perhaps? Kinda. Veronica Milsom’s appalling character Veronica Dynamite seems to have been retired, and while that’s definitely a victory for comedy, it was a victory which took at least two series of the show to achieve. And as the ever diminishing number of sketches which have appeared in the show haven’t exactly been funnier (a recent episode featured a series of parodies of board game ads where the games were existing board games reworked to reference something happening in the news, i.e. the kind of waste material which littered the poorer episodes of The Chaser’s War on Everything) it’s pretty much the worst kind of victory over bad comedy that there is: a victory for giving up rather than spending a little time working out why the bad sketches didn’t work and then NEVER MAKING THOSE MISTAKES AGAIN.
Which begs another question, why don’t the senior people in charge of shows like Hungry Beast (or for that matter Angry Boys, a show which on Chris Lilley’s past form was never going to be anything more than the same self-indulgent crap) ever take poorly-performing comedic talent aside and point out some home truths? Andrew Denton the co-creator and one of the executive producers of Hungry Beast has spent large parts of his career getting the mix between serious issues and comedy right, so where was he when If Lady Gaga Wasn’t A Popstar – a sketch literally anyone could have come up with – was being filmed? Or Liberals on Fire, which drags one not particularly interesting satirical observation out for more than 40 seconds. Any decent executive producer would have taken one look at sketches like these and demanded an instant re-write.
And indeed whatever happened to Hungry Beast‘s original intention of reviving the This Day Tonight concept, of a current affairs show which mixed serious stories with irreverence? Well, it tried, but Hungry Beast just never managed to do it smoothly, meaning that the comedic aspects of the show became almost entirely separated from the serious, and the serious has become far more dominant than the comedic. Given the quality of the comedy it’s probably better they started to focus less on that area, but the failure to effectively combine the two still counts as a failure.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that The 7PM Project went on a similar journey, which has seen it become an increasingly serious programme. Perhaps the news/comedy combo is one which is never going to work easily, unless you’re making a straight-out satire like the Clarke & Dawe sketches or The Chaser’s War on Everything. Even then good writing is the key to this, and Hungry Beast‘s satirical sketches could have been a lot better if they’d been as clever, fast and gag-packed as Clarke & Dawe.
But perhaps the central flaw in the whole Hungry Beast premise was that irreverence thing. It’s all very well when the presenter makes an off-the-cuff gags in a news or current affairs programme, but it’s an entirely different thing for it to be planned and deliberate. What you get are forced attempts at humour from someone who’s not a comedian. In the real world it’s like a Best Man speech where all the gags have been downloaded from the internet and awkwardly adapted, rather than been inspired by the context and crafted by a skilled professional comedian.
As people born after This Day Tonight ended, we can’t say for sure to what extent Hungry Beast managed to be a This Day Tonight for the 21st Century, or whether This Day Tonight was a decent enough concept to revive in the first place. What we can say is that Hungry Beast failed to produce decent news-based comedy, and that it’s right that the serious aspects of the programme came to dominate it. As a showcase for emerging production talent it’s been a success, but when the list of the show’s comedic highlights includes this Avatar parody, well, that’ a fail.
Are You Being Re-made?
If, like us, you’re often sceptical of Australian TV comedies then consider this: is it better to give comedy a try and not always succeed, or to give up entirely and just import it? All too often we get defeatist about it and chose the latter, but down that path dangers lies, for history tells us that when there isn’t much original, locally-made comedy on TV not only do we get lots of imported shows, but local re-makes of British shows – and is that actually what we want?
Even now when there are a number of original local comedies made each year we still make plenty of re-makes, none of which ever seem to set the world on fire. Recently there has been TV Burp and You Have Been Watching, whose producers failed to either understand why the original worked or to adapt to the show successfully for the local market (probably both); Good News Week, which has been adapted from the British original Have I Got News For You but lost its way by morphing into an over-long variety show; and Balls of Steel Australia, which is an automatic fail simply for giving the world more Balls of Steel.
But if you think those shows were kinda pointless imagine a world where there was even less in the way of original local comedies, but lots in the way of re-makes of crap British sitcoms. Shows like Love Thy Neighbour, Father Dear Father, the Doctor series and Are You Being Served? were all re-made by local broadcasters in the ’70s and early ’80s. The formula was that one or two of the stars of the original shows were brought over, the original scripts had all the obvious British references substituted for local ones, and the cameras started to roll.
Should you ever sit down to watch any of these shows, and almost all available on DVD, the big question is “Why did local broadcasters bother”? Are You Being Served?’s Australian incarnation (now available if you know where to look) is particularly, startlingly, pointless as a piece of television. The premise, such as it is, is that Mr Humphries (John Inman) of London’s Grace Brothers department store has moved to Melbourne to take up a position (oo’er!) in the menswear department of Bone Brothers (which is owned by Young Mr Bone, the Australian cousin of Young Mr Grace), where his new colleagues bear a striking resemblance to his old ones and he finds himself in some very familiar situations (the co-writer of the original series, Jeremy Lloyd, adapted some of the British scripts for this remake, “an experience he claims not to have enjoyed” according to the book Are You Being Served? The Inside Story).
If you think local re-makes of British panel shows failed to make themselves relevant to Australian audiences, then let us assure you this version of Are You Being Served? eclipses them all. And it’s not so much the British humour that is out of place in Australia (who amongst us can resist a pussy joke), but the gags based on the British class system, which are such a key part of the show (and indeed many British comedies of the era). Indeed, for gags about the British class system to work even slightly in an Australian context most of the cast have to adopt pseudo-British accents, so Reg Gillam as Captain Wagstaff (Frank Thornton as Captain Peacock in the original) sounds more like a graduate of Sandhurst than a graduate of Puckapunyal, and musical star June Bronhill virtually copies Mollie Sugden’s Mrs Slocombe in the role of Mrs Crawford. Only Shane Bourne as young sales assistant Mr Randel (Trevor Bannister as Mr Lucas in the original) uses his native accent, as do all of the lower-status characters (apart from maintenance man Mr Cocker, who is played with a Cockney accent by English migrant actor Reg Evans). To say this show portrays no Australian department store, or workplace, or social situation that has ever existed puts it mildly – this programme must surely have been the last bastion of the cultural cringe.
Having sat through such an obvious failure as the Australian version of Are You Being Served? (although to do it justice it ran for two series, so perhaps had some resonance 30 years ago), and the more recently re-made British shows previously mentioned, it’s hard to understand why any Australian broadcaster thinks that making a local version of an overseas comedy is a good idea. OK, it’s clearly much cheaper and easier to do a re-make of a successful overseas show than to come up with something original, but when the ultimate result of a re-make is always a show which doesn’t quite work then why wouldn’t you try and come up with something developed locally which might work? Why does there always seem to be an assumption than an overseas success will work better than an untried local idea? And if all you’re aiming for is something competent then Australian comedians have proved time and time again that they can do that.
Full Frontal in “Now Available In Stores” Shock
It’s a sign of just how grim things have become that the long-awaited release of series four and five of Full Frontal can seriously be described as “good news”. Hell, even “long-awaited” is pretty depressing. But yes, finally these two collections are out there waiting to be purchased / fast-forwarded to the Shaun Micallef bits. Of which there are plenty: series four is packed with highlights (Roger Explosion / David McGann / Milo Kerrigan) and series five contains a fair bit of him until the midway point. While a lot of this stuff was collected in The Compleat Micallef DVD collection, a fair bit wasn’t, which is really all you need to know.
Otherwise… well, it’s late-90s Australian sketch comedy. The golden age had well and truly passed by this point, and while the dark ages of Comedy Inc: The Late Shift hadn’t closed in, this was the show that firmly pointed the way down to a future of endless sketches about dole-bludging superheroes and “that baby’s a raper” gags. If you have strong nostalgic reasons for sitting through episode after episode of this, go right ahead; if you’re coming to it fresh, there’s not a lot here that’ll hold your attention unless you’re a fan of dodgy sets, overacting, endless restaurant scenes and references to shows and commercials you probably don’t remember.
Still, considering how many other moderately worthwhile / interesting sketch comedy series seem lost for good – BackBerner must be worth a look, and how about the “adult” second series of The Wedge? – having this available on DVD complete and uncut can only be seen as A Good Thing. Mind you, we’ll get back to you about Full Frontal‘s even shoddier follow-up Totally Full Frontal – that one’s due out on DVD around the end of the month…
Travelling North
It was announced the other day that Rove McManus has become the latest Australian to score a gig on American TV, and that’s all well and good but why him? There are lots of other far better Australian comedians having a crack in the US, why aren’t they getting gigs? One such example is Gristmill, AKA Wayne Hope and Robyn Butler, who we understand were (or are) planning to move to the US to pursue opportunities. And with quality work like The Librarians and Very Small Business behind them there must surely be plenty of opportunities for them to pursue…or are there? Because it’s all very well for a bland, solid everyman like Rove McManus to make it overseas, but Gristmill’s focus has always been on uniquely Australian characters – characters possibly too unique for the US market – so, despite their obvious talent, are they ever going to get anywhere?
Breaking the US market’s historically been a big challenge for Australian comedians, even now when hundreds of Australians in other parts of the entertainment industry are making it big there. Barry Humphries made a number of attempts over a 30 year period before he finally did it, and the progress of others has also been slow. Sure, Chris Lilley’s done extremely well to get HBO on board for Angry Boys, and FX are about to screen the US re-make of Adam Zwar and Jason Gann’s series Wilfred, but when an Australian comedy or comedian goes to America it always seems to be one which isn’t specifically Australian. Which kinda rules out Gristmill.
Gristmill’s brilliance in The Librarians and Very Small Business was their ability to highlight and parody elements of Australian society. Very Small Business was a subtle and clever attack on the attitudes and values of “The Howard Battlers”, and similar themes, mixed with a liberal dose of Catholic guilt, were explored in The Librarians. But while both were brilliantly funny series it’s hard to imagine them having quite the same resonance overseas. Particularly in the US, where a local version of Gristmill would be focusing on a rather different set of cultural attitudes and values.
In contrast, the characters in Angry Boys and Wilfred don’t necessarily need to be Australian, nor is the humour of Rove McManus, or indeed Rebel Wilson (such as it is), rooted in a specific Australianess. Kath & Kim, which like Gristmill’s work also focused on Australian suburban attitudes, did not travel well to the United States. Indeed those who remade it clearly didn’t understand why the show worked, and so failed to adapt it for local audiences (quite possibly the show was un-adaptable). And perhaps the same is true of Gristmill’s work: if your comedy comes from your observations of the immediate world around you, the same world you grew up in, then it’s unlikely to travel well.
The point of this article is not to have a go at Gristmill’s style or whatever plans they have to go overseas: they’re talented, there’s nothing wrong with having a go overseas, and comedians focusing their attention on who we Australians are and how our country works is a perfectly valid thing (in fact it wouldn’t hurt if more comedians did it). All we’re trying to work out here is why local talents like Gristmill haven’t (yet) made it overseas.
It’s also interesting to note that Gristmill’s most recent work is a series of videos featuring Robyn Butler as right-wing shock jock Arabella Twat, a character who despite being very much a comment on local pundits like Miranda Devine, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, could more easily be understood by overseas audiences than some of Butler and Hope’s other work. Either way, Twat (pronounced “Twart”, and very obviously both a twat and a tart) is another great creation and it will be fascinating to see how it develops. Gristmill’s website may list their US agent, and they may yet be heading to overseas, but Australian comedy would be all the poorer for losing them.
Divide and Stoop to Conquer
Okay, so over at The Age this just happened:
throughout Angry Boys the language is appalling, family interaction is wholly dysfunctional and there are repeated references to all manner of sexual deviations – dog-wanking and grandma-groping chief among them. If this is comedic genius, Rodney Rude and Kevin ”Bloody” Wilson deserve lifetime achievement awards.
The publicity team at the ABC must be rubbing their hand with glee so violently over this one they’ll have to have safety officers standing by with fire extinguishers in case their palms burst into flames. While there’s very little on the factual front that former Herald-Sun editor Guthrie gets wrong – having recently watched episode 5 of Angry Boys, it’s amazing just how much the “comedy” revolves around dick, ball and piss jokes – the approach he takes is playing right into Lilley’s hands.
While recently most of the positive press for Lilley’s series has revolved around his supposedly subtle and insightful character shenanigans, the original hook for his work going all the way back to We Can Be Heroes has been how “shocking” and “confrontational” his comedy is. That’s why, as we’ve pointed out previously, the approach of a new series by Lilley is always and without fail signaled by news reports claiming that one character or another is going to spark a wave of outrage. A wave, it’s worth pointing out yet again, that never arrives – unless there have been riots over Gran’s racist comments that didn’t make the news? No? Didn’t think so.
The reason why this kind of attack on Lilley’s work is not only pointless but actively harmful to sensible debate is because it just reinforces a divide that already exists. The people who already think Lilley is a dirt-monger will nod sagely, safe in the knowledge that their blinkered view has been confirmed; those who think his dick jokes are a cutting-edge attack on society’s stifling morality will nod sagely, seeing this article as proof that Lilley is bang on target.
As far as we’re concerned, the real truth doesn’t so much lie between those two irrelevant extremes as it does off in the direction of “is it funny?”. And as even his firmest supporters are increasingly admitting, it’s not. If you want to make a real point about the quality of a supposed comedy, that’s the direction you should approach it from, not asinine cries that it should be pulled off air for violating the ABC’s charter.
No doubt someone somewhere is already penning a defense of Lilley, claiming that Guthrie has missed the point of his satire. Save your ink: if Australia’s self-styled “master of disguise” doesn’t figure out a way to make people laugh and fast, his already plummeting ratings – down from 1.3 million to 800,000 in three weeks – will make the only real point to be made about Angry Boys abundantly clear. Even when it’s left on the bonnet of a police car, this shit ain’t funny.
The Song Remains The Same
It’s taken us a day or so to process the news that Spicks & Specks – a show we honestly figured that at this stage would keep on keeping on until at least the next Ice Age – will in fact be gone before the next Ice Age movie comes out. Not because we’re going to miss the actual show or anything, of course: S&S was in many ways the apex predator of panel shows, a format ruthlessly constructed to ensure that the really funny guests aren’t too funny while the totally shithouse ones are moderately tolerable. And there’s only so many times (we’ll say… three) you can watch someone whose work you really admire forced to play a bunch of lame party games before you put a foot through the television set.
Let’s not forget that, for a show that’s become that most dreaded of things, an “Australian Institution”, S&S was not only a thinly disguised knock-off of UK show Never Mind the Buzzcocks but was also commissioned minutes after the ABC passed on the lets-be-honest-they’re-almost-identical RocKwiz. Much as the three leads did a solid job of personalising the format, S&S was always generic committee-driven television at its finest, a show made by executives to be “good enough” without a trace of creative passion behind it.
Tho be fair (why start now – ed), S&S did do a good job of recreating the fun of a dodgy quiz night while providing a showcase for various musos and international acts to show off their ability to laugh at Hamish Blake. It also managed to do what most panel shows seem utterly incapable of doing: providing team captains who aren’t completely identical.
[we interrupt this drivel for a Public Service Announcement: hey, TV execs: if The Movie Show / At The Movies can survive for roughly a trillion years based solely on movie trailers – which the commercial networks throw away as ads because they ARE ads – and having two moderately different people who like different things occasionally argue, then maybe it’s time to consider the idea that the folks at home like to watch shows where THEY CAN TAKE SIDES. No-one wants to see open loathing, but good-natured conflict is clearly a big, big plus when it comes to making watchable television and the fact you avoid it like crazy every chance you get is yet another reason why viewers avoid your shows like crazy every chance they get.]
Still, it’s not the loss of S&S itself that we’re sad about. It’s the loss of the locked-in, million plus ratings lead-in that we’re going to mourn. It’s hard to over-estimate how important all those loyal S&S viewers have been for Australian comedy over the last 5 or so years: thanks to S&S drawing huge crowds and then leaving them at 9pm with nothing else to watch but whatever half-hour comedy the ABC had lined up next (every other network having started hour-long shows at 8.30pm), a whole range of comedies that would have almost certainly struggled to draw a crowd had instead a ready-made army of followers.
Sure, this did mean that shows that deserved to have struggled in their early episodes instead looked like winners. We won’t name names (*cough* The Gruen Transfer *cough*), but you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. In the wider scheme of things having S&S anchour the ABC’s Wednesday night comedy line-up was a massive, massive boost for television comedy – as anyone who remembers the days when the ABC would dump their local comedies anywhere and then wonder why they didn’t rate (and then, for a period in the early 00s, stop making them entirely) knows all too well.
So when Spicks & Specks finally leaves our screens due to (we assume) Adam Hills pulling out in the wake of In Gordon Street Tonight proving that people will watch him even when he’s not spitting out music-themed questions and kaking himself, we’ll miss it. Not because we could stand to watch more than the occasional five-minute snippet over the last four years, but because it did the heavy lifting that allowed a lot of other, better shows to dodge the ratings bullet. Which is a hell of a lot more than Good News Week has ever done for anybody.
Cheap, nasty and downright boring
The more eagle-eyed amongst you have probably noticed that we’ve put off reviewing Balls of Steel Australia for five weeks. But never fear, we haven’t come over all “rule of three” (or indeed five) round these parts. We just figured that as the original Balls of Steel (made in the UK) started off with someone placing hundreds of turds on the pavement of a heavily-congested London bridge just before rush hour and filming the hee-larious results, the Australian version would, at best, be equally bad.
So why even bother to cover it all? It’s on Foxtel, lots of people can’t watch it. Well, because we think it’s time somebody came out and said it: pranks aren’t funny. Whether it’s Matt Tilley making his infamous “Gotcha Calls” (these can now be heard on at least two Austereo stations around the country – another reason not to tune in!), Julian Morrow as the Citizen’s Infringement Officer handing out tickets to parents who’ve given their children “bogan names”, or Chris Lilley’s new character Gran telling a teenage inmate in her care that he’s about to be released and should pack his things and, oh wait, just as he’s saying goodbye to his cell mates…”Gotcha!”…well, there’s a reason why in real life this sort of thing would have you up in front of a judge. These pranks may be many things, but funny isn’t anywhere near the top of the list.
What pranks actually are is a barely acceptable form of bullying or harassment, where we the audience are supposed to cack ourselves sideways as an unwitting victim gets put through some entirely unnecessary pain or embarrassment that doesn’t turn out to be that funny anyway. In many ways it’s the equivalent of bogan or ranga jokes, a cheap, easy style of humour that has the moral equivalence of racist jokes, but without the potential to get Twitter in a tiz.
There should be more to comedy than such patronising button-pressing, and audiences shouldn’t get to a point about a quarter of the way through the first episode where they realise they could make something equally good on their mobile phones – or find something better on YouTube. Comedy on TV should be a quality product, which should knock you sideways with surprise, and provide you with one serious belly laugh after another. If broadcast TV wants to have a profitable future making comedy that provokes audiences to do little more than emit the odd shallow “ha” as some dickhead chucks chips on sunbathers isn’t the way to go.
Indeed, there’s a reason why there are hardly any comedians in the cast of Balls of Steel Australia: this isn’t a real comedy. A real comedy would at least try for a bit of light and shade, not broadcast roughly the same thing for half a hour. Even Craig Reucassel and chums worked that one out, sandwiching their lame pranks between studio segments and spoof ads. They also tried to give their pranks some sort of point, a notion which has so far not been explored by Balls of Steel Australia. And that’s probably just as well.
Oh, and while we’re here, is it just us or like on The Chaser’s War on Everything did some of the pranks on Balls of Steel Australia look just a little bit staged? There have been rumours. And if they’re true they only make the show even more pointless, because if the goal of a prank is to make the victim react in an over-the-top manner, then an actor with no emotional stake in the scenario (apart from their pay cheque) is probably not going to get that hilariously upset. Which would explain why most of the victims just look at the likes of The Annoying Devil and Nude Girl as if someone’s presented them with a turd on a platter. Oh wait, they just have. Isn’t it hilarious?
Dad ‘n Dave
Half way through an Age article penned decrying the latest wave of internet dumbassedry, Melbourne comedy stalwart Dave O’Neil talks of breaking his leg trying to jump Ian “Dicko” Dickson on a BMX bike for his Vega radio show. “It was entertainment,” he writes, “But was it really?” Gee Dave, if you weren’t sure why’d you use the footage in your latest Comedy Festival Show?
The thrust of Dave’s article is… well, let’s let him say it:
Entertainment used to be carefully thought-out, constructed pieces. These days anyone can do it – lie horizontally on a rubbish bin, get the photo on your phone and you’re away.
Clearly Dave isn’t talking about his own career here, unless we missed the bit where standing around saying “Sausages!” or reviewing movies with Leigh Paatsch on The Mick Molloy Show or writing utterly shithouse films like Takeaway and You & Your Stupid Mate were “carefully thought-out, constructed pieces”. Actually, considering that Australia’s Funniest Home Videos has been going strong for well over 20 years based entirely on footage roughly equivalent to “lying horizontally on a rubbish bin”, what the hell is he talking about?
Dave’s been around the traps for a long time now, and stories about guys only realising they’re too old for this shit when they fail badly at something that used to come easily are hardly rare, or surprising, or new. In this case it seems that, having realised he can’t do dumb shit for laffs anymore, Dave feels no-one else should either:
Maybe after this planking tragedy, it’s time for all of us to make a pact to stop doing stupid things for the internet.
In contrast to doing stupid things for the radio? Is what he’s actually saying here just another variation of “c’mon guys, stop giving this shit away for free, I need to get paid over here?” In which case, get to the back of the queue behind everyone else in the media.
Anyway, to take his request fair more seriously then it deserves… uh, no. As much as planking itself is about as funny as sawing off your own foot – after all, 99.9% of all “viral” videos are so-called because just like real viruses all they do is give you the shits – they are still part of a long tradition of piss-farting about that, when done by people with a clue about what’s funny, can deliver honestly funny comedy.
The problem with Dave O’Neil is that he’s built a career around doing dumb shit, and now he’s just a little bit too old for it. Not “dumb shit” as in internet pranks and crazy stunts, mind you – we’re talking “dumb shit’ as in making a whole lot of jokes about eating too much and being kinda chunky. When you’re a young(ish) comedian, dumb shit works for you because hey, it’s funny. When you start getting on a bit, it starts getting sad. Put another way, a Dave O’Neil gig used to leave you laughing at how he reckons he’s sponsored by Pizza Hut; now we’re just worried that he’s developing Type 2 Diabetes.
The problem with Dave O’Neil’s article is that while he’s bang-on about the stupidity and boring nature of “planking”, he’s banging on about it like it’s a universal issue and not just Dumb Shit Young People Do. This isn’t “maybe old people shouldn’t be doing sketch comedy” time – it’s more “hey, young folk piss-farting around is funny, but after a while you’ve got to take it up a notch or you’ll just look sad.” Cue footage of Sam Newman planking.
There are loads of old farts out there still getting laughs – they just shape their material to suit their changing status. In Dave’s case, the clock is clearly ticking: writing columns that might as well be headed “Stay Off My Lawn” isn’t a great start.