Australian Tumbleweeds
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.
Woah Woah Woah, The Tide Is Turning
From Rowan Dean, on the ABC website The Drum:
…the new Chis Lilley show (zzz zzz zzz go the teeth of my saw slicing into the flesh of the branch) called Angry Boys (zzz zzzzz zzzz – I can feel the bough starting to give way under my weight already) which screened for the second time last night on the ABC (zzzzz zzzzz oh shit – here I go!)… well, sorry folks, but it simply isn’t funny.
SNAP! There! I’ve said it. Somebody had to. I know it’s not the politically correct thing to do. And I know there’s a legion of crazed fans just waiting with baseball bats raised high over their heads to club me to a pulp for even daring to suggest it, but I can’t help myself. Angry Boys just isn’t funny. Not even remotely.
Sure, the “somebody had to” is kind of insulting, considering we’ve been saying it for months – welcome aboard the bandwagon Rowan, might still be some room up the back – and come to think of it, the assumption that finding Angry Boys not funny is somehow swimming against the tide is more than a little out of date these days. Take Darren Devlyn, writing in The Herald-Sun over a week ago:
The first episode of Angry Boys had flashes of artistic brilliance, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that there weren’t more laughs.
Maybe as the series progresses it will gain comedic momentum and a sense of energy that wasn’t quite there in the opener. But maybe not.
Or Karl Quinn, writing for Fairfax online:
Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys is bold, aggressive, unafraid to trample on some very shaky ground. But on the basis of last night’s opening episode, it’s hard to conclude that it’s especially funny. Yet.
Quinn continues:
Clearly, Lilley is unafraid to stomp all over notions of what is acceptable in comedy, and to a large degree that is to be applauded. But breaking taboos, if that is what they are (or have become; let’s not forget that in many respects Benny Hill and Dick Emery were here decades before, albeit to different ends), is not much of an ambition in itself. It needs to go somewhere, to have some point, or at least to be really bloody funny, if it’s to count as great comedy.
It’s way too soon to judge if that’s what Angry Boys is, or if it is just a tired reiteration of the now-familiar tropes of Lilley’s ouvre.
[A swearing racist granny and some surly bogans are “stomp[ing] all over notions of what is acceptable in comedy”? Please. Acceptable on the set of Hey Dad..! perhaps.]
Anyway, even the video review on this Fairfax page is a wary one, and we all know how much Fairfax loves Chris Lilley – as the article itself shows:
Our comic controversies (for instance, the infamous Hey Hey It’s Saturday! blackface moment) usually aren’t edgy in the manner of Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks. They don’t send a confronting social message. They aren’t speaking truth to power. To the extent mainstream Australian comedy enters genuine controversy, it tends to do so by accident and in ignorance. It’s not about breathing comic fire at the socially privileged on behalf of the alienated.
Does Chris Lilley take us there? Certainly not in an American manner. He’s no angry Aboriginal comic or explicit champion of any underclass. But perhaps he’s doing something similar in an understated way. His work is close to the edge, not because it presents us with characters that swear a lot, or indulge in deeply ingrained, casual racism and homophobia, but because it’s not immediately clear what attitude towards them he wishes to evoke in us.
This is about as close to a willful misreading of Lilley’s work as you can get. Lilley’s attitude towards his characters is plain to see from the moment they appear on screen: he loves them, and he wants you to love them too – warts and all. It’s not a matter of creating complex comedy characters, because that’s not what he’s doing: seriously, a swearing granny? A “street” rapper from a pampered background? A pair of boring, frustrated bogans? Lilley deals in stereotypes: the “conflict” is that while he loves them and wants us to warm to them, audiences are used to laughing at characters in a comedy. Because, you know, it’s a comedy.
If Lilley wanted to leave us to make up our own minds about his characters, would Gran have given her little speech about an inmate who hanged himself, then followed it up with her boring-as-hell-but-meant-to-be-touching care of the “dog-wanker” in episode two? Would Daniel & Nathan’s hurt and frustration at their dead-end situation be so screamingly obvious?
Sure, S.mouse currently seems like a jerk, but the pattern’s been set with Gran and the twins: the first time we meet a new character they seem like a dick, then as we get to know them their troubled, sympathetic side emerges. It’s a sensible way to pace a series like this – the new character gets laughs while the more established ones are revealed to be a lot less funny – but with only five characters and twelve episodes, that’s a whole lot of unfunny coming up ahead.
But enough critical analysis from us. For every reviewer that gives it the thumbs down for being unfunny, there’s someone who seems to think being unfunny is a plus when it comes to comedy. Take this review in The Australian:
It was brilliant, but to my mind, not because it was hilarious. There were funny lines. But Angry Boys was also terribly sad.
Then there’s this gem from the BBC, wording up the world on what they can expect:
Chris Lilley is so good because he is so deadly accurate. And like most really good satire, it operates just beyond the borders of most viewers’ comfort zone. It dares you to laugh, and it becomes almost a guilty pleasure to do so.
“Dares you to laugh”? If true – and it’s not – then it’s a dare that viewers are increasingly failing to take up. Considering how the coverage of Angry Boys has gone from “Lilley is a comedy genius” to “It’s not all that funny, is it?” in the space of a few weeks, it’ll be interesting to see how long before “boot this tedious drivel to a midnight timeslot” comes around.
That might seem a little harsh (and highly unlikely, even to us) but don’t forget, there’s two and a half months more of this to go…
[Insert Topical Sporting Reference Here]
About five seconds into Behind the Lines – the latest in a never-ending procession of sports-themed quiz shows – it suddenly becomes clear why Peter Helliar’s The Trophy Room – the second-to-latest in a never-ending procession of sports-themed quiz shows – tanked: the set! With typical ABC logic, The Trophy Room‘s set was designed to look like a cosy sports clubhouse, only out in the real world “sports clubhouse” is the kind of place even sports fans run from: sports fans want bright lights, big spaces, a clear path to the bar and a pokie machine around the corner. And if there’s one thing you can say about Australian television with a straight face, it’s that Channel Nine knows sports fans.
[Not entertainment, mind you, or quiz shows or women or decent drama or niche programming or quality news or… well, you get the picture. But sports fans? Oooh yeah.]
So as much as it’d be nice to be able to lump Nine’s latest half-arsed stab at the cheap panel show format with previous winnaz like The Bounce, The White Room and The Trophy Room – and after an amazingly shoddy opening credit sequence featuring a “go team go!” chant unheard of on any sporting ground in the land, our hands were rubbing together with glee at the prospect of yet another trademark slag-off – we just can’t do it. Slick professionalism is pretty much all Nine has left on its shelf these days and while it’s easy – and important – to sneer at it when it comes to comedy, with this kind of show knowing what you’re doing is a bit of a plus.
Oh, what kind of show is it? Spick & Specks with Sport. Two teams (two comedians and a sportsperson each), a host, quiz questions, mild piss-farting about, dragged out over an hour which is too long but the half-hour commercial alternative would only clock in at around 20 minutes which isn’t enough. And that pretty much sums up the show as a whole: it’s easy to think of ways it could be a whole lot better, but there are a lot of examples of this kind of thing that are a whole lot worse.
To be completely honest, the first episode of Behind the Lines was always going to get the thumbs up from the moment they introduced Peter Berner, cut to a wide shot of the other team (the one with Mick Molloy and Ed Kavalee) clapping him – only while Mick and the female sportsperson were clapping away, Ed was just sitting there with a clear look of “what the fuck is this?” on his face. Having followed Berner’s career since BackBerner, we know how he feels.
The panel format’s many, many limitations are there to create uniformity of product – the show will never stink but it’ll never be great, as seven billion episodes of Spicks & Specks have proven. But as panel shows go, this gets a surprising amount right. Well, it gives everyone enough room to dick about, which is pretty much the only thing this kind of show can get right. There’s the usual dodgy gags when answering questions, but a lot of the time people just chime in with gags – crap dad gags, yes, but at least they’re trying. Which isn’t something anyone’s been able to say about GNW in living memory.
Yes, it’s about sport. Yes, it’s hosted by Eddie McGuire. Yes, it’s a product of that blokey Nine culture that actually said out loud “Hey, why not give Hey Hey It’s Saturday another go?” But if we have to have shoddy sports panel quiz shows – and considering how many of the damn things have been served up in recent memory, it seems that decision’s already been made in the affirmative – than we could do a lot worse than Behind the Lines. And if you wait a few weeks, we probably will.
[though if anyone can explain the somewhat sudden edit at the end of the Jesse Martin segment just after Ed says “there is no way he would have resisted-“, that’d be great. The whole end of the segment – including whether Martin was telling the truth or not – seems to have vanished, presumably because if it was true Martin’s ’round-the-world record would be in doubt. Which seems like the kind of thing that should have had some media coverage really… though that would’ve required people to actually tune in.]
The Emperor is Seriously Underdressed Over Here
The reviews are in, and the verdict is clear: Chris Lilley ain’t funny. But don’t take our word for it:
“…as we delve further and further into the life of Gran and her distant grandchildren, the hick yobs Daniel and Nathan Sims from We Can Be Heroes who also take up much of tonight’s episode, two things happen: the laugh-out-loud moments become fewer and farther between and the parallel stories of unfulfilled, short-changed lives begin to entwine”
[Paul Kalina, The Age Green Guide, Thursday May 5th]
“Summer Heights High is remembered chiefly for Ja’ime’s manifold outrages, but it was the heartbreaking fate of Jonah that raised it from comedy to something so much more. Those same elements are playing out here”
[Melinda Huston, The Sunday Age M Magazine, May 8th]
“Though his comedic talents loom large, he also has the capacity to weave seamlessly into his work plot lines that are confrontational or heart-wrenching”
[Darren Devlyn, Herald-Sun Switched On supplement, May 4th]
“Ricky Gervais does The Castle“, which means shithouse.
[A reviewer known to Team Tumbleweeds, quoted over the weekend]
“So what,” you might ask – presumably because you’d much rather talk about what the hell Huston means about raising something to be “so much more” than comedy (what, there’s an actual ranking scale of quality? A shithouse drama still means “so much more” than an excellent comedy?) – haven’t you ever heard of “you’ll laugh, you’ll cry”? And yeah, good point. You’re still wrong though.
Australian television critics are not subtle creatures. Their reviews, especially of locally-made shows, aren’t nuanced. If a show is not described along the lines of “hands down the most impressive debut /return of the year”, it’s almost certainly fatally flawed. So the trick is to focus on the negatives; if they rate the tiniest mention in the review, they’re certain to be glaring in the actual show.
So it’s good to see that our initial opinion of Angry Boys – that it’s Lilley basically disappearing even further up his own arse, indulging his penchant for trite drama and heavy-handed character moments over, you know, being funny – has largely been confirmed by the first wave of reviews. Of course, they haven’t actually dared to say it’s no damn good. But when you’re describing a comedy series and you actually say “laugh-out-loud moments become fewer and farther between”, what other conclusion could you draw?
Chris Lilley seems to have managed to create a wondrous new category for his work: unfunny comedy. Not for him the burden of having to make the audience laugh on anything like a regular basis; in fact, his inability / lack of interest in doing so is magically now a plus. Instead of being asked “where’s the jokes” by critics, he gets the thumbs up for creating a kak-handed soap opera featuring the kind of “drama” that’d be laughed off Neighbours, all the praise seemingly solely because he’s the one playing all the roles. So there are no 60 year old female actors in the country? No teenage male actors? No-one could play these characters as well as Lilley does?
Of course they could. Lilley is an extremely talented performer, but if he wants to make straight drama – and after the end of the very first episode Angry Boys is already going harder for the tears than all but the sappiest moments of Summer Heights High – maybe he should make room for some other cast members occasionally. After all, on the one hand he wants us to take his characters completely seriously, while on the other… well, one’s him in a dress bunging on an accent.
The problem with all the reviews praising Lilley’s serious character work is that he doesn’t bring anything at all to the table by playing all the characters himself. There’s never even the most obvious “we’re all the same under the skin” kind of justification for why he is the only person who can play these now largely serious characters. Did anyone watch, say, the recent Hawke telemovie thinking “this’d be much better if the same actor played all the lead roles”?
These reviews are simply pointing out what’s obvious: Lilley, and Angry Boys as a whole, simply isn’t that funny. Just because it’s a path he’s consciously chosen to go down doesn’t mean he’s automatically a success for doing so. The ABC must have their fingers crossed very tightly indeed hoping that audiences will stay interested in an unfunny comedy for three whole months…
Meanwhile, here at Tumbleweed central we’re more interested in how Lilley’s producer Laura Waters told the Green Guide with a straight face that “I marvel at anybody sitting down by themselves and writing a 12-part series” when a): all the initial publicity said Angry Boys was 10 parts and b): Lilley’s writing largely consists of him improv’ing scene after scene in front of the cameras. After all, it wasn’t exactly hard to spot the two episodes of 6-expanded-to-8-part-series Summer Heights High patched together from scenes the improv-crazy Lilley simply couldn’t bear to lose…
Australian Television’s Nightmare of Nights
Ahh, the Logies; remember when they used to get comedians to host? Probably not – and if you do, chances are what you actually remember is the stock-standard chorus of “wasn’t that shit” the following day. Not because the comedians were actually all that shit – even the much maligned Wendy Harmer Experiment would probably shimmer like gold compared to the more recent attempts to concentrate boredom into a beam that could tunnel through Eddie McGuire’s ego – but because no-one commentating on the Logies seems to understand exactly what kind of show it is.
Let’s spell it out: The Logies is an AWARDS NIGHT. It’s not a comedy gala, it’s not a fashion show, it’s not a chance to see the celebrities at play or whatever collection of words they use to caption their photo coverage in the Herald-Sun the following day. It’s a bunch of people sitting around waiting to see if they’ve won something. That’s not to say it can’t be fun and exciting in its own way, but because of the whole “entertainment industry” angle, people seem to think the show itself should be more entertaining than every other example of the form. Two words: Brownlow Night.
This isn’t an excuse for the amazingly shithouse standard of “comedy” the Logies have been serving up in recent years. Even Micallef’s fine work last year with his acceptance speech shone to some extent because everyone knew the rest of the show was going to be bog-standard bland. But what else do you expect? When comedians were given the job they were roundly condemned even before the end credits rolled (with the exception of Andrew Denton, who was praised largely for putting on the kind of smarmy industry-baiting show that Logies organizers would be guaranteed not to want to repeat); no wonder that reportedly none of our professional funny buggers wants to go near the gig these days.
So until we can create some kind of virtual host whose dialogue is compromised entirely of real-time Logies tweets, everyone knows Bert Newton is always going to be the dream Logies host because he can tell a joke and… um, that’s pretty much it (so, in all seriousness, why not get Daryl Somers?). But it’s not like Australian television doesn’t have a whole bunch of other professional hosts out there – Adam Hills, Rove McManus, Andrew O’Keefe, even if two out of the three have already had an ill-fated stab at it [from wikipedia]:
In 2004, O’Keefe co-hosted the historic tri-network tsunami appeal Reach Out with fellow presenters Eddie McGuire and Rove McManus, which raised over $20 million for Tsunami Relief Efforts around Asia. The event was such a success that the three teamed up the following year to host another disaster, The TV Week Logies.
Again with the snark. Of course, it’s not like the people putting together the Logies want it to be an awesome night, because an awesome night would involve everyone getting drunk and acting up while the host pointed out how shallow, vapid and venal the television industry really is.
All we’re saying is, if we’re ever going to see a successful Logies night in our lives, then the Logies has to work out what it wants to achieve. If it’s all about the awards and celebrating what passes for talent on Australian screens, then a stripped back, no muss or fuss night focusing on the tension of who’s going to win what – followed by the stars making painfully earnest and dull speeches thanking people no-one’s heard of – is the way to go.
If, on the other hand, it’s meant to be something regular people will want to watch, then get everyone drunk, bung in a bunch of bizarre musical numbers and incomprehensible skits and get Rodney Rude to host. Oh and tell the press to go to Hell when they report on “yet another dismal Logies night”; how is that any different from what Australian television serves up every other night of the year?
I Did But See Hilarity Passing By…
So it looks like Colin Vickery’s dream has finally come true: The Chaser won’t be providing commentary for the upcoming royal wedding after all:
Just two days before Prince William and Kate Middleton are due to tie the knot, ABC TV has been forced to cancel The Chaser’s one-off live coverage of the event due to what it says are restrictions imposed by the royal family.
The Chaser’s Royal Wedding Commentary was due to air on ABC2 from 7:00pm AEST on Friday, offering viewers a satirical take on the royal wedding.
But now the live special – promised to be “uninformed and unconstitutional” – has been reluctantly pulled due to restrictions imposed over the Easter break.
Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Censorship! Well, apart from the fact that it’s a wedding being held inside a church where the royals control the rights to the footage, which means they can slap whatever restrictions they like on its use. It’s not preventing you or I from making fun of the royals or the wedding all we want – we just can’t use their own wedding footage to do it with. Much like you can’t call up Channel Ten and say “hey, me and my mates have come up with some hilarious gags about how shithouse The 7pm Project is – how’s about we come in and do a commentary over Friday’s episode?” Well, actually you can, but why bother?
While The Chaser’s slowly pulled themselves back from the brink quality-wise after the stunt-heavy depths of series two of The Chaser’s War on Everything – to a point post-Blow Parade where any new project of theirs (or at least, a project where they’re not just hosting or being panelists) is once again well worth a look – talking over footage of a wedding is hardly primo comedy material. You could probably come up with “satire” at least 80% as funny yourself at home: make fun of the guests’ clothes, make up wacky “facts” about the church, pretend that Prince Phillip just said something racist, throw in some swipes at the bloated excesses of an un-eletected elite, “how many starving kids could that lady’s hat have fed – and that’s just from the fruit on it!”, and so on.
In fact, why would you bother with The Chaser’s coverage even if it was going ahead? It’s not like you could watch it with mates – not unless you wanted to spend the entire night going “shhh!” every time someone physically present wanted to crack a joke. If you’re watching the wedding with friends (realistically, the only way to watch it), you’re going to want to say your own snarky stuff. If you’re watching it because you’re honestly interested, why would you want some smarmy types making fun of it? And if you’re watching it alone… well, why not watch some actual comedy instead? If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve got a DVD or two lying around you could watch that’d be a lot funnier than anything some guys making fun of a massively stage-managed and ploddingly paced wedding could come up with.
Much as the loss of any local comedy from our screens is an authentic loss, this is one we’re finding it hard to get worked up about. It’s not like The Chaser have a shortage of outlets for any quality scripted material they’ve already written; no doubt any really memorable jokes will turn up sooner or later. At this stage there’s even a chance they might do a radio commentary and ask people to turn the sound down on their TVs. Which would be a real shame: having an actual, shouting-in-the-streets controversy about them not being allowed on television is the funniest thing The Chaser’s done in years.
It Has Begun
When it comes to being first with the news, it’s hard to top News Limited. Especially when they’re reporting on controversies that haven’t even happened yet:
CHRIS Lilley is set to spark controversy in his new comedy show Angry Boys, with characters defecating on cars and racist slurs rife.
But the star makes no apologies for the provocative content in the mockumentary series.
Lilley, who enjoyed a ratings smash with Summer Heights High, is most likely to face a racism backlash from his new show.
See that right there? “Most likely to”. They can’t even manage to cough out a “will most definitely face a racism backlash”. Not only are they just flat-out guessing that Chris Lilley’s latest show will stir up anger – by which they mean “we’ll be running stories about how racist it is a little closer to the broadcast date” – they’re not even confident that their guess is correct.
Surely this kind of wild accusation requires some kind of back-up – and don’t worry, next up is a bunch of out-of-context quotes designed to create the outraged world of tomorrow today:
Lilley plays six characters, and it is granny Ruth Sims, a worker at a juvenile justice centre, who dishes the dirt in the early episodes.
“Get your lazy Abo a… off the couch,” she says to one young detainee.
During a soccer match, she shouts: “Kick it negro … Come on Coco Pops, I thought wogs were meant to be good at soccer.”
The other characters are twins Daniel and Nathan Sims, who featured in Lilley’s series We Can Be Heroes, black rapper S.Mouse, surfer dude Blake Oakfield and hard-nosed Japanese mum Jen Okazaki – mother of a “gay” skateboarding champion.
[you might be wondering why S.Mouse won’t be causing outrage, considering that for that character Lilley gets around in make-up designed to turn him into an African-American. But remember, the Murdoch press had no problem whatsoever with the blackface sketch on Hey Hey It’s Saturday, thanks to reader’s polls saying they were a-ok with blackface acts even before chief columnist Andrew Bolt announced Somers et al were guilty of nothing more than stupidity. So while Lilley’s racist comments will fan the flames of hate, his suddenly dark-skinned face will breeze by with a smile and a wave.]
Time for a confession: we’ve seen the first few episodes of Angry Boys (of course we have – we wouldn’t have been taking swipes at it for the last week or so if we hadn’t seen enough of it to pass some kind of judgement), and while everything the Herald Sun‘s Colin Vickery* and Darren Devlyn mention here is factually correct, even for a Chris Lilley effort there’s more than enough context around these “jokes” to make it clear that we’re supposed to be laughing at the fact anyone would say such things.
But that’s not what’s so annoying about this thick slice of premium tripe: every single time Chris Lilley sticks his head up we get a run of news reports and reviews warning us that his latest effort will ignite a firestorm of outrage and controversy across the length and breadth of the land. To be fair, it’s not just Lilley that threatens the very stability of this country every time he frocks up. As we pointed out here here and here, outrage is increasingly the publicity option of choice when it comes to promoting comedy on / from the ABC and it’s a game the Murdoch press is more than happy to play along with.
What makes this latest example even more outrageous is that when it comes to Chris Lilley this supposed wave of outrage NEVER ACTUALLY ARRIVES. Remember this report from the Fairfax press back in 2007?
AWARD-WINNING comedian Chris Lilley’s much anticipated new series is under fire for its controversial jokes and storylines, weeks before it is due to air on the ABC.
Summer Heights High, set in an Australian public high school, features jokes about a teenage ecstasy death, children with Down syndrome, child sex abuse and rape, causing some campaigners to call for it to be banned.
And yet, when it arrived, what happened? Nothing. Well, nothing but a lot of reviews going on about “watch out, this week’s episode is going to make the ABC switchboard explode!!!” Take this Summer Heights High review from The Herald-Sun‘s Cameron Adams:
Summer Heights High
Plenty more reasons for the haters to get angry tonight when Year 11 girl Ja’ime starts dating a year 7 student. More ammunition: a student overdoses on ecstasy (letter writers have your pens ready) and overly dramatic drama teacher Mr G somehow manages to make the death all about himself. And worse. And if you thought you’d never hear Nikki Webster’s Strawberry Kisses, think again.
Watch for: the ultimate crime against Ja’ime – a boy makes her “feel less hot”
And yet, apart from us, were there any actual “haters” of Summer Heights High, let alone a mass wave of protests? Yes, there was a kerfuffle around the real-life teen who died in a similar way to the girl Mr G’s musical was about, but her parents a): had an actual reason to be annoyed, considering the character had the same name as their dead daughter, b): were just the victims of a sad co-incidence, as the episode had been filmed weeks before their daughter’s death, and c): were people who reportedly had to physically walk out of the room when something distressing appeared on their TV instead of simply turning it off.
What these reviews and reports claim is always just over the horizon is the kind of mass public outrage that greeted The Chaser’s “Make A Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch – an outrage, it’s not too far off-beam to suggest, that was at least in part whipped up by the same Murdoch press that keep trying to tell us over and over that everything Chris Lilley does is going to shake this country down to its can’t-you-take-a- blackface-joke-mate-what-are-you-a-poof? foundations. The only thing remotely similar to have happened since was the outrage over the Hey Hey blackface skit, and with the Murdoch press hosing things down instead of stirring them up the only result there was that Hey Hey came back for a further 20 episodes. Gee, thanks.
As far as Chris Lilley’s work is concerned, there have been no – none, nada, zero, zip – serious controversies. Not a one. And as as even the most superficial of glances reveals Lilley’s latest effort to be the very dictionary definition of “more of the same”, what seriously makes them think it’ll be different this time? What possible justification can they have for re-running a story that was comprehensively proven false the last time they tried it? Gee, you might start to think the “news” was nothing but the same old ideologically motivated stories repeated over and over again, without even the slightest regard as to whether they actually happened or not…
*who, elsewhere in the Herald-Sun, writes an amazing editorial complaining about the ABC getting The Chaser to provide commentary for the royal wedding. “Would you like your wedding to be the target of bitchy people taking the piss?” he says, missing roughly two dozen points in one go. Other choice lines include “It is all so wrong,” “Marriage is supposed to be a solemn occasion where two people declare their love for one another… what is so damn funny about that,” and “The irony is many of the comedians who think it is fine to make money by slagging off the royal wedding are, themselves, married”. Much like the way many of those comedians who make fun of people are, themselves, people?
Yeah, I’ll Be Your Pimp
It’s difficult to know which is more unsettling: that the ABC is currently running ads in prime time asking people to vote for Adam Hills in the Gold Logie race, or that the ad claims that “a vote for Adam is a vote for fantastic comedy and entertainment on the ABC”.
[yes, there are days when the blog posts seem to just write themselves]
Really? Adam Hills means “fantastic comedy and entertainment on the ABC”? If you squint really hard then maybe “entertainment” isn’t all that far off – he does host a couple of the ABC’s more competent broad-based light entertainment efforts – but “fantastic comedy”? From Adam Hills? The guy who occasionally cracks wise while hosting game shows and talk shows? Okay, there’s no doubt that people often laugh at things he says, but…
Well, there’s really no reason why someone hosting a game show can’t create “fantastic comedy”. It’s just that Adam Hills isn’t the example we’d hold up to the world. He seems nice, he can sell a joke, he’s generous when it comes to laughing at the gags of others, but “fantastic comedy”? No. He’s the ABC’s version of Rove McManus (and no, that’s not an insult), a decent host who knows enough to get out of the way and let others shine when need be.
More importantly, if a vote for Adam is a vote for fantastic comedy, what if everyone votes for the woman off The Circle instead? If Hills doesn’t win, will the ABC go “well, clearly the public has no interest in fantastic comedy, time to shut up shop” – right before some junior runs in waving a DVD of Angry Boys saying “hang on – they only wanted us to stop showing fantastic comedy, right?”
The real issue here, of course, is whether the ABC should be out there wasting airtime begging for votes in a shoddy popularity contest in the first place. Realistically though, why not? They’ve been going flat-out for ratings for years now, to such an extent that in most ways the old divide between the ABC and the commercial networks no longer exists.
The fact that now the audience is split more between people who watch TV and those who don’t rather than the old ABC / commercial divide is good news for comedy in general. If you watch television, you have a pretty good idea that decent Australian comedy at least exists on television – even if the commercial networks screw it up every single change they get. But it also means that the ABC now runs ads pleading for viewers to vote for an award that means basically nothing to anyone outside the television industry, and nothing to anyone inside the industry (who didn’t win one) by the morning after the last party winds up.
So we wish Hills well in his quest for fame and glory. Just so long as he doesn’t actually win: if the ABC started getting the idea that the public’s taste in “fantastic comedy” begins and ends with a genial host firing off questions, well… okay, it’d be pretty much business as usual. Whatever happened to that Peter Helliar sports show, anyway?