Australian Tumbleweeds
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?
Reasons to listen to the podcast of Triple M Melbourne’s The Hot Breakfast
If you saw the title of this post and expected it to consist of the following seven words – “There are none, sorry to trouble you” – then you’re wrong. Well, sorta wrong. Wednesday’s Hot Breakfast podcast contained one tiny little titbit guaranteed to interest the comedy nerd of a certain generation: Mick Molloy’s account of those infamous sketches from The Late Show where he gate-crashed TV shows in his Bart Simpson underpants. And because we know very well that there’s no good reason to listen to The Hot Breakfast on a daily basis, we’re going to share it with you now.
Download the episode here and fast forward three and a half minutes. There’s not a lot of detail, but the key fact is that the first underpants sketch, in which Mick Molloy jumped onto the set of Ernie & Denise during a live show from Myer, was born of desperation. Molloy and Tony Martin had turned up at Myer to film a door-buster sale sketch but had failed to get the footage. Luckily they spotted that Ernie & Denise were filming upstairs and they quickly came up with the underpants prank.
The result wasn’t exactly clever comedy, but as anyone who saw it at the time remembers it became an instant phenomenon. The following week, by popular demand, Mick gate-crashed Good Morning Australia, surprising Bert Newton. Then some shonky ABC special effects made it look like he’d also disrupted a discussion on media ownership on Lateline. But despite the popularity of these pranks this is where it ended. The following week’s Late Show began with a sketch in which Mick and Tone officially retired the Bart Simpson underpants, placing them under glass which was only to be broken in an emergency.
Viewing these sketches in today’s media climate, where simple, repeatable comic ideas like this are what comedians actively set out to create, Molloy and Martin’s decision to stop pulling the underpants prank after just a couple of weeks looks like a bad idea. But back in the 90’s this sort of restraint and good judgement were commonplace. Why would you do the same thing over and over, running an initially popular idea into the ground, when you can get out on a high and do something else?
It’s the kind of attitude we wish the makers of comparable recentish sketch shows like The Chaser’s War on Everything had. Or anyone trying to repeat their success. People remember The Late Show fondly because as a viewer you never knew what would happen next. Today’s TV comedy is usually fairly predictable, with characters turning up week in, week out – sometimes year in, year out – staying far beyond their welcome (we’re looking at you again, Chris Lilley). Repetition may be cheap, it may be easy, and your producer may claim it’s a good way to “build a brand” or some equally soul-destroying media wank, but as a viewer it’s a massive disappointment – and that surely can’t be good for TV comedy in the long term.
Things You Learn From Talking to Someone Who’s Seen Boytown Confidential
*It’s pretty darn funny.
*It’s about 90 minutes long, which probably means it would’ve only fitted on a 2-disc DVD release (considering there’s all that sing-along stuff taking up space on the current one-disc release)
*It’s mostly interviews with the (in character) cast. There aren’t a lot of visual gags, it’s not full of snappy editing or anything – Tony seems to have just sat down with each cast member and just improvised a whole lot of stuff.
*Tony Martin does his “rock DJ” voice throughout.
*The version seen by our nameless friend was basically finished – presumably some polishing would have been done, but everything else – opening titles, closing credits, heart-breaking “thank yous” listing amongst others Mick and his brother, and the Molloy Boy copyright tag – is present.
*There’s a lot of music references, some of which are kinda derogatory and might have caused legal problems (or just been bleeped out) if it had been released.
*While the “Meet Marty Boomstein” clip on the released Boytown DVD isn’t part of BTC, all the BTC easter eggs on the DVD do come from the full version of BTC. And if you had to pick five clips from BTC to keep, you’d probably pick the ones used on the released DVD.
*Once again, it’s pretty darn funny.
*What it isn’t, is a stand-alone film. It’s a really, really good DVD extra, but it doesn’t stand alone (nor is it meant to). It does reportedly make you want to watch the original BoyTown again though, and taken together the overall result is supposedly a lot funnier than they are separately. If you were a lunatic with too much time on your hands and a total disregard for copyright, you could probably edit the two together to create the best Australian comedy film of… well, the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. Hey, it’s still BoyTown.
*From everything we’ve heard, it’s not the best work of Tony Martin’s career – it’s not the best work of anyone involved’s career (apart from Gary Eck’s*) – but it’s still petty darn funny.
[for those arriving late, BoyTown Confidential was the DVD extra filmed by Tony Martin that was left off the released edition of Mick Molloy’s film BoyTown, resulting in a rift between the two long-time work partners. Legal action means it is extremely unlikely that it will ever be made available for public viewing in any form, though a lucky few have seen it over the last few years. No, we can’t help you see it.]
*(no, we didn’t like You Can’t Stop the Murders. Or, for that matter, his work on The Nation. His non tv / movie work remains largely outside our view)
Not Much Chop
In a world where comedy on commercial radio largely consists of prank calls and stand-up-esque chat, it’s refreshing to find a show where scripted comedy gets a look in. The Bunch, the top-rating breakfast show on Perth’s Mix 94.5, may not be the first place you’d look for that sort of thing but we can assure you it’s there, albeit not terribly often.
Each week The Bunch includes not only an amusingly snarky film review from Justin Hamilton, but “Ask Ethel”, in which Andrea Powell’s grotesque octogenarian Ethel Chop dispenses advice to the listeners. Both segments are worth downloading the weekly Bunch podcast to hear (although this does require you to fast forward through a lot of breakfast radio slop). The “Ask Ethel” segment in particular is savagely funny, and remarkably crude for the timeslot.
We’ve asked many times on this blog why Australian radio has so little scripted comedy – even basic comedy review or comedy advice segments are rarer hen’s teeth. Yet “Ask Ethel” and Justin Hamilton’s film reviews can’t be prohibitively expensive, and given that The Bunch website includes more than a hundred Ethel Chop segments Ethel, at least, must be quite popular.
So what’s the problem here? Are the purer types of comedy too divisive for some radio audiences? Do they not fit station’s brands in the way that pointless stunts and mindless phone-ins seem to? Has stand-up become so dominant in comedy that there’s no one out there capable of writing a half-decent radio script? Can producers just not be bothered? Or is it just that a show can make more money for a station by filling air time with pranks, stunts and chat that are actually a plug for some product, than they can from a comedian doing a character monologue?
Post your ill-advised theories or insider gossip here, and in the meantime get some Chop down you.
Based On Factual Events
Not everyone loves The Jesters. We understand that. After all, after a decade where most Australian sitcoms were filmed in odour-rama stuck on “shit” coupled with a solid push claiming that ye olde sitcom format – that is, people on cheap sets telling obvious (if funny) jokes – was clearly inferior to a show filmed like a high-end drama series only with everyone saying “outrageous” things that would bore most primary school students, a regular old-fashioned funny sitcom most likely comes as a shock to the system.
But one thing is a bit of a puzzle. Most of the press about The Jesters has taken the path of least resistance: The Jesters (the comedy group) are basically The Chaser, Dave Davies (Mick Molloy’s character) is Andrew Denton, etc. It’s understandable, if not strictly true: Davies is nothing at all like Denton, he just has a similar gig as a mentor to a bunch of up-and-coming comedians, while The Jesters all have distinct comedy characters, which is something The Chaser never managed to do (was there any real difference between the on-screen personas of Chris Taylor and Craig Reucassel?).
The thing is though, with all the “The Jesters are basically The Chaser” chat, no-one seems to have noticed that, on The Jesters the actual Jesters TV show is, well… meant to be shit. Of course it is: it’s a lot easier to make jokes about a crap show than a successful one, as everything from 30 Rock to the first few series of Frontline has shown. But it doesn’t work both ways. Either it’s a copy of the original – in which case maybe the fact that it’s saying that The Chaser’s War on Everything was kind of shoddy is worth pointing out – or it’s a show that uses real-life as a springboard for something new.
[yes, it’s obviously the second. But the reviews, even the positive ones, have focused so heavily on the “it’s just like the Chaser! Mick’s just like Denton!” angle that it’s worth pointing out that, if that’s really the case, then there’s an actual story out there they’re missing. And if it’s not, maybe they could find something else to say.]
This does go a long way towards defusing the other occasional criticism of the show, where it’s supposedly simply and mindlessly re-telling recent real-life comedy controversies (the Chaser’s Make a Realistic Wish Foundation outcry for one) using characters closely modeled on The Chaser. While a straight re-telling of that controversy would certainly be interesting (to us, if no-one else), The Jesters is a comedy. Events and characters are exaggerated for comedic effect. Even if you don’t think the end result is funny, how hard can this be to understand?
One of the bigger problems comedy faces when it comes to criticism is literalism: the inability to understand that some things are meant to be a joke. The Jesters, by having a basic set-up somewhat close (on a superficial level) to an existing group of people and a real-life situation, is an obvious target for this kind of thinking. It’s the flip side of the reality TV boom: some viewers can’t understand why you’d choose to make a show less real, even if by doing so you made it more funny.
As always around these parts, it’d be nice to blame Chris Lilley for all this, seeing as his career has largely been made on the back of audiences saying “I know someone just like that!!!” (only presumably an actual schoolgirl or Asian, making the entire joke nothing more than the fact Lilley is playing dress-ups). But he was just surfing a pre-existing wave, where reality – or barring that, holding up an purposely blunt and un-altered mirror to real life – was seen as television’s ultimate purpose.
It’s been a few years since that wave crested (which is why it’ll be extremely interesting to see how Angry Boys does when it starts), and the return (and relative success) of shows like The Jesters to the Australian comedy firmament is a sign that the wave may be receding or fading or heading off to Noosa or whatever it is that waves do after they break.
Clearly the tide hasn’t completely turned (that’s enough of the water bizzo – ed) – The Jesters is still loosely based on an actual real-life comedy team, after all. But it’s a start, and the fact that this season has increasingly moved towards more sitcom-y plots (such as last week’s dinner party episode) is, as far as we’re concerned here, a step in the right direction. Because comedy should always be free to do whatever it takes to get a laugh – even if that involves telling jokes.