Australian Tumbleweeds
Dog Training
The final episode – you’d have to guess forever – of Wilfred aired earlier this week and hard as it is to admit, I’ll be sad to see it go. Not all that sad mind you, because that first series was pretty much a textbook example of how to put together a comedy that contains no actual comedy. But the second series actually managed to cough out a couple of mildly funny episodes, and in today’s comedy climate that’s got to count as a win.
Unfortunately, the few decent episodes I saw – especially the one where Wilfred (Jason Gann) decided he wanted to be a TV star and got himself into a dog food commercial – came at the end of what was, for Australian television, a very long run. On the one hand, that’s good: at least Wilfred finally found a way to get laughs out of a premise that sounded like it should have been funny but turned out to mostly be fairly grim. Which was clearly the intention (check out the lighting; Kath & Kim it was not): when did we get to a place where trying to make people laugh in a comedy was a bad thing?
On the other hand, it’s not like anyone else in Australian comedy is getting 16 episodes of their own half-hour show to figure out what works. Not to mention the six episodes of that Mark Loves Sharon mockumentary Jason Gann did on Ten, and Zwar’s got Lowdown (written with others, mind you) currently running on Two. That’s at least 50% of the Australian sitcom output over the last two or three years (more if you don’t count pay TV): if you don’t like the Zwar / Gann school of faux-realism, you’re kinda out of luck.
So who picked them to be the future of the Australian sitcom? Well, they did: they worked hard, they made short films (including the original Wilfred) and a feature (the, uh, feature-length Rats & Cats), and slaved away on both series of The Wedge. They’re one of the few members of the current crop of comedians who have focused on performances rather than panel show appearances and / or radio, and guess what? It’s paid off with actual television careers (even if Gann is over in the US “pursuing opportunities”). Just like it used to back in the old days.
Unfortunately, at the moment they’re the only ones who seem to be doing it. Maybe because it’s hard work, maybe because it involves actually working on comedy that isn’t just cracking jokes about today’s news, and maybe because even after all that hard work you still end up making a sitcom on SBS that hardly anyone gets to see. And when they did, what they saw was a grim, enclosed share-house comedy where (in the first series much more than the second), the fairly harmless Adam was constantly picked on and abused by the other two cast members.
Wilfred could have been the best sitcom made in this country in the last 10 years and it almost certainly wouldn’t have been a smash hit. SBS just doesn’t get enough viewers. But the first series was so committed to making no concessions to an audience – especially an audience who might have been expecting a laugh – that the fact there even was a second series took a lot of people by surprise.
It’s probably fair to say that only the committed few would have kept on watching series two long enough to realise that they’d fixed some of the show’s bigger problems: episodes began to have plots that were as over the top as the idea of Wilfred himself, Adam’s character stood up to the other two more… look, it still wasn’t a classic, but it was getting better. Much like The Hollowmen, it wasn’t until the end was in sight that it was possible to wish there was more to come.
So while it’s clearly good news that this particular path to fame hasn’t been totally cut off, it’s a sign that something isn’t quite right that we seem to be seeing more than a few sitcoms that only hit their stride when they’re all but over. Especially considering that they’re coming from people who’ve been making comedy for a long, long time – Zwar and Gann aren’t Working Dog, but they’d made two series of their own, worked on two series of The Wedge, made short films and a movie. That’s equivalent to Shaun Micallef’s career when he was making The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), and Wilfred ain’t no P(r)ogram(me).
Perhaps they’re burnt out on the idea of making people laugh before they get the chance to do it right; perhaps they’re rushing into production on a concept before they’ve figured out exactly what’s supposed to be funny about it. Either way, it’s not a good thing: you can hardly have a TV comedy industry based on telling people “don’t bother watching until the last couple of weeks – that’s when it’ll get really good”. Not that it stopped Seven from trying that approach twice this year with The Bounce and The White Room. And look how well it worked there…
B-B-Bounced
In a result so unsurprising even we predicted it weeks ago, Channel Seven’s Peter Helliar-hosted AFL footy show The Bounce has been axed. Well, not exactly axed – the technical term is “rested” as supposedly it’ll be back during the finals. It’s a move that makes no sense – how is a dud show now going to magically become worth watching during the finals? – and so it makes perfect sense for Seven, who seem to have lost all touch or clue when it comes to live and live-ish programming over the last decade.
There’s plenty of reasons why The Bounce tanked. Having most of the writing staff walk out after the first week is rarely a good sign after all, and while Peter Helliar is supposedly the nice guy of Australian comedy, maybe hiring the funny guy of Australia comedy might be the way to go next time. And pranks? Really? Prank TV hasn’t worked in Australia (unless you’re The Chaser) for a decade or more, and having (for example) a footballer facing off against a fan brandishing mildly creepy collages isn’t going to change that.
Even the idea of a big budget “family friendly” football show seems a little suspect: Nine’s footy show rates in part because it’s one of the few shows on Australian television that’s indisputably male (though its version of masculinity is, er, somewhat limited). Meanwhile, Before the Game has the comedy and family friendly angles sown up: despite what sports fans might think, could it be possible that the footy market on Australian television is saturated?
Whatever the reason, shed no tears for Helliar just yet. His romantic comedy I Love You Too hits cinemas in a week or so, and by all accounts it’s not half bad. Interestingly, those same accounts suggest that, as romantic comedies go, this one’s firmly down the sappy end of the scale, with not a dry eye in the cinema at some stages. So, in an example of the wild speculation we love to indulge in here, here’s a question: could Seven have axed The Bounce when they did because they realised its host had written and starred in a movie that was just too girly for (stereotypical) footy fans?
Seriously, it’s one thing to make your footy show “family friendly”; it’s another entirely to have the host tearing up on the big screen because his mate’s lost his girlfriend or whatever. Australian television is notoriously blokey, after all, and to date Helliar’s on-air persona has been about as blokey as you can get this side of Mick Molloy (who never cried in either of his movies).
Okay, sure, in the real world it’s hardly likely to have been the main reason why The Bounce got axed – at the end its ratings were worse than The White Room was doing in the same timeslot when it was axed, after all – but if The Bounce had lasted a few more weeks (as its’ NRL counterpart on Seven seems likely to), we would have had the unusual event of watching a blokey footy show hosted by a man who wrote and was currently starring in something of a tissue-heavy tear-jerker. That’s not likely to happen now until Sam Newman puts out a romantic comedy of his own, and chances are those tears will be of a very different variety.
The low down
With Wilfred drawing to a close on SBS, and Lowdown just started on the ABC, Adam Zwar seems to be the dominant force in sitcoms right now. But at least with Lowdown he’s produced something which isn’t too bad; this is not like Wilfred – all atmosphere, no laughs – but a more conventional sitcom, with running jokes, over-the-top performances and farcical situations.
None of these features sound like positives, particularly in the current climate, but they are. A sitcom’s main purpose is to make you laugh, it can also satirise, make you cry, or be entertaining in other ways, but making you laugh should be its main purpose. So it’s kinda interesting to see a more traditional, gags-based, approach in Lowdown.
Not that there aren’t plenty of problems with the show. Judging by episode 2, which was slipped my way recently, every episode will be kinda the same: Alex has to interview an arrogant celeb who won’t talk about any of the topics that would make really great copy, meanwhile, he thinks he’s developed a medical condition and needs to see Dr James, and he’s just walked in on his girlfriend rooting someone famous (although, to be fair, there’s a bit of a twist on this in episode 2) – so any hope you had of Lowdown satirising lots of different aspects of tabloid celebrity journalism, in the way that Frontline did with TV current affairs, you can forget.
But then again, are there really that many aspects of tabloid celebrity journalism apart from interviews and appearances heavily stage-managed by publicists, pants-down gotchas, and ex-lovers or prostitutes telling “their story”? And aren’t people pretty cynical about them anyway? In that context, those comparing this to Frontline weren’t really being fair. Lowdown isn’t a satire, it’s not trying to be and the all the marketing stated very clearly that it wasn’t. “Our goal has always been to make this show very sympathetic towards journalists, instead of a cliche. We’re on their side”, Zwar told TV Tonight recently. This is not like tuning in to the The Hollowmen and sitting stony-faced in front of half an hour of observations you’d already observed, or tuning in to the The Jesters expecting that it really would be a “satire about satirists”. Lowdown is a depiction, not a satire. (It’s also not a “celebration”, for which we can also be extremely grateful.)
Also coming in for much criticism was the use of a narrator. As in Arrested Development, the narration in Lowdown acts as both a framing device and a way of driving the plot forward; it’s used fairly sparingly throughout the show, and is an efficient way of cramming in more set-ups and gags. What was the problem with it, again?
Don’t get me wrong, Lowdown isn’t a great sitcom and I’m only prepared to defend it up to a point. In an ideal world, a show at this level of competence would be one of the worst you’d get in an Australian sitcom. It’s a bit limited in terms of the subjects it can cover and for a gags-based show there weren’t enough gags, but on the plus side Lowdown wasn’t one of those shows that was trying desperately to be trendy or edgy or arty, and there were enough laughs and good performances to make this an entertaining and watchable show. So, I’m going to keep watching.
Lilley of the Valley
Because who doesn’t love Chris Lilley news (from The Herald-Sun‘s Confidential section, 21/4/10):
Comedian Chris Lilley has pushed himself to the limit for his highly anticipated TV series Angry Boys, according to director Laura Waters.
Production wraps in Melbourne next week on the mockumentary-style ABC series, which will explore what it means to be a 21st century boy
“I wouldn’t even compare Chris’s shows to each other,” Waters said.
“All I can say is that we’re pushing ourselves – including, and especially Chris – way beyond where we pushed ourselves before”
More than 200 locals will play extras and small roles in the series filmed around Melbourne and on Torquay’s beaches.
It’s a short news item, sure, but there’s a lot packed in there. For one, “I wouldn’t even compare Chris’s shows to each other” – really? Even though two of them feature Ja’ime? And they all, without fail, feature bad taste high school / amateur musicals? Then there’s the hilarity of “200 locals will play extras and small roles” – like there are any other roles in a Chris Lilley production unless you’re named Chris Lilley.
What’s really interesting though, is the news that Lilley has “pushed himself to the limit”. Well, not interesting, just something to keep in mind when we finally get to see Angry Boys sometime in 2011. Because if we get yet another set of cliches and stereotypes and crap “offensive” musical numbers like we have with every Lilley project since Big Bite… well, at least we’ll know what his limits are.
Thinking About Bargains? (or, how the mighty have fallen)
Don’t you hate the way those Book Warehouse places always have two supposedly separate but in reality impossible to divide sections – one where all the books are $5 or less, and one (with all the interesting books) where the prices vary and aren’t really that cheap? Anyway, while lured inside one of their stores by the promise of “new stock!!!” earlier this week, I spotted a couple of items worth checking out.
1): Rebel Wilson’s Bogan Pride book going for $1. That’s cheaper than, well, a lot of very humiliating items. But seeing it at that price is a lot funnier than the show itself, especially as Ms Wilson keeps on going on to whoever will listen in the media about how she’s doing sooo well over in Hollywood. And maybe she is. But in Australia, her book is selling for less than a pack of cough lollies.
2): Chris Lilley’s We Can Be Heroes book. No price marked, but it was firmly in the el cheapo section. This one is actually worth getting ahold of. It’s not a great book, but (I think) Lilley himself put a lot of effort into it and it does seem to have been put together with a lot of care and attention to detail. Which you’d expect from his shows (it’s also not very funny, which you’d also expect from his shows).
They all seemed to be first printings too (making them a few years old), so while Wilson’s book was pulled from shelves in fairly short order, Lilley’s book was kicking around for a few years before the stores gave up on getting any more full price customers and sent them back. The piles of both books were roughly the same size though. Make of that what you will.
A Pus-Filled Boil on the Face of Australian Entertainment
There’s two ways to look at the 20-episode return of Hey Hey it’s Saturday: either it’s a soul-crushing reminder of just how low television can sink in this country, or it’s a great opportunity to kick Daryl Somers in the balls (you could also see it as an easily avoidable hunk of forgettable lowest common denominator entertainment, but where’s the fun in that?). Remember how angry and sulky and petulant Daryl was when Hey Hey was axed eight years ago? Imagine how pissed off he’ll be if, after all these years of striving, his dream comes true – only for shit ratings to snatch it away again? Hope someone remembers to film that meeting.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that axing Hey Hey a second time would kill Daryl: these days Daryl doesn’t seem to know where he ends and the show begins. Take a recent article on Hey Hey in The Age‘s Green Guide: “Everyone’s entitled to their opinions,” sez Daryl, “you can’t hope that everyone is going to like what you do. But I think I’ve been targeted quite a bit. Over the years I’ve copped quite a bit of stuff and sometimes I do wonder what I’ve done to upset these people so much.”
Daryl wonders why people don’t like his show. Golly gosh. Was he watching during the blackface sketch? Doesn’t he look around occasionally and go “gee, why is the only woman on this show a glorified barrel girl?”. Does he ever stop to think that a show that stops to talk about how popular the show currently is on the internet might be, you know, just a little self-indulgent?
But hang on a second – Daryl isn’t actually talking about Hey Hey it’s Saturday there, is he? “I’ve been targeted quite a bit… I’ve copped quite a bit of stuff… I wonder what I’ve done…” Which is a little bit of a puzzle because I’ve been, well, pretty much the opposite of a Daryl Somers fan over the years and yet I really honestly can’t remember Daryl personally copping much of a serve at all over the years.
Certainly when Hey Hey was first axed we were living in a land where old fart TV reviewers were the norm and pretty much all of them felt that, at worst, it was maybe just slightly possible that Hey Hey could have conceivably run its course. Perhaps. In contrast, The Mick Molloy Show – one of the shows Nine trialled as a possible Hey Hey replacement – got headlines like “Get This Rubbish Off the Air”. And once Hey Hey dropped below the horizon Daryl kept a fairly low profile, so there wasn’t really much of a chance for people to take shots at him. Dammit.
Then when he came back to host Dancing with the Stars most reviewers thought he was doing a decent job in a role that suited him, when he left it was seen as a bad thing for the show, blah blah blah – the point is, for him to have a whinge about “being targeted” is pretty funny when you compare the gentle stoking with a damp cloth he’s received to the constant attacks the Australian media’s capable of dishing out. Lara Bingle: being targeted. Kyle Sandilands: being targeted. Daryl Somers: would you like a glass of warm milk before we tuck you into bed, sir?
The important point here is that as far as Daryl’s concerned, he and Hey Hey are one and the same. Take the start of the first instalment for 2010: while it’s traditional on a talk show for the host to monologue when he comes out at the start, Daryl came out, thanked the audience for all their support in bringing the show back – oddly, he didn’t thank the executives at Nine who actually did bring the show back – then started talking about how you could send emails to the show and follow it on twitter. This is how you introduce the show? I don’t recall the old Hey Hey starting off with the GTV Nine mailing address being held up on a card for the first five minutes.
It’s not like he hasn’t seen and addressed at least some of the show’s other glaring flaws. There seems to be a lot more live music in Hey Hey – The Second Coming (though having a couple of guys playing acoustic guitar is the kind of thing you’d expect to see at 11.30pm on ABC2), and the wacky comments from the old-favourites are kept to a mildly tolerable minimum. The “comedy” segments often seem to have a script – or at least, an actual idea – even if they do go on way, way too long (did we need five minutes on Daryl’s new phone app that detects deodorant and turns people into cartoons? Only unless you’re Apple lapping up the product placement). Even having Jet as the opening band has to count as an improvement from John Farnham.
Make no mistake, it’s still a pus-filled boil on the face of Australian entertainment. But at least now if you squint your eyes and smack yourself in the head with a hammer a few dozen times you can almost maybe sorta kinda see how it could, after some massive and radical alterations, be turned into something actual living human beings might want to watch without having to be strapped to some kind of hi-tech bondage stool.
Problem is, every imaginable watchable version of Hey Hey would be Hey Hey with all traces of Daryl removed. Good luck with that. Remember the strange way Daryl keeps talking on and on about how “the fans” and “the public” brought the show back? Out in the real world it’s a combination of Daryl’s persistence and Nine’s desperate need for local content that brought Hey Hey back – take either of them out of the equation and it wouldn’t matter how big the “bring back Hey Hey” Facebook group was, they couldn’t buy enough shovels to dig open that grave. Shit, even Good News Week admitted they were brought back because they were cheap and Ten needed content.
Daryl keeps thanking the public for the same reason that he opened the show with a plea to the public to get in touch with him over the internet: for Daryl Hey Hey is a venue for you, the public, to show him your love. This need to connect with the audience should make him a great entertainer… well, a better entertainer than the thousands of tools out there who seemingly don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. Problem is, Daryl doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks either.
For all his comments about thanking the public for bringing him back, the large segment of the public who were rightfully disturbed and angered by the blackface skit on last year’s specials are dismissed as “targeting” Daryl while he’s left “wonder[ing] what I’ve done to upset these people so much”. When you love him, you’re “the public”; when you don’t, you’re “these people”.
Hey Hey is Daryl Somers, and Hey Hey is only interested in three things: music, Daryl Somers, and toadying lackies (on screen and at home) sucking up to Daryl Somers. And the music’s only there because he’s an ex-muso who likes to think of himself as someone helping up and coming bands – so long as they don’t cross him (remember that late 90’s controversy when Reef played the “wrong” song live and Daryl banned live music from the show forever?). So forget music: Hey Hey is a showcase for Daryl and the worship of Daryl.
Which is fair enough I guess – it’s his show and no-one’s making anyone watch – but it does leave one question: if the band plays music, Livinia is attractive, and Russell Gilbert and John Blackman make the jokes, what exactly are we supposed to be worshipping Daryl for?
The Buddy System
So, as a token gesture towards the idea of live entertainment, I went to see The Shambles – Live in a Ballroom a few nights back. I’ve haven’t bothered with much at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year, just The Shambles plus Micallef and Curry’s Good Evening, but I’d seen The Shambles last year and liked what I saw so I figured it was worth a second shot. Turns out I was right: the show was smart, well-structured, hilarious from start to finish and varied enough to leave you wanting more. Five stars! If I gave out stars, which I don’t.
But after I’d had a good old chuckle at the way Lynchie’s dad looked exactly like Robert Hughes on Hey Dad..! and giggled at seeing Sos in a devil costume riding around in a shopping trolley, my thoughts wandered as usual to television. Specifically, to the way that part of what had made The Shambles so much fun to watch on stage has been totally banished from our screens: the fun of seeing friends piss-farting around together.
I’m not talking about theatresports, or the bastardised version we saw on Thank God You’re Here. The thrill of theatresports is seeing how the performers pick up and expand on what each other is doing second by second; the point of Thank God You’re Here is… well, I’m guessing it’s to make Working Dog rich. I’m talking here about the fun of seeing a bunch of friends playing dress-ups and then laughing at how stupid it all is.
This kind of thing used to be mainstream comedy. Everyone’s sick of hearing how The Late Show was the best comedy show ever made in this country, so let’s just point out that many of the show’s best-loved moments involved friends cracking up or cracking wise in the middle of a crumbling sketch. The Doug Anthony All Stars, the biggest act to come out of The Big Gig: three friends messing about.
And how is it that in four years of Fast Forward – arguably the biggest hit comedy television show of the last thirty years – the only bit anyone remembers is the scene where Steve Vizard and Peter Moon struggle to stop laughing during one of their rug salesmen sketches? That’s right: this kind of comedy is so infectious and fun it can make even Steve Vizard seem like a decent bloke.
Now it’s vanished, gone so completely that it took the fluke event that is me seeing comedy live on stage to remind me that I hadn’t seen it on Australian television in a long, long time. It doesn’t happen on panel shows: hearing someone say something crazy –as if you’d even get that on an Australian panel show – simply isn’t the same as hearing them say something crazy while wearing a bad wig. And it doesn’t happen on comedy games shows like Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation or Good News Week: when a bunch of relative strangers are forced to act silly together, there’s not the trust between them that allows them to really let loose and have fun.
It’s undeniable that a huge part of the Australian television comedy boom in the late 1980s came from the fact that we were seeing friends working together. Even when the jokes were crap or didn’t work, we could see that the people involved were having fun, and watching people genuinely having fun messing about is about as good as entertainment gets (unless the messing about involves home renovations). But for whatever reason – I’m guessing all television producers are heartless robots who have no friends and so hate and fear the very idea of friendship – seeing people who actually like each other on television is almost impossible these days.
We all know the real reasons why we don’t see this kind of comedy any more – producers like to put together their own comedy teams (even back in the 1980s, when Vizard gutted the D-Generation to cast Fast Forward), sketch comedy is dead (thanks Double Take), as is live television (outside footy shows, which sometimes still manage to capture a little of this kind of thing, only involving AFL haircuts) and the old-fashioned idea that sometimes unpolished television is better value than something that’s had the life scrubbed out of it.
[At this point someone’s certain to mention Hey Hey It’s Saturday. Remember how I used the word “friends” earlier? Get back to me when you see the slightest example of any genuine human warmth radiating from Daryl towards anyone else who gets between him and the camera. I’ll be over here doing my tax return.]
So I guess the question is, why is it that while we’re constantly being told that television is a source of human connection for people – usually to justify some long running and utterly soul-less soapie or US sitcom – television that shows pretty much the closest clothed human connection there is – people who are trying to do something together laughing over how it’s gone wrong – has been wiped from our screens? We don’t need an entire one-hour weekly show devoted to sketches going wrong. Just a little bit of what I saw from The Shambles – you know, what you humans call “chemistry” – would do nicely, thanks very much.
Movin’ On Up
It’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival time again, and that means the streets of Melbourne are filled with… well, the smell of sweaty types desperately shoving flyers at you in the forlorn hope that you’ll attend the unknowns-packed show they’re pushing. That’s entertainment!
Away from the bright lights and overpriced beer though, there’s a slightly different conversation taking place, thanks to something Rod Quantock said in a feature on MICF that ran in the April edition of The Age’s (Melbourne) Magazine. Sure, The (Melbourne) Magazine might be the most graspingly aspirational catalogue of hipster tripe either side of the Yarra, but they do love their comedians (especially if they’re managed by Token, as pretty much everyone in this article is*), so they can’t be all bad. At least, not every issue.
Anyway, in this article Quantock puts forward the idea that MICF isn’t good for comedy in Melbourne: “It’s almost impossible to get any live work now, there are no venues any more… The festival, for all it’s wonder and glory (has) destroyed live comedy in Melbourne to a great degree.” The story is that audiences gorge on live comedy during the festival and then ignore it for the rest of the year, and who’s going to argue with that? Well…
Nobody sane is going to seriously disagree with Quantock. After all, he knows the Melbourne live scene better than anyone (and a lot better than us). Plus, his thesis has been taken up by others – notably Matthew Quartermaine over at The Scrivener’s Fancy – who’re also not exactly short of knowledge about how the live scene works. So the following’s more of a supplement to the “MICF Killed Comedy” thesis than an argument against.
See, here’s a probably stupid question: if the idea that festivals kill off local venues is an iron-clad rule, why hasn’t The Melbourne International Film Festival killed off the local cinema industry? MIFF is a massive event in it’s own right, packed with local and international films, yet your local multiplex is ticking along just fine.
Okay, it’s not exactly a fair comparison: MIFF is much smaller compared to the film biz in general than MICF is to Melbourne comedy. But still, MIFF (and the other capital city film festivals) have been going for decades and getting bigger each year without strangling the rest of the industry: what are they doing differently to comedy?
The obvious point – and the only one we’re going to go into here, because we’re just chucking ideas about – is that good stuff is on at the movies all year ‘round. And by “good stuff”, we mean stuff that people actually want to go and see, starring people you’ve heard of and featuring things you want to see happening. That just doesn’t happen with comedy.
Sure, you can say there aren’t enough (or any) venues and you’d be right, but if you’re Dave Hughes or Wil Anderson or Dave O’Neill or Charlie Pickering (this year) you could probably find someone to open a room for you to do your thing during, say, the lead-up to Christmas. But you don’t. Often if you’re a big name (read: have a regular gig on the telly) in Australian stand-up, you wait until the Comedy Fest and then you do a “best-of” set like you’re doing us all a fucking favour. After all, you’re on the telly – what do you need to work at stand-up for? (But more on that in a moment.)
That’s part of why live comedy is dead year-round: the big names – the comedy version of the Hollywood blockbuster – are almost never on outside of the festival. If it feels like live comedy is dead in Melbourne, that’s because unless you’re a massive comedy fan – the comedy version of the people who go see arthouse films about goat herders or mournful teens in those ground-floor cinemas at The Nova – there’s nothing out there you want to see eleven months of the year. If the cinemas stored up a years worth of blockbusters and then showed them all in a mad rush for three weeks, they’d be closing down like crazy too.
The other reason why live comedy is pretty much dead is because back in the late 1980s when MICF (or as it was then, the plain old Melbourne Comedy Festival) started up, live comedy had already started to shift from being an end in itself like theatre still kind of is (even big name movie actors often return to the stage) to a one-way stepping stone to a bigger and better world. Unfortunately for comedy, that bigger and better world was television.
Television doesn’t really want performers who’ve spent years honing their comedy skills. It doesn’t want people who’ve developed a quality act, or figured out how to write a funny joke, or worked out how to do anything that people in a live setting would actually want to see. Television wants presenters. Television wants people it can stick up the front of a concept that they bought from overseas or was thought up by some nameless guys out the back. Television wants people who are “real people” – or who can seem that way – not stylised comedy performers. Dave Hughes’ television career took off the second he hit the airwaves; Shaun Micallef was a “cult favourite” until he started hosting a game show.
Yes, for a while comedians could get on television doing the kinds of comedy that also worked live. The Big Gig, The Late Show, even parts of Fast Forward and Full Frontal. But by the time panel shows became the comedy norm on television, live comedy was well and truly absorbed into the television process. Sketch comedy was (mostly) out, heavily written shows were (mostly) out, radio-style confessions and panel-friendly anecdotes were in. And remain in to this day.
So what? That stuff’s still funny, right? Sure it is. But why pay money to see live the kind of material you can get for free on television? We’re not talking a five minute sample of hilarious stand-up that makes you want to go see someone’s live act, and we’re not talking about the thrill of a live performance over something pre-recorded; we’re talking about comedians whose entire careers have been aimed at getting on television, and then they put on a live show that’s just like what you’ve seen them do on television. Only, you know, you have to leave the house to see it. And pay money for it. Which is fine if you want to see Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation’s Josh Thomas live ‘cause you love him on TV. But then you’re just paying to see someone off the telly.
Because television hasn’t valued scripted or well-honed comedy for well over a decade now, and because performing stand-up is mostly seen as a stepping stone to television, stand-up now is often – not always, of course, but often -simply a “look-at-me!” showcase to attract casting agents. Again, this is fine, but what’s in it for the rest of us? Listening to some mildly good-looking person talking about their weird life is fine at a party where there’s a chance you might get to root them, but at a comedy show… well, there’s still a chance you might get to root them. But it’s more likely you’ll just feel like you got screwed.
To sum up: the big names who could re-introduce the general public to the idea of seeing comedy outside of the festival’s three weeks are too busy on TV and radio to do so, and with live comedy basically being a try-out for television – a medium that values glib one-liners and a pretty face over anything more lasting – MICF has to bunch everyone together for a three week burst to get people interested in it at all. But at least they’re interested that long: if anyone cared for even a day about the comedy that’s shown on our televisions Hey Hey it’s Saturday wouldn’t be coming back. Ever.
*thanks to menagers over at Champagne Comedy for pointing this out