Australian Tumbleweeds
Desperation of a (Gruen) Nation
Are some things too important to be left to the marketing department? That’s the kind of question you won’t hear asked on Gruen – the series where the sales team is king and all of human behaviour can be reduced to a shonky hustle from a second-rate scam artist. So of course, the ABC has wheeled it back out to cover the current Federal election. Because what could be more politically important in 2022 than sales techniques?
Same host, same jokes, slightly different panel but don’t worry, Neo-Nazi enabler Todd Sampson is still there telling us he doesn’t care about who wins the election. Because why would he? Oh right, the Nazi stuff.
After close to a decade of sticking to a good thing, there’s no real point examining the Gruen format. Which is ironic, because examining formats while having zero interest in the content is the entire rationale of the Gruen series. And look where it’s gotten them!
Unfortunately – well, in theory at least – in turning their attention to the current federal election they’ve foolishly taken on a subject where their audience actually do care about the steak as well as the sizzle. Worse, they’re now competing with the rest of Australia’s media when it comes to ignoring the substance of the election. Yeah, we’ve got a real intellectual Clash of the Titans going on there.
The problem with Gruen Nation is that everyone’s coverage of the election – and politics in general – is focused on the marketing. That’s because Australia has a massive disconnect in the media: most of News Corp’s product is aimed at working class types, but News Corp’s product is 110% about propping up the LNP, who are actively opposed to treating workers as anything more than serfs.
That means most of the political coverage in Australia can’t focus on policies, because they’re supporting a side whose policies work against their audience. So everything you get out of News Corp is focused on marketing – personalities, gaffes, whatever – because if they talked policies their audience might possibly think “hang on, giving poor people more money is… bad? But I’m poor and need more money!”
Gruen Nation might be of some use to its audience if it talked about that. But of course not: it’s just a lot of political anecdotes from fixers providing insights like “the general public don’t help with election campaigns” and “jingles work if they’re catchy”.
If they had people on who were actually passionate about their side of politics, then it’d just be a news program. So instead we get a collection of slightly creepy, totally cynical types letting us peek behind the curtain, delivering the central plank of Gruen‘s platform: letting their viewers think they’re smarter than everyone else.
Sadly for us, their version of “smarter” means “too smart to give a shit”, which is kinda bullshit when we’re talking about the political direction of the country for the next few years. Worse, these are the people who’ve been telling us for three years that Scott Morrison – a man who, let’s be honest, is widely loathed and largely speaks backyard gibberish – is a campaign genius.
No real surprise then that Gruen Nation seemed to largely be a fan of the Liberal’s campaign ads (which really do need to be pretty good considering the record they have to defend). And if the LNP lose the election? These “experts” continue on their merry way, their abject failure to get it right doing no harm whatsoever to their highly-paid careers.
Basically, Gruen Nation is once again presenting us with a collection of upper middle class types telling the rest of us we’re suckers, only this time the assumption is that we’re too stupid to vote for our own best interests. And maybe they’re right. But why waste half an hour of your time being told you’re an idiot?
After all, The Weekly‘s on next.
Surfing the Dark Web
Aunty Donna spin-off Grouse House is currently featuring Hot Department: Dark Web on its YouTube channel. This series, written by and starring Melbourne-based comedy duo Hot Department (Honor Wolff and Patrick Durnan Silva), with additional writing by Liam Fitzgibbon, parodies pop culture consumed online – TikTok dance videos, Netflix, porn, film clips, YouTube ads – but with a dark spin. It’s sort of what Black Mirror would have been like if Aunty Donna had made it.
Of the six videos released so far (at the time of writing there are two more to come), the best are Hot Singles, Sad Women, Jamantha Greene – My Lamp ft. Mikey T and TikTok. Pizza Ad and Stepmom Blues are less successful.
Hot Singles, which guest stars Aunty Donna’s Broden Kelly, concerns a man (Kelly) who interacts with an online ad featuring a “hot single in his area” (Wolff) but gets more than he bargained for. Along the way, there are good parodies of various genres of online porn, as well as the invasive advertising for them, all in the style of a cinema thriller. Kelly gives his usual stilted-but-funny performance, while Wolff displays a lot of range as her character evolves from an invasive advertising character to a homely mum.
Sad Women, while perhaps a bit long, is a decent parody of a Netflix historical drama. In this case, one that bears a lot of similarities to Call the Midwife. Two nurses (Wolff and Durnan Silva) find themselves unable to sleep and start talking about how they’re tired of nursing and want adventure. Being based in a convent-run hospital in the 1950s, their options are limited, but then they find a way to both have an adventure and satisfy themselves. Watch out for the cameo from Rhys Nicholson.
Jamantha Greene – My Lamp ft. Mikey T is a parody of a film clip aimed at teenage girls. Jamantha (Durnan Silva) is hosting a sleepover and singing about her lamp, but her mum (Wolff) keeps interrupting as she has an important job interview in the morning. Watch out the enjoyable cameo from Mark Bonnano as rapper Mikey T.
TikTok features two twenty-somethings who also TikTok together. Zane (Durnan Silva), the entitled, attention-seeking son of a man who invests in oil, complains that his housemate (Wolff) is constantly mourning the recent death of her Nana June. Following an unsuccessful attempt to connect to June via séance, Zane films his ill-advised TikTok dance tribute to June but fails to notice that the séance wasn’t quite as unsuccessful as he’d thought. There’s plenty to enjoy here, particularly Durnan Silva’s ridiculous TikTok moves.
Pizza Ad starts off as a parody of a YouTube ad that you might mistake for a real one if it didn’t go on for far too long. The son of a pizza shop owner (Durnan Silva) fronts an ad for the shop but proves himself to be an incompetent presenter. This eventually segues into the son becoming a successful musician. There are some decent ideas in this, and it’s hard not to enjoy the punchline, but overall, it’s a bit of a mess, relying on weak gags to prop up the flimsy storyline.
Stepmom Blues, a parody of an eighties porn video in which a young man (Durnan Silva) gets it on with his stepmother (Wolff), should also be a lot better than it is, and suffers from some of the same problems as Pizza Ad: it’s too long and the storyline’s a mess. Even the creepy cameo from Zachary Ruane can’t save this one.
Week By Weak
The Weekly isn’t a show that asks for much. Which, all things considered, is probably for the best. But every now and again it drops its guard for a minute to remind us that it’s not that it doesn’t know how to be a better show – it actively works hard to be as bad as it is.
If your comedy show has flaws in it that we can spot, then you’re in real trouble. And while The Weekly‘s news jokes are always consistently… adequate… the sketches slotted in between chunks of Charlie Pickering blathering on are just no damn good. Case in point: this week’s wacky “we’re sponsored by a Casino!” bit, which seemed to be based on the idea that saying things twice is twice as funny. Only if they were funny the first time!
But then, a ray of sunshine cut through the clouds of… well, it wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine considering it was coming from Luke Heggie, AKA that guy from Question Everything who was like a slightly more upright Dave Hughes. But it was a segment that looked like effort had been put in, and sometimes (on this particular episode of The Weekly), that’s enough.
And then Pickering interviewed comedian Laura Davis. And by “interviewed” we mean “sat there while she talked about being in lockdown which just possibly might be the basis for part of her act”. Which was also fine! Sometimes a talking tin can is just what a TV show needs.
Here’s a suggestion. Over the last month Melbourne has been packed with comedians in town to catch Covid at the Comedy Festival. Would it have been so hard to set aside a couple of days for Pickering to interview (by which we mean, get them to do a few minutes from their act in interview form) a dozen or so of them to create segments that could run throughout the series so there’d be at least one bit that was reliably funny?
We know we’re totally wasting our time here, because what we want is for The Weekly to be a show that features segments that make us laugh, while the producers want The Weekly to be a show that makes us think (mostly “why isn’t this funny?”). The whole point of the show isn’t to “be funny”, but to “make news jokes”, which we can all agree by now is most definitely not the same thing.
Also, for some reason The Weekly is also about taking stories from twitter – this week: what’s the deal with scientific journals raking in heaps of cash while blocking easy access to actual science? – and somehow dumbing them down even further. Isn’t The Weekly aimed at people under the age of 65? Don’t people under the age of 65 already have access to social media and so already know all this?
The Weekly will always be a frustrating viewing experience because it’s not very good at what it’s trying to do and it’s constantly ignoring something it could be good at. Cut the topical stuff back to just desk-based news jokes, come up with a list of issues that they can run segments on at any time-
(you know the kind of thing we mean – “what are our defense forces really for?” “why does the federal government raise all the money but the states spend it?” “did the NBN have to be shit?” – just watch old episodes of Utopia basically)
-then put out a call for comedians who want to do a segment or two and let them know that you’ll be accepting pitches for the issues on the list. That way the show’s still news-related, and we get to watch a bunch of different comedians who have time to work* on their segments and make them funny or interesting or maybe even both.
The Weekly already does a half-baked version of this with various comedians (Luke McGregor mostly) turning up every now and again. All they need to do is do more of it in a way that makes “different comedians being topical in an amusing way each week” a reason to tune in. After all, isn’t that the point of the show?
Of course, this would also mean we’d get less Charlie Pickering. Considering he’s currently on our screens for a full hour Wednesday nights with two shows back-to-back (has anyone else noticed that Pickering is treating Tomorrow Tonight as a venue to tell us all about his personal life?), we’ll cope.
.
*also, we’re guessing The Weekly doesn’t pay an awful lot. Getting comedians to do one or two segments as a way to boost their profile and promote their paying gigs seems a bit more reasonable than locking them into a poorly-paid job for months at a time
Comedy is Back Baby!
Two returning shows in the same week? We’re having an attack of the vapors over here.
Over in the “if it ain’t broke” corner, The Cheap Seats managed to do pretty much what it was doing for most of last year’s run: decent news-adjacent comedy based on silly visual gags and banter. Yes, the banter was a little rusty and not all the clip jokes were classics, but if you want weekly comedy that’s actually made fresh each week, then it’s going to take a little while to get back up to speed after a long break.
The secret part of the secret of this shows success is that – unlike pretty much every other news comedy on the air – it can and does select its clips based entirely on whether they can get a decent joke out of it. The result? Decent jokes!
Also, unlike both Mad as Hell and The Weekly, those decent jokes are largely apolitical. Continuing the Working Dog / D-Generation tradition of almost forty years now, what’s funny about politicians here is a): when they stuff up or act daggy and b): that’s pretty much it. Acting that way about politics is a political stance in itself, obviously; still, there are worse attitudes to take.
We’ve said plenty of nice things about this show in the past and they all remain true. Good jokes, good hosts, a decent selection of guest presenters, all wrapped up in a format that’s fast paced and just shaky enough to keep a show that’s 70% about laughing at people’s mistakes from ever feeling like they’re, as it’s now termed, “punching down”.
It’s good to have it back.
Also, The Weekly is back. Or is it? There’s definitely a show called The Weekly With Charlie Pickering in the schedules, but if you were to compare this week’s return with an episode from last year, or the year before, or the year before that, or… you get the idea.
Just as a guide to the whiplash-level changes this show has gone through over the years, remember when Hard Chat was a thing? Remember when the season opener would be some chummy group sketch featuring all the regulars? Remember when Judith Lucy was a regular? Remember when Briggs… nah, nobody remembers when Briggs was on The Weekly.
So anyway, to summarise: Pickering is still wearing a suit (so the same as 2021, but not 2020), the studio audience is back (first time since 2019) – and boy, are they are pumped to be there – the set is now a chilly docking bay for robots rather than the “warm & cosy” one of a few years ago, there’s still intrusive background music, the opening checklist is gone but the show is now “weekly” in that every now and again Pickering will say something like “Friday” and we’ll get a segment supposedly related to something that happened on Friday-
(deep breath)
-Luke McGregor is still around covering finance (is it just us or does he now have a weird American accent occasionally going on?), Jan Fran is now part of the show because the ABC are already paying her so why not (seriously, her segment on kids in politics was piss-poor), and most importantly of all, Pickering and company are providing the centre-right take on the election we’ve all been missing… if we somehow have been missing literally all the election coverage across Australia’s mainstream media.
Remember “Albo’s gaff” from 10 or 11 days ago? The Weekly actually showed the footage yet again – and followed it with Morrison’s smug reply, which was odd because whenever they showed any footage of Morrison they didn’t feel the need to show a Labor reply to it, let alone also drop in Stan Grant telling us Albo had made a fatal mistake. But don’t worry, it was just to… establish that… jobless figures are… a thing? Did we miss something?
The big difference between Mad as Hell and The Weekly is that Mad as Hell is a comedy that responds to what’s actually going on: if the LNP have been grabbing all the attention, then the show will be making fun of them. The Weekly, as both the promos and Pickering himself make very clear, is a “we watched the news so you don’t have to” show: the point is to cover the week… in news.
Unfortunately, as anyone who actually watches Australian news knows, Australian news is not exactly free of bias. So if our news is largely trying to keep Scott Morrison afloat by downplaying his blunders and talking up Labor’s, then The Weekly is happy to provide more of the same. Only less amusing.
“But what about the explainers,” you ask, “you know, where Pickering takes a deeper look at a topical issue and gives us the real story behind the news?” Hey, has anyone told you you’re really funny? You should write for The Weekly oh wait.
This week we were treated to the shock news that scare campaigns are a thing because politicians need to raise money for ad campaigns because… hang on, the timeline got a bit muddled there. The point seemed to be that we need restrictions on campaign financing because otherwise we get into an advertising arms race that leaves our politicians beholden to their donors.
This was interesting when it was the subject matter of documentary The Big Deal, which aired last year on the ABC. It’s still available on iView, and it did a much better job of covering the topic. During an actual election campaign, running a segment that is basically “there’s too much electioneering going on during this election campaign” seems a touch on the pissweak side.
Or to put it another way, business as usual for The Weekly.
Comedy songs make us cum
Last night The Chaser went to number one in the charts with their song Coal Makes Me Cum (DJ Scomo Remix).
How good is Australia pic.twitter.com/JjuJZSWilx
— The Chaser (@chaser) April 26, 2022
Comedy songs which cut through are a rarity. It’s been almost four years since Bridie Connell’s Tonightly song Sex Pest won an ARIA, for example. Her Christmas song Literally Everything, also for Tonightly, was pretty great too.
Going back six years, to 2016, there was Tim Minchin’s Come Home (Cardinal Pell), which also went to number one. It neatly captured the rage a lot of people felt about the issue but was also the kind of song you could sing along to. A real, campaigning belter, if you like.
Coal Makes Me Cum is clearly resonating with a lot of people now, but it’s not a great song. There’s something about the fact that it’s a bunch of clips hastily edited together, to make it sound like the Prime Minister is swearing, over a crappy dance music beat, that makes it feel a bit cheap. It feels like the kind of thing 14-year-olds are knocking out on TikTok all day long.
Largely because it is.
Vale Mad as Hell 2022 v.1
And just when the election campaign was starting to heat up too. Only joking! Like this election campaign will ever “heat up”: Scott Morrison is the kind of thuggish suburban bully everyone (outside the media) hates, Anthony Albanese is a submarine, and the media coverage is so meta you’d be forgiven for thinking there was nothing at stake here despite – for example – a literal plague killing dozens of people a day every single day. Mad as Hell? You’re not wrong.
So yes, it’s a touch disappointing that Mad as Hell has wrapped up with weeks of election campaigning to go. Or is it? As pretty much the last vestige of the once-proud tradition of Australian sketch and satirical comedy, Mad as Hell is more important to the nation than mere politics. And yet it’s hard to deny that this past series has seen Mad as Hell dominated by politics as never before.
Whether thanks to budget cuts or covid or the general grim tone of everything else, the various non-political elements of Mad as Hell were in short supply in the 2022 version. TV parodies, social commentary, stupid characters doing stupid things; all shunted aside in favour of a whole lot of desk interviews with political spokespeople of various comedy stripes. Even Darius Horsham came back! Which was in no way a bad thing, but was most definitely an unusual thing.
Scripting and performing a weekly comedy series must be incredibly tough work, and finding inspiration after – 10 years? Shit, you get less for murder – has got to be a struggle at times. So when there’s a parade of smarmy self-serving political dickheads constantly cocking up on the public stage, we can hardly fault Mad as Hell for picking up the comedy baton and running with it.
And let’s be honest here: the Australian media is not exactly reluctant to talk complete and utter bullshit when it comes to promoting a range of opinions that just coincidentally coincide with the view of the world the LNP likes to ally itself with. “Workers rejoice as removal of close contact rules mean they’re now required to attend work while sick”, etc etc, you couldn’t make this crap up.
Mad as Hell could be a dour laugh-free half hour (it isn’t) and it’d still be must-see viewing simply because it’s the rare Australian television program that suggests that rampant pork-barrelling and pissing taxpayer money up against a wall is something we should frown at even though it’s our bonza good mate Scotty doing it.
Still, occasionally we found ourselves thinking during the most recent series that maybe Mad as Hell was possibly doing slightly too good a job of reflecting the current claustrophobic state of Australian public life back to us. Could there be more to Australia than having to suffer through an incompetent governments’ blatant corruption and naked disinterest in the public good? Eh, we’ll have to get back to you on that.
Obviously with an election looming and then toppling over onto us all, politics were at the forefront of daily life in Australia in 2022. There’s no Australian comedy series we’d rather see tackle politics than Mad as Hell, and not just because there are no other Australian comedy series. Fingers firmly crossed that when it returns later in the year we’ll all be looking past the political realm and engaging with the wider world beyond.
Good luck finding anything to laugh at there.
Vale, Would I Lie To You Australia
The last episode of the first Australian series of Would I Lie To You aired on Monday night. As usual, it was…okay. At this point, we should probably say why we think it was just okay and not spectacularly hilarious like we hoped it would be, but we’ve already done that in our review of episode one, and as the show continued exactly the way it started eight weeks ago, there’s absolutely no need to repeat ourselves.
Apart from to note one of the reasons why.
No, we don’t mean the regular cast, although only Frank Woodley brings the big laughs.
Remember how Randling was famously all filmed months before it aired, meaning the makers had no way of re-working the show mid-series when it became clear what the problems were? Well, here we go again as Would I Lie To You was shot in December last year. And yes, it should have been obvious to TV professionals that the show was over-long and dull in the edit – it certainly was to us in episode one – but sometimes you need the external view of the mass audience before you can see that kind of thing. An external view that came at least a month after all the editing was done, presumably. Too late!
One other thing we will note about Would I Lie To You was how incredibly distracting that graphic in the bottom corner of the final episode, reminding us that The Cheap Seats is coming back, was. It’s not that we’ve dropped in from 30 years ago and never seen those kinds of graphics on TV. It’s more that having a constant onscreen reminder that the network making this okay program is capable of much better, is pretty distracting.
The Cheap Seats represents many of the things you hope for in a new comedy: it’s a fresh take, there’s interesting new talent on the show and it’s consistently funny. Would I Lie To You, on the other hand, is in a different arena altogether. It’s a 15-year-old concept that’s been done and done and done on British TV (albeit fairly successfully), then aired here, and now it’s been re-done by us except it’s been stretched and warped to fit a commercial TV hour and whoever books the guests forget to hire enough female comedians.
The result was the kind of show that hasn’t been fresh on Australian television for more than a decade. Seriously, it’s 2022, and there are now enough female comedians that you don’t need to hire female actors, musicians, and personalities to make up the female numbers. When you’re hiring Gina Liano, a woman who stretches the definition of entertainment, let alone of comedy, as a panellist, maybe it’s time to reflect a bit on your booking policy.
We’re used to Australian commercial television comedy playing it safe, but making a middling local version of a declining overseas show doesn’t feel like a way forward. It feels like the kind of show you make when you’re out of ideas or not brave enough to take a punt on something, or somebody, new.
Hey Hey Its Yet Another Bloody Clip Show
Probably the best way to look at Hey Hey It’s Saturday in 2022 is to not look at it at all. The second best way is to look at it as a shed out the back of Daryl Somers’ place full of dubious old crap he just can’t let go of. If he wants to spend his days rummaging around in there trying to find something of value under the porno mags, fine; the rest of us have television to watch.
Hey Hey It’s 100 Years is a clip show hosted by Daryl Somers. Does he walk on stage saying “thank you, thank you” to pre-recorded applause from a non-existent audience? Of course he does, and it’s all downhill from there.
Supposedly the reason why we’re getting a 100 year anniversary special of Hey Hey only a few years since the 40 year anniversary is because, as Daryl puts it “I want to be a part of this show and enjoy it with everybody else”. Let’s reflect on that a moment: Daryl thinks that in 2077 there will definitely be a Hey Hey anniversary special so he wants to get in early and join in on the fun. There are lot of things wrong with that sentence, and “fun” is only the beginning.
Despite an early montage of mostly annoyed or confused looking celebrities, this is not really a “night with the stars”. Again, this shouldn’t be a surprise: Hey Hey‘s celebrity guests were usually just wheeled out to be used as befuddled props or handed a gold record while Plucka Duck gyrated around in the background.
It’s a shame there weren’t more celebrity moments – not because these segments ever revealed anything interesting at all about the celebrities beyond their high tolerance for pain, but because they’re a great reminder of the way Daryl’s TV persona was always that of the bully: arrogant and self-serving around those he saw as inferior, blatantly grovelling and sucking up to those who had greater status. Fun times!
To be fair, a large chunk of this “special” involves Daryl being fairly generous to the cast members who provide most of the content here – Lavinia Nixon, Russell Gilbert, cartoonist Andrew Fyfe, and so on. Of course he is: without them, there would be no show. Ninety minutes of Daryl introducing acts and laughing at everyone else’s jokes was probably too much to swallow even for Channel Seven over Easter.
There’s also salutes to recently deceased Hey Hey greats like The Amazing Johnathan – you know, the American comedian who wasn’t the one with the puppets – and that great Hey Hey icon… Shane Warne? Plus the occasional current talking head (if you could call the lead singer of Pseudo Echo “current”) pops in to wish Daryl all the best on this non-existent anniversary. Stick around until the end to hear Delta Goodrem sing a Ricky May song about how much she wants to be on Hey Hey… or maybe don’t.
Are any of the segments any good? Do you really have to ask? Hey Hey It’s Saturday was always only ever disposable entertainment, a show that skated by on live energy and little else. A greatest hits collection only makes sense as an extension of Daryl’s ego. There were never any classic moments to revisit.
Unlike far funnier shows and series – which would be pretty much all of them – Hey Hey It’s Saturday is privately owned. That means Daryl can repackage it any way he likes and sell it to networks at rock bottom prices in an attempt to maintain his relevance. There’s literally no other reason why this crap is still being shown in 2022 when much better and more interesting programs – again, pretty much all of them – are seemingly lost for good.
Despite the occasional glimpse of the always entertaining Trevor Marmalade, this special was a waste of time. If you tune into the two (for fucks’ sake – ed) Red Faces specials due later this year, you only have yourself to blame.
And They’re Off!
One week into the official election campaign and… yeah. Remember when political satire was a central part of Australian culture? You do? Have fun down at Services Australia trying to claim the old age pension.
Slightly less snarkily, these days any election campaign really drives home the shrinking opportunities for political comedy on Australian television. The Chaser may have been staggering a bit during their final few election shows, but at least they were making fun of an election campaign. Which is pretty much all 95% of most election campaigns are good for.
Worse – well, worse for people who like political comedy, and there aren’t many of us left – political comedy just isn’t fashionable. For a long, long while there, jokes about politicians were about as mainstream as you could get. Martin / Molloy, the biggest radio comedy program in the country for years, was constantly making fun of John Howard; sketch shows made sure to always have a few political impressions handy just in case.
And now sketch comedy is dead, along with comedy on radio. But you’d think impersonating a politician would be the kind of thing that still got some laughs somewhere. Maybe the rapid turnover of leaders post Kevin Rudd (remember how Rove had a Kevin Rudd sketch every single week?) killed off impressions; more likely, the current media climate is… somewhat less tolerant of disrespect.
You don’t have to be a flaming #auspol nutter to realise that the ABC has become somewhat more conservative – in more than one use of the word – in recent years. It’s no surprise that during the pointy end of the election the ABC’s “comedy” coverage will consist of The Weekly (the ABC’s “youth news explainer” that rarely fails to skew towards the status quo) and Gruen Nation (ugh why), which-
-seriously, what’s the point of Gruen talking about the election when 85% of Australian political coverage is already focused entirely on marketing? It’s all talk about how each side is getting their message out there and cut throughs and positioning the leaders to appeal to segments of the community and so fucking on and on and on like the media aren’t the ones who actually decide which messages get put out there in the first place. Gruen covering election marketing might make sense if we had a media that was was, oh, focused on ideas and policies and benefits to the community instead of themselves, but there’s fat fucking chance of that ever happening, fuck this shit-
(ten minutes pass)
Meanwhile, over the last decade or so the ABC has all but banished overtly political comedy from prime time. It’s not doing so well outside of it either. Sammy J is barely a blip, Mark Humphries turns up when he feels like it. At Home With Julia may have been controversial and somewhat ill-judged, but at least it was treating a politician with the disrespect they deserved in a timeslot where people might have seen it. It’s simply not possible to imagine a similar parody directly mocking Scott Morrison ever getting to air.
Sure, that’s probably because our current PM is… shall we say, not exactly someone with a robust sense of humour about himself? But you’d think in an even slightly healthy environment for political comedy, having a PM who is so clearly either a): “a type” or b): marketing himself as “a type” would result in a few jokes. Or are we yet again deluding ourselves?
When nobody is making jokes about politicians, there’s an unhealthy tinge to the political debate. Politics is a serious business: that’s why it’s important to be able to laugh at it. Without decent political comedy in this country, we can barely pretend to even be a country. We’re just a collection of servants and masters, and the masters don’t like being laughed at.
Put another way, thank fuck for Mad as Hell, and that’s finishing up next week.
Ten Steps to Nanette: A book review situation
Hannah Gadsby’s memoir Ten Steps to Nanette is the sort of autobiography you write when you suddenly shoot to international fame for one thing, in this case, the ground-breaking stand-up show Nanette. As such, Gadsby, who’s been a well-known comedian in this country for more than a decade, spends most of the book setting the scene for her new fans who weren’t aware of her early stand-up shows, her comedy art criticism, In Gordon Street Tonight or even Please Like Me.
Even for those of us who have been familiar with her work for years, and knew she was one of the best local stand-ups out there, it wasn’t necessarily a given that she’d become a worldwide sensation. Australian comedians, no matter how good, rarely make it further than Edinburgh. So, spending most of this book on the decades it took to write Nanette is essential. You don’t just win an Emmy out of nowhere.
With Nanette, many commentators suggested, Gadsby re-wrote the rules of comedy. There were large parts of the show which didn’t contain jokes, she discussed the most traumatic events she’d ever experienced with astounding frankness, she spent ten minutes “calling bullshit on the patriarchy,” and she timed it beautifully as she happened to be touring it at the height of #MeToo. She also re-wrote her own rules about what she was and wasn’t prepared to do on stage, namely, to be the butt of the joke anymore. No wonder she freaked out a lot of comedians who worked by the established rules of comedy like “keep them laughing” and “never get serious.”
In the first chapter of Ten Steps to Nanette, Gadsby takes us through the praise and criticism Nanette received and gives her reaction to both. She’s not that fond of either, it seems, or of the instant fame she garnered. “The few months that followed the release of Nanette were amongst the strangest and most unsettling of my life,” she says. “I went from relative obscurity to intense visibility in such a short period of time that I sustained spiritual whiplash.”
It’s then that the book becomes a more conventional and chronological autobiography, in which Gadsby takes us through her childhood and adolescence in rural Tasmania, followed by a move to Hobart, and then the mainland. If you’re roughly the same age as her, you may enjoy the references to schoolkids receiving a Bicentennial coin, her brief interest in stamp collecting and her recollections of the dumb drinking games popular with first-year uni students. More universal are the tales of schoolyard bullying and feeling awkward as an adolescent because you’re overweight or not wearing the right clothes.
Then Gadsby shows us the dark side. Against the backdrop of the struggle for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Tasmania in the 1980s and 1990s, Gadsby reveals her struggles with her sexuality and gender presentation. She also drops just enough hints, without forcing us to live the awful details, of the many ways in which men groomed, abused, and assaulted her. Her expertise at taking an audience from laughter to tension to tears, the hallmark of Nanette, is once again on display here.
She also writes incisively about her struggle to understand how she should be. She knew she wasn’t “normal” but neither she nor anyone else around her knew why or what to do it about. The drip-feed of hints at her later diagnoses of ADHD and ASD is written with great clarity and real insights into what it’s like to be neurodiverse.
There’s also plenty for comedy nerds, with a deep dive into how Gadsby crafts her shows, particularly all the effort that went into Nanette. The sweat, tears and breakdowns may seem a surprise if you’ve seen how skilled Gadsby is on stage, but, then again, she didn’t pull that Emmy from anywhere. She worked hard for it, and she lived it.
This is also a book that, as you’d expect from Hannah Gadsby, is witty, compelling, and expertly crafted. Ten Steps to Nanette documents a lifetime’s work, and what a life it’s been! And as Gadsby’s shown more recently with Douglas and Body of Work, there’s plenty more of it to come (just hopefully without the bad bits).