Australian Tumbleweeds
And the Lord gave unto us CrossBread
The ABC’s really been going for it in terms of podcasts lately, with CrossBread, a mockumentary about a Christian rap band, the latest audio comedy to be released.
This kind of show used to be a rarity – those with long memories may remember 2010’s The Blow Parade – but now, thanks to the rise of podcasting, there are heaps of them. In fact, we should probably expect even more of this kind of comedy with budgets shrinking and COVID-19 making TV production harder. Audio comedy is the future! Hooray?
CrossBread is a documentary about the Christian rap band CrossBread, who first appeared on the Christian music circuit back in 2015. Fronted by Josh (Chris Ryan) and Joan (Megan Washington), a brother and sister from Melbourne’s outer suburbs, the band gained fame at the Hillsong-esque Firebrand Ministries, a mega-church fronted by cool priest “The Rev” (John Waters). CrossBread is told from the perspective of Ken Lim (Aaron Chen) the church’s social media manager, who recorded many of CrossBread’s rehearsal sessions and became their biggest fan.
In the first two episodes (released last Monday – there are four more episodes to come), we learn about the series of lies and financial difficulties which led to the formation of CrossBread and how the band shaped its act, adding sound man Pradeep (Sami Shah) on decks. We also hear a lot of their music (written by Ryan and Washington) which neatly parodies both Christian and mainstream pop music styles.
CrossBread (the mockumentary) isn’t super hilarious but it has some good moments and the origin story of Josh and Joan forming band together is particularly funny. Aaron Chen’s trademark deadpan comedic style also brings a lot to the narration and works particularly well when his character unintentionally parodies some of the presentation styles associated with American podcast documentaries (“I didn’t know what to believe”).
With four more episodes to come, it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. But scriptwriter Declan Fay (Ronnie Chieng: International Student) is always reliable and Kate McLennan (Get Krack!n) is coming up in future episodes, so it should be worth a listen.
R.I.P.S.Mouse
Who knew Chris Lilley still had the power to make us laugh?
In the heat of the Black Lives Matter movement, Deadline can reveal that Netflix has removed four shows from controversial Australian comedian Chris Lilley from its services in Australia and New Zealand.
Angry Boys, Summer Heights High, We Can Be Heroes, and Jonah From Tonga have all been taken down after featuring characters that have in the past sparked questions over racial discrimination. The shows were originally made by Australian producer Princess Pictures for the ABC.
Remember when people took Chris Lilley seriously? Bet there’s a lot of critics around the world working hard to scrub their many, many glowing reviews of his “work” from their resumes. And if they’re not, they really should be, because it’s not like nobody noticed at the time that his blackface shit was offensive – they just thought that was part of the joke.
This 2011 interview in The Atlantic is particularly awkward to read in 2020 – maybe not as awkward as this 2008 story in The Age (or even this Age review from 2014) – but this bit is worth quoting in full in case it mysteriously vanishes:
With S.mouse, you’ve been criticized for “exploiting the history of race relations for a cheap laugh.” Is that a common reaction to your portrayal of S.mouse, who appears in blackface, or Jen?
Well, Australia has a thing where apparently it’s fine for me to dress up as an Asian woman. No one has questioned that. But there was—which I totally expected—there was a bit of an outcry about me playing a black person. And also, my shows are meant to be a bit provocative and I like that kind of television that shocks you. But the thing is, I think a lot of people just saw the trailer and then they started writing about it but they didn’t sit down and watch the episodes. When you get to know S.mouse, it very quickly becomes not about a guy wearing blackface. It’s a character. It’s sort of irrelevant that I’m black. It’s about him being home on house arrest and lost in the commercial music industry. There’s a lot more heart to the character by the end of the series. Yeah, but that stuff just sort of came and went in Australia. It’s completely predictable and obvious. And then funnily enough, in the UK there was no issue at all. They just completely got it.
Better dump a few more statues into the harbour quick.
Being the humourless scolds that we are, we jumped on the “Chris Lilley isn’t funny” bandwagon before there even was one.* Because there isn’t really one now: keen-eyed readers will have noticed that nobody’s saying Lilley wasn’t funny, they’re just saying that the blackface (and yellowface) antics he based his entire career on are currently offensive. Obviously blackface was just as offensive fifteen years ago, but at the time his fans just thought that was part of the joke. Safe to say that view has not held up.
Unlike just about every other comedian currently in trouble over their past blackface antics, Lilley was never trying to say or do anything with or around the idea of blackface. To his defenders (presumably he still has some), he was never doing blackface at all – just playing a range of comedy characters that happened to be black, or Islander, or Asian, or female, or (stereotypically) gay, or socially disadvantaged, or… anyone else starting to see a pattern?
Chris Lilley’s entire “comedy” act – and we’d argue his interest in comedy was marginal at best; he just liked pretending to be minorities and comedy was the only way he could do that – was based on the idea that seeing a white male pretending to be a minority was intrinsically funny. And if that wasn’t the case, then was exactly was the joke?
Time and time again Lilley was praised by critics for the “realism” of his performance. But if realism was what people were tuning in for, why wasn’t Jonah played by an actual Islander kid? Were there literally no black actors available who could capture the subtle nuances of S.mouse? You can’t read an article about Ja’mie without someone praising Lilley’s accurate portrayal of a teen bitch; if the joke there isn’t that a teen bitch is being played by a mid-30s man, what is it?
Most of the time, most of the comedy that gets slated for blackface was at least somewhat aware that blackface is offensive. Sometimes they were trying to say something about a character that would willingly don blackface; sometimes they were just trying to use it for shock value. But Lilley was (hopefully) the last comedian we’ll see who used blackface completely unironically; he was a white man who wanted to pretend he was black, and people laughed because that was funny to them.
Those critics who were quick to praise his work (“The sort of comedy he wrote in Summer Heights High was dangerous and provocative and raw”, for fucks sake) better scrub a little harder.
*just look at anything here with a “Chris Lilley” tag – they’re pretty much all negative**
**that said, this is probably the best one to read if you’re in a hurry
Isolated Laughter
Press release time!
Comedy fires up under lockdown!
New ABC series Retrograde launches July.Set in a virtual bar – Australia’s first narrative comedy filmed entirely in isolation
ABC and Screen Australia are thrilled to announce that the new six-part narrative comedy series, Retrograde, premieres Wednesday 8 July at 9.30pm on ABC and iview. Developed, produced, and post-produced entirely under strict COVID-safe guidelines, Retrograde follows the lives of a group of thirty-something friends as they drown their sorrows at a virtual bar in the time of COVID-19.
The series features a terrific line-up of Australian talent including Pallavi Sharda, Ilai Swindells, Maria Angelico, Esther Hannaford and Nick Boshier with guest star Ronny Chieng. Shot in isolation, Retrograde will be the first remotely filmed narrative comedy series to hit Australian television screens.
Gemma is about to embark on an exciting career in Korea when COVID-19 crashes her farewell party. Faster than you can say “social isolation” she’s made unemployed and has to find a place to live — like, yesterday. Thankfully she hadn’t got around to dumping her boring but nice boyfriend Rob, so she can lockdown with him — and his daughter. Even at 32, adulting is not something that comes naturally to Gemma and to make things worse her ex has returned to Australia and is back on the (online) scene. At least she doesn’t have to drink alone. Her friends have created an online bar where they can commiserate and workshop their questionable life choices. Gemma is forced to take a good hard look at herself in the preview window — and work out what she wants her life to be in lockdown world and beyond.
Bringing you this out-of-this-world (but very much of this world) show are creator/producer/writer Meg O’Connell (Content, Robbie Hood) and lead writer/co-producer Anna Barnes (Content, The Strange Chores). Rounding out the creative team are director Natalie Bailey (Avenue5, Run, The Thick of It), script producer Sophie Miller (The Family Law, Maximum Choppage), and writers Declan Fay (Ronny Chieng: International Student) and Michele Lee (Hungry Ghosts). Alongside O’Connell, the producing team includes Dan Lake, Jackson Lapsley Scott and executive producer Kurt Royan.
Series Co-Creator, Meg O’Connell said, “The COVID-19 lockdown means the characters in Retrograde are finally having the existential crises they put off having in their twenties. They’re being forced to look at their reflections in the mirror (or video call) and are asking themselves: Do I like what I see?”
Sally Riley, ABC’S Head of Drama, Comedy and Indigenous said, “Making scripted content means it’s not always easy to respond in the moment to the terrifying events and changes in our world. But we’ve reimagined the way we make drama and comedy to bring Australian audiences a show that illustrates the very real impact the pandemic has had on life as we know it. Crossing humour with a layer of existential dread, Retrograde tracks from beginning to end our journey of the first wave of lockdown.”
Senior Online Investment Manager at Screen Australia, Lee Naimo, said, “We’re excited to support this team who have responded so quickly to the strange new normal with an incredibly innovative and clever series. Retrograde brings our online lives into focus and introduces a new kind of viewing experience to Australian audiences, and I can’t wait to see it.”
Who knew that the big winner out of a global pandemic killing tens of thousands of people would be Australian comedy? At this stage we’re facing at least 50% or more of this year’s ABC’s scripted comedy output coming as a direct response to coronavirus.
Sure, by “direct response to coronavirus” we probably mean “taking advantage of health restrictions to produce shows on the cheap”, but still: if scripted comedy is to have any kind of future at the ABC, fingers crossed for a all-out nuclear war in 2021.
Black comedy matters
We’ve all been horrified by the murder of George Floyd. And not just because of the brutal way in which George Floyd was killed, but for the fact that this keeps happening to black people. In the United States and in our own country.
But given this is a blog about comedy – and that none of us writing it are people of colour – is this something we should even comment on? Does Black Lives Matter need more white people and white-led organisations making a statement about this?
As a friend of this blog and a person of colour pointed out:
I’m sick of seeing companies and publications posting black squares. Look at who makes up their board, their senior management team… This rings hollow to me.
So, instead, we have some questions for our readers who work in the Australian comedy industry: why are there so few comedy shows by or about people of colour that people like us can review? Why is almost everything about the white experience? And why does there seem to be no effective pathway for comics of colour?
Many comedians start their careers doing stand-up, so it’s in the world of stand-up that you’d expect to see plenty of up-and-coming comedians of colour. Except, often, you don’t:
Of the 10 stand-up shows released on Amazon Prime recently, only one was by a person of colour.
Amongst the 25 performers who were part of Stan’s Lockdown Comedy Festival, just five were people of colour (six if you count Randy Feltface).
Of the 16 episodes of the audio series ABC’s Comedy Presents… just three feature either an immigrant or a person of colour.
These statistics aren’t awful, you might think, but they’re also not great. Amazon could only find one Australian-based comedian of colour to film? Really?
And it’s not like there haven’t been plenty of shows from indigenous and non-white comedians on the live scene in recent years. So why are so few of these performers making it onto TV, radio, streaming…?
And this is even weirder when you consider the great strides made in Australian comedy in recent decades to embrace comedians who are female, LGBTQI+, disabled or neuro-diverse. And the way in which indigenous artists have been the creators and stars of acclaimed drama series like Pine Gap, Mystery Road and Total Control.
So, what’s the problem in the comedy world? Sure, there’s been Black Comedy, the final episode of Get Krack!n, Steph Tisdell’s appearance in Drunk History Australia and Briggs’ occasional segments The Weekly… but is that good enough?
And in the week of George Floyd’s death, why did it seem as if the episode of Miriam Margolyse Almost Australian about ‘Mateship’ was only entertainment program which had anything to say about the problems faced by indigenous Australians?
Yes, we have a long way to go.
P.S. If you’ve got access to Stan, Steph Tisdell’s set on Lockdown Comedy Festival is worth a look. Punchy, pointed and funny, she’s one to look out for.
Briggswatch 2020: The Search for Segments
The Weekly‘s been a bit erratic format-wise this year, but just because the days when it was utterly predictable seem over doesn’t mean the show is actually, you know, interesting or funny. So we were going to take a break this week and focus on other things until we actually watched this week’s installment and… where’d everybody go?
Regular readers of this blog have our sympathies, but they also may recall that a year or two back we ran a series of posts wondering out loud where supposed Weekly regular Briggs actually was. He was in the credits and promos, some episodes even ended with the promise that he’d be back next week, but he just… never turned up. Even in 2020, when he’s technically still part of the team, he hasn’t been sighted (or mentioned) once. Then again, when you can do comedy protest songs with Tim Minchin and have been working with Matt Groening, being condescended to by Charlie Pickering is probably something you don’t need in your life.
So no Briggs this week. Also no Judith Lucy, Luke McGregor, Tom Gleeson, Kitty Flanagan or the Ghost of John Clarke. “You want Charlie Pickering?”, the demonic head of ABC Entertainment seemed to be saying, “HAVE ALL THE CHARLIE PICKERING IN THE WORLD!!” Or at least, a solid half hour of him, which we can all agree is definitely some kind of demonic punishment.
Opening news recap? Pickering. Interview with Hugo Weaving? Pickering. Multiple “comedy” news explainer segments? Pickering. Chats with overseas comedians talking about the issues facing their countries? Pickering and just for a change, Pickering. The return of Charlie Pickering, ABC HR manager? This would have been hilarious if the role of Charlie Pickering had been played by literally anyone else but no, it’s more Pickering.
Sure, it’s his name there on the title. And no doubt the lingering effects of Coronavirus have taken their toll on the show and by that we mean Tom Gleeson isn’t stinking up the place quite so much. But there was nobody around to hand in a segment to break up the half hour chunk of non-stop suck? Much as we appreciated the return of Eddie McGuire gleefully reeling off a list of Millionaire Hot Seat tales of woe, that 60 seconds or so of fun wasn’t really enough of a break from the wall-to-wall Pickering.
(there was also Corona Cops, the segment where the footage changes but the jokes do not)
The Weekly has always been a weirdly shonky show for a prime time news satire, what with the missing Briggs and that time they promo’ed an interview with the South Park creators and then just never aired it. Whether it’s such a high pressure environment that they’re all just barely keeping it together, or they don’t have the resources to put together a smoothly running satirical machine, or they just… can’t be arsed, we have no idea. But there’s a big difference between a freewheeling show that keeps things loose so they can make sure the best possible comedy goes to air and whatever we’re getting each week with The Weekly.
Hey, at least Pickering’s still wearing that natty sports jacket.
Is Hannah Gadsby’s Douglas as good as Nanette? Yes!
Where do you go after you’ve done the most-acclaimed stand-up show in years? Many comedians would be tempted to try and do it all again – same style, similar issues – but Hannah Gadsby, wisely, has taken her new show Douglas (now on Netflix) in a different direction to Nanette. This has turned out to be a good move.
Gadsby jokes at the start that this is her “difficult second album”. Except it’s not, it’s her 10th big stand-up show. And boy does the experience of doing those ten shows shine through in this.
Douglas is as funny and on point as Nanette but it’s also about lighter topics (sort of), with as much of the humour coming from Gadsby playing around with form and structure as it does from great material about real experiences.
Gadsby, who takes such delight in surprising audiences with abrupt 180 turns, is clearly having a lot of fun as she first signals material that she will later call back to, and then, long after we’ve all forgotten about her signalling, does the call back to huge laughter and applause. The look of joy on her face as the audience falls about is as wonderful as being in the audience and appreciating the joke and the call back. Gadsby really is the master of getting her audience to do exactly what she wants them to – and we love it.
Unlike Nanette, which was a very personal reckoning about abuse and misogyny, Douglas takes great joy in revealing that Gadsby has autism, a condition she’s comfortable with. For her, it’s a relief to know why her brain is different. She finally understands herself.
Douglas is stand-up about loving who you are – and a showcase for the (comedic) benefits of having autism. Like how spending hours obsessing over minor things can lead to some interesting and funny discoveries. And how spending (what I’m guessing was) weeks and months honing the contents and structure of this set can result in a brilliant and surprising stand-up show.
The amount of care and attention that Gadsby’s given this show is rare in all but the very best of the big stand-up shows. And while comedians and audiences have quite rightly mourned the loss of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival this year, it’s worth asking how many of those cancelled shows would have been honed to the level of slickness that Hannah Gadsby’s achieved in Douglas? And how many would have been just an hour of whatever material the comedian could generate in time?
Perhaps this lockdown, and the brilliance of Douglas, will give more comedians the time – and the urge – to work on honing their cancelled shows. There’s no great secret as to why Hannah Gadsby’s a world-famous comedian after all: she’s just spent a lot of time making her material as good as it can be.
Wednesday Night Fever and Dry Cough
Even in the golden age of the ABC’s Wednesday Night comedy stronghold, the whole night was rarely all comedy. Shows like Spicks and Specks and The Gruen Transfer may have provided laughs but honestly? They were more entertainment than straight-up comedy. So having two comedy series on back-to-back should be a pretty sweet deal at a time when Australian television comedy is struggling, right?
Oh right, one of those shows is The Weekly.
The lack of actual news has finally been acknowledged by The Weekly, as it made an unsteady lurch towards sketch comedy with predictably shit results. “Charlie Pickering, ABC HR Guy” gave Pickering a chance to show off his comedy performance chops, and turned out to be a nice reminder that as a comedy performer he makes for a great newsreader. Sure, you make do with what you’ve got; what happened to Briggs anyway?
This week it really was the Charlie Pickering Show, though no doubt if we actually measured his air time it’d probably turn out to be the same contractually mandated 25 minutes it is every week. Which is fine when The Weekly is doing its usual shit mix of dull news explainers and dull celebrity interviews, but without that to lean on – we’re glad they dug up the Sports Rorts to slap the PM around with a bit, but even they had to admit it was old news that not everyone cared about in the first place – all they’re left with comedy, aka Pickering’s greatest weakness besides having to seem interested in other people.
And the comedy was not great this week. Corona Cops takes Australian comedy’s fine tradition of dubbing over existing footage and… doesn’t seem to understand that the results should be funny? Still, when you’re making a half hour show you can’t just rely on Judith Lucy’s segment having a pointless minute-long intro to fill in all those seconds. On the flip side, that edit of all the disastrous things that’ve happened to Millionaire Hot Seat contestants was gold; fire the writers, hire more researchers.
Nothing else in this week’s episode really worked, and while it feels like there should have been a difference between that sketch bringing back Scott Morrison’s PR team and the Yard Chat interview with Richard Wilkins son (why?), they both dragged on so long we stopped paying attention before we could figure out what it might be. Aside from them both being pointless, which is a weird thing to say about The Weekly when you think about it because unlike At Home Alone Together it still has a point: making fun of the news. It’s not good at it, but it’s a slightly better show when it sticks to it.
Speaking of At Home Alone Together, it’s funnier than The Weekly. Then again, so is [insert generic horrible thing here]. It’s still a mixed bag but that’s the whole point, and even when a bit doesn’t really work (that home wine tasting sketch comes to mind) it’s still possible to see what they were going for and how somebody else might find it amusing. Can we say the same about The Weekly? Let’s move on.
The weaknesses of the whole “lifestyle show parody” angle are coming clearer, but that was always going to happen. The joke in all the sketches is the same joke: the person hosting the sketch is either creepy, incompetent or having a breakdown, and this is laid over a traditional lifestyle show topic for humorous results. Or not. Already pretty much all this week’s sketches had characters paired off with someone else to interact with, which adds another layer to the hijinxs and should keep them going for the remaining five weeks even if we’ll be roaming the streets freely in a fortnight or so.
Unfortunately that means what initially seemed like the most promising aspect of this show – watching lifestyle hosts go increasingly nuts as lockdown drags on – has suddenly been taken away, leaving the prospect of it becoming a show making fun of something that’s already over and that most people will want to forget. Then again, we would have said that about Ray Martin a month ago and look where we are now.
As usual with Australian comedy, it’s the worst of both worlds (aside from the lack of deaths, obviously): At Home Alone Together will increasingly lose the only angle that made it interesting, while The Weekly remains stuck without any real news to cover as the rest of the world remains in lockdown. When’s that next Spicks and Specks reunion?
Oh My God They Killed Kinne
Who exactly is Kinne Tonight for? Obviously it’s a sketch show with a young cast – Troy Kinne himself is what, early 30s? – so there’s a bunch of sketches set in bars and dinner parties (well, Christmas dinner in the first episode of this latest season) and a load of observations about drunk texts and the pain of helping the olds navigate today’s technology and so on. And yet there’s something a little odd about proceedings – something that doesn’t sit quite right with today’s comedy landscape…
Oh, that’s right; this is a television comedy aimed at mainstream Australia.
It’s easy to forget mainstream Australia exists when the only Australian television you watch is comedy. We’re not talking about the actual real-life mainstream of Australian society; we’d need to make a lot more television than we currently do to give a real picture of what’s going on out there. But young adults who have office jobs and go out for a drink after work and are in a reasonably committed relationship but haven’t “settled down” yet? The kind of generic “mainstream” you’d expect to be all over the media? They’re hardly ever seen in our comedies.
Partly that’s because – and hopefully someone’s pointed this out to Kinne, because this would be a shitty way to find out – these people don’t watch television. Kids and teens watch television; parents and old folk watch television. But people in their 20s and early 30s? They’re too busy going out, having fun, and possibly raising kids to watch television. Or at least, that’s what’s Australian television has assumed in the 21st Century: plenty of young people on our screens, but not a whole lot of references to how they actually live their lives.
So while Kinne Tonight is solidly more of the same thing Kinne has been doing since 2014, at least he’s got the market all to himself. There’s no way the ABC is going to make a comedy (or any other kind of show) about white middle-class people in their 20s, and the other commercial networks aren’t really going after this demographic. Even when he does a joke we’ve seen before (that bit about the difference between weekday drinking Kinne and weekend drinking Kinne resembled the old Seinfeld bit about how his nighttime self was always screwing over his morning self), it’s a reminder that nobody else is currently doing those kind of jokes on Australian television.
There’s a lot of comedy of manners here; that Christmas dinner sketch was basically a battle of the woke, only the joke wasn’t on the idea of woke so much as it was just pointing out the ways it can be taken to extremes. And because Kinne is approaching this stuff from an insiders point of view, the observational comedy is more “this is how things are” rather than “what’s up with those crazy kids” – which again, isn’t an angle we see much of at the moment.
It’s a little strange that Kinne has this market all to himself, because there’s been long stretches in Australia where this kind of comedy was the main kind of comedy. But these days comedy itself is a niche interest, so you might as well make Squinters or Mr Black or any one of seemingly countless comedies that feature characters in their 20s without actually being about anything anyone in their 20s actually does (remember how the female lead in Mr Black worked at a newspaper?) because who’s going to pull you up?
Kinne Tonight was a bit more focused this time around in its first episode back – no public interactions, not much live stuff, no guests – but Kinne’s sense of humour remains consistent. His relationship material is thankfully even-handed, he’s usually sure to make himself the butt of a sketch’s joke, and when he comes up with a dumb comedy character at least the central joke is an actual joke, which only sounds obvious if you haven’t been watching those reoccurring bits on The Weekly.
That final musical number about bad grammar in texts being a turn off could have done with another polish, mind you.
Shows What We Know
Press release time!
JOSH THOMAS’ CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED SERIES EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE OKAY IS GONNA BE BACK FOR A SECOND SEASON ON STAN
The series, from the Emmy-nominated and critically acclaimed Aussie writer and comedian, will return to Stan in 2021.
Need we go on? Eh, may as well.
20 May, 2020 – Stan today announced that Josh Thomas‘ critically acclaimed comedy Everything’s Gonna Be Okay will be returning exclusively to Stan in 2021.
The series, which is created, executive produced and stars Josh Thomas, follows Nicholas, a neurotic twenty-something-year-old who is forced to raise his two teenage half-sisters, one of whom is on the autism spectrum, after the untimely death of their father. The series stars Josh Thomas – the creator and star of the International Emmy-nominated series Please Like Me – Kayla Cromer, Adam Faison and Maeve Press.
Thomas, Stephanie Swedlove and Kevin Whyte serve as executive producers, with David Martin, Jon Thoday and Richard Allen-Turner executive producing for Avalon. Additionally, Please Like Me collaborator Thomas Ward reunites with Thomas as co-executive producer.
Everything’s Gonna Be Okay will return exclusively to Stan in 2021
The way they couldn’t quite be bothered to bold the final “y” in Everything’s Gonna Be Okay pretty much sums up our feelings about the whole thing.
What this really tells us is something we already knew: Thomas was hired to provide prestige, not ratings. It’s a great place for him to be, even if it does suggest he’s not actually funny, because “prestige” is the kind of thing you don’t have to prove. If people think you’re classy, then you’re classy, low ratings and general disinterest be dammed.
The real question now is, will there even be a Stan by 2021?
Comedy in Lockdown (again)
The world has changed rapidly in the last two months and it’s perhaps sad that just as comedians are starting to understand how to produce comedy online or at home or remotely or at a social distance, that the country’s starting to open up again.
Or maybe not? Because let’s face it, this is going to be with us for years. And this has just been the first of many, near-incomprehensible stages.
In the next few years, we’ll see a slew of content about what it’s like to come out of lockdown, or to suddenly be plunged back into it, or how people have had their lives ruined (or improved) as a result of what’s happened. And this could be a good thing for comedy. It certainly makes a change from naval-gazing dramedies about falling in love, or mental health issues, or pregnancy. Now we can have naval-gazing dramedies about falling in love, or mental health issues, and or pregnancy, but in isolation!
What this crisis has shown us, though, is that there is an audience for low budget, scrappy online content that contains actual laughs. Particularly if it can be produced quickly enough to feel timely. Gristmill’s Love In Lockdown, a six-part web series about two people falling in love over Face Time, has quickly gained good viewing figures on YouTube.
Written by Robyn Butler (The Librarians) and Lucy Durack (The Letdown), the show features Durack as Georgie, a working-from-home office manager with nothing much to do but bake, and Ned, a newly out-of-work musician and café worker, who’s turned to online ukulele teaching to make ends meet. When Georgie starts lessons with Ned, a romance between the two seems unlikely – she’s an uptight hard worker and he’s a lazy, disorganised loser – but these are strange times, and anything can happen.
Love In Lockdown isn’t a super hilarious series, but it’s funny in parts and a pleasant enough watch if you have half-an-hour (and who doesn’t these days). We didn’t quite buy that Georgie would fall for Ned (he’s a bit of a dickhead) but we do sort of buy that George (who’s desperate and lonely) might fall for Ned in these circumstances.
Or, for more straight-up – and shorter – laughs, head over to Frank Woodley’s Facebook page and check out his No Bad Ideas series. So far, he’s come up with an amusing suggestion for coping with loneliness during lockdown…
…and another for dealing with the new normal.
Or, there’s Steen Raskopoulos’ Instagram, where he’s posting one-man sketches, impressions and other nonsense on a regular basis.
Are we going to look back at any of this in decades to come and think “Classic comedy!”? Probably not. But it’s keeping us going in the meantime.