Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale How to Stay Married season 2
This week saw the final episode of the current season of How to Stay Married, a sitcom that revolved around the hilarious idea that a marriage could somehow survive a wife writing a book titled My Shit Husband. It’s funny because it’s true! Or it’s true that it’s not funny, one or the other.
The real news here is that the end of How To Stay Married has knocked Ten off its perch as Australia’s number one comedy network, though it’s hard to say that the ABC is back on top what with The Weekly barely counting as comedy no matter how many times Charlie Pickering does that ABC HR sketch. Remember those magical days when there was enough Australian comedy on television that we could afford to be picky? Oh wait, that was last week.
Now the latest round of ABC cuts has forced the national broadcaster to re-re-brand ABC Comedy as something we care about even less, which you’d think would be hard to achieve but welcome to 2020. ABC Comedy was a bad idea from the beginning, became an even worse idea once they announced they didn’t have a budget, and by the time it became obvious their flagship show was going to be Tonightly – which wasn’t a bad show in itself, but giving the cream of Australia’s #auspol gagsters a chance to double their twitter followings on TV was never going to bring in the kind of crowd it needed to – it was already over.
This would be the perfect time for the ABC to point to all those crowd-pleasing comedies they’ve been airing over the last decade or so to build some public support, only… and you know where we’re going with this. But why has ABC comedy been so deliberately shit? Comedy hasn’t been a consistently viable product on Australian commercial television for a long time; any kind of rationale for the ABC’s decision to focus on alternative comedy rather than going after mainstream laughs vanished long ago. Not that it ever made sense, what with the golden age of ABC comedy being almost entirely built around shows that people wanted to watch whether they were Good News Week or Spicks & Specks.
It’s certainly possible to argue that the ABC has tried to chase down a wider audience with their comedy programming. The Weekly is a knockoff of a whole bunch of more popular US shows (and The Project), only with no money: Rosehaven is a knockoff of a whole bunch of more popular shows, only with no murders. The problem with that argument is over the last few years Network Ten (and to a lesser extent Nine) have also tried comedy, and as networks with actual experience in trying to grab a wider audience the difference between their programming and the ABC’s has been informative, to say the least.
Comedy should be the area where the ABC connects to the Australian public. People like comedy: the commercial networks aren’t doing much of it. But over the last decade or so they’ve messed it up so consistently that if someone said they were being pressured by the government to actively focus on shit comedy we couldn’t dismiss that theory out of hand.
This isn’t a situation like drama, where the commercial networks make enough local product that it’s reasonable for the ABC to claim their attempts are offering an alternative. Ten will have one sitcom and one sketch show in 2020, plus a highly successful comedy gameshow. Gameshows aside, the ABC will air well over double that, even with their current budget woes. But where Ten has stuck to the basics and not completely disgraced themselves, the ABC just can’t resist zany high concepts that never quite disguise the fact that the substance isn’t there.
Maybe once upon a time, the ABC’s job was to nurture new comedy talent that would then move on to the commercial networks. How to Stay Married is a spin-off from a segment from Peter Helliar’s It’s A Date, which he made for the ABC and which definitely seemed like the work of somebody new to comedy. Those days are over: the vast majority of comedy the ABC airs simply doesn’t have anything in common with what commercial television – or its viewers – are interested in.
Every time there’s budget cuts the ABC goes on and on about their award-winning news and they’re right to do so. But the news is everywhere these days, and while the ABC might be serving up the good stuff most people are happy with car crashes and bag snatchers. Comedy should be a point of difference for the ABC, something the general public likes that they can point to and say “this is what we do for you and you can’t get it anywhere else”.
ABC comedy should provide Australians with a solid reason why they should support the network. Good luck managing that after two series of Squinters.
LOLZ: Last One Laughing Zzzzzzzzzzz
Last One Laughing (the first two episodes of which are now streaming on Amazon Prime) answers a question no one was asking: what happens when comedians play to absolute silence?
Now, to be fair to the makers of this show, it’s important to remember that Last One Laughing was conceived and shot well before lockdown. You remember before lockdown – when no one imagined that live comedy would become comedians in their homes performing to their laptop cameras for an audience they can’t really see or hear or react to.
So, given that our live comedy future will increasingly feature small, distant or quiet audiences, Last One Laughing is, perhaps, of the moment. A TV iteration of live comedy without an instant reaction.
The concept of Last One Laughing is this: Rebel Wilson oversees a sort of Big Brother house in which ten comedians are locked for six hours. During the six hours, the comedians have to try and make each other laugh, but if anyone does laugh – and Rebel can see if they do because she’s got an elaborate control room-type thing – they’re kicked out. The last one left, i.e. the one who hasn’t laughed gets $100,000.
So, let’s just say our ten comedians pull out all the stops to get that $100,000. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the more surreal and surprising the comedian, the wackier they go and the more laughs they get.
Anne Edmonds is the first to make one of the ten laugh, with a cutting and beautifully-timed comment that most would struggle to keep a straight face at. Sam Simmons brings his A-game too, wearing some bizarre costumes (including a Home & Away school dress and a jacket covered in floppy penises) before he decides to dispense with the silly outfits and strip down nude and sit in a paddling pool, encouraging the other comedians to pour Fanta on him. This turns out to be the least funny of his routines.
Frank Woodley also busts out a few wacky props and costumes, although Simmons consistently outdoes him simply by being more bizarre.
Others on the show – Nazeem Hussain, Joel Creasey, Dilruk Jayasinha, Ed Kavalee, Becky Lucas, Nick Cody and Susie Youssef – take more of a backseat in the first couple of episodes, focusing on getting laughs in lower-key ways. And, of course, desperately trying not to laugh at all the crazy stuff happening around them.
As for who will be the last one laughing, it’s hard to tell. Sam Simmons looks incredibly difficult to crack up and hasn’t come close once, but some of the quieter comics also seem to be brilliant deadpanners. Ed Kavalee was tipped as one-to-watch, and based on his performance so far, he’s definitely a contender.
The element of surprise or sudden shock will probably be the winning weapon, though, and if Simmons, Edmonds or Woodley make it to the end, they’ll be tough competitors.
We still can’t help but think this is ultimately a bad way to do comedy, though. In a pre-COVID world, what was the point of making comedy seem less funny by forcing the live audience not to react to it? And even in a post-COVID world, why wouldn’t you want comedy to be as funny as possible? It’s certainly possible to make an audience you can’t hear or see laugh – comedians on TV and radio have been doing that for years – but live comedy often gets its spark because it responds to the audience.
And that’s what’s missing here: spark. There are some individual funny moments but no sustained laughs. The comedian-audience are distracted from being funny because they need to stop themselves from laughing in order to win the cash. So, their eyes aren’t on what should be their real job, here: making us at home laugh.
Born Again Piss Tank
Press release time!
To b(ooz)e or not to b(ooz)e? That is the question Shaun Micallef asks in July
ABC and Screen Australia are pleased to announce the eagerly awaited Shaun Micallef’s On The Sauce, a 3-part documentary series about Australia’s drinking culture, premieres Tuesday 21 July at 8:30pm on ABC and iview.There are many facets to Shaun Micallef – comedian, actor, writer, hugely popular TV presenter. Perhaps less known, he’s also a dedicated teetotaller. So, when his sons hit drinking age, it got him thinking. What kind of drinking scene are they about to dive into?
Revealing a rarely seen personal side, Shaun shares all sorts of intimate stories, from his self-combusting grandfather to the reason he chose to stop drinking. He meets a variety of everyday Australians, from those who love to drink to those who’ve sworn off it. Along the way, he’s joined by experts who share some eye-opening facts about the “demon drink”.
In this thought-provoking series, Shaun attends an all-girl pub crawl, an alcohol-fuelled B&S ball and an 18th birthday celebration, to gain a better understanding of Australia’s long held love affair with booze.
Shaun also catches up with young abstainers and those recovering from addiction, which makes him question whether Aussie attitudes to alcohol are changing, and how this will impact his own three sons?
Shaun is confronted by the highs and lows of alcohol consumption and witnesses the changing shape of our national pastime. Where are we heading as a nation? And how does Shaun feel after getting drunk for the first time in three decades?
Hungover? There, we saved you three hours.
Much as we like Micallef, this could go either way. Anyone who’s read a Fairfax paper on the weekend over the last decade or so knows there’s a fairly consistent element of hand-wringing wowserism on the subject of alcohol coming from the more “enlightened” side of the Australian media, not to mention the semi-regular appearances down your local bookstore of memoirs from women under 40 going on about how they spent their 20s drinking and It Was Bad.
On the other hand, a lot of people do seriously feel that Australia has a culture of getting on the turps – especially experts with “eye-opening facts”, those who’ve sworn off the grog, young abstainers and those recovering from addiction. It’ll be a tricky needle to thread… especially if it’s going to stay entertaining and amusing while basically saying “drinking is bad”, which it’s obviously going to have to do.
(we all know that drinking is bad – it’s just that sobriety for some is worse, and the ABC is hardly going to do a series about why we drink when the answer is partly going to be “because western liberal society is pretty shit for many people and they have to have a cheap escape somehow”)
One things for sure: the ABC will be crossing all available fingers and toes that we don’t have a second wave of coronavirus between now and July 21st, because nothing’s going to seem more irrelevant if we’re all back in lockdown than a series about pub crawls and B&S balls.
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?