Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale The (AFL) Footy Show (10 years too late)
Ok, The (AFL) Footy Show has got the axe, and not a minute too soon. So why should we care?
Well, some of the seemingly endless articles looking back over the history of Nine’s The Footy Show – and who doesn’t remember the best running gag in Logies history where the much less popular NRL Footy Show beat it for the Logie for Most Popular Sports Program ten times in 13 years since 2005 – have pointed out that it was in many ways a retread of televised pie-nights like League Teams and World of Sport, and that it’s this tradition (revived by Seven’s all-conquering The Front Bar) that has led to the Footy Show‘s demise.
This kind of makes sense, suggesting as it does that Australia (well, the AFL parts of it at least) will always like a show where loveable knockabout larrikins sit around talking sport-related shit, and that The Footy Show failed because it lost sight of that. The thing is, this isn’t strictly true.
Yes, when The Footy Show began, a large chunk of it was basically re-heated World of Sport banter where footy players past and (unusually for the time) present talked about the game like it was meant to be a bit of a laugh. But there were two elements present that previous sports shows had lacked: Sam Newman rapidly went from elder sport statesman to fully fledged media prankster, and Trevor Marmalade was funny.
These days Trevor Marmalade doesn’t get mentioned all that much in Footy Show history, but in the first decade or so of the show he was the one getting the big laughs. A seasoned comedy professional best known to the public for popping up on Hey Hey It’s Saturday, he was often mentioned behind the scenes as a kind of comedy technician, someone who helped shows and performers fine tune their act.
Whether you gave a shit about AFL or not, whenever host Eddie McGuire would throw to “Trev” over behind Trev’s Bar, you know you were going to get a rock-solid joke. Marmalade took the show’s comedy up a notch, lifting the long stretches of fairly average banter into something worth watching if you were after a laugh – and on Australian television in the late 90s, there was enough local comedy going around that viewers could afford to be choosy.
In contrast, Sam Newman got laughs and attention by becoming a larger-than-life figure, which is a nice way of saying he did pretty much whatever it took to make sure the spotlight stayed on him. This mostly involved being a professional dickhead both in the studio and out of the street, encouraging his audience to laugh at his chosen victims in pretty much the same way as a bully does. Okay, exactly the same way as a bully does.
For a while there, the tension between the two forms of comedy – well, comedy and “comedy” – worked. Not only did the mix provide something for most viewers, but Marmalade’s jokes took the harsh edge off Newman’s antics and Newman’s stunts made Marmalade’s fairly traditional jokes seem a bit more edgy. Throw in some increasingly polished footy banter from a bunch of players with personality and Channel Nine had an across the board winner.
Pop quiz: in any large organisation, when an arrogant loud-mouth glory-hog bumps up against a quietly competent professional, who do you think management is going to side with?
FOOTY Show funnyman Trevor Marmalade has been axed by Channel 9.
Marmalade leaves after 15 years with the high-rating show.
The shock departure comes as Nine moves to freshen up AFL version of The Footy Show after another turbulent year.
Just-retired Hawthorn champ Shane Crawford and buffoon Billy Brownless will play bigger roles next year and new segments will be introduced.
Marmalade’s “behind the bar” role will go.
It is believed Marmalade was no longer considered important to the show.
Meanwhile, in that same Year of Our Lord 2008:
Resident clown Sam Newman was never far from the headlines. He was condemned for a controversial sketch in which he manhandled a mannequin dressed to resemble football journalist Caroline Wilson.
Newman had surgery for prostate cancer and a shoulder injury, then spent three months on crutches after dropping a gym weight on his ankle and shattering the bone.
He also apologised after causing a storm over perceived crude remarks about Tasmanian MP Paula Wriedt. Newman signed a new long-term, multi-million dollar deal with Nine in October.
And by any reasonable standard it was all downhill from there. The rot had obviously set in well before that – increasingly The Footy Show had become The Sam Newman Show, and Sam’s act on The Footy Show was largely split between roaming the streets calling people dickheads and reading out letters where he could call the writers dickheads – but this was as clear a sign as any that the show had chosen its path and while the pie night banter might still get a look-in, actual comedy was “no longer considered important to the show”.
Which was a little odd, considering the closest thing they had to a rival – Ten’s Before the Game – was pulling viewers because of comedy. Peter Helliar’s footy character Straunchie was a hit; Dave Hughes was a regular (years later he’d later turn up on The Footy Show once they realised they needed someone there who could actually tell a joke). When Helliar left, Mick Molloy – who’d previously been hosting sports show Any Given Sunday on Nine alongside doing some actual legit sports commentary – stepped in, then when Before the Game was axed he went to Seven for Saturday Night Football and finally The Front Bar.
But The Footy Show wasn’t interested in actual comedy – when Dave Hughes jumped ship after little over a year to go back to Ten for Hughsey We Have a Problem, he wasn’t replaced. They’d already doubled down and bet the house on their “personality” based-programming: if you enjoyed Sam Newman, Billy Brownless was basically Sam Jr., and behind him the rest of the cast were waiting to have a go at talking loud and saying nothing. This year’s attempt to reboot the format without Newman was dead out of the gate; everyone who didn’t like his stunts was already long gone.
Literally every other mainstream (AFL) footy show since the launch of The (AFL) Footy Show has gone with comedians somewhere in the mix. It’s not hard to do: plenty of comedians want to crack jokes about the footy. It’s only The Footy Show that made a conscious decision that they didn’t have room for professional comedians. It – and by that we mean Sam Newman, as by 2008 the entire show was basically built around him – was too big for that. And now it’s been axed.
Good riddance.
Countdown to democracy sausage
With just one week to go until our triennial democracy sausage party, Sammy J’s Government Coach is appearing in weeknightly instalments of Countdown to Glory, a mockumentary about the Liberal party’s 2019 federal election campaign.
Sammy J has been using his Government Coach character as a concept through which to satirise the week’s politics for a while now, imaging that our federal politicians are actually part of a poorly-performing football team and that it’s the Coach’s job to get them to win the next match. In much the same way, Clarke & Dawe used to do sketches where Bryan Dawe was a teacher telling off John Clarke’s wayward child, er, politician for not letting another child, er, politician “have a go on the bike”.
As conceits go, these aren’t bad ones; we’re all familiar with sports coaches’ press conferences, and we’ve all been told off by teachers. And framing a current political issue as a sporting match or a spat between schoolkids is usually a pretty apt metaphor. It’s also quite a neat way of sneaking in a lot of references to dull political wranglings whilst keeping the audience laughing with recognisable parodies of sporting clichés and teacher/student dynamics.
Thing is though, to work as political satire, there needs to be some analysis of the politics, no matter how disguised, and Sammy J doesn’t really manage much of that in Countdown to Glory beyond a few hackneyed visual gags referencing the one or two things most people know about the one or two Coalition politicians most people have heard of. For example, Barnaby Joyce walks around the “Blue Ties” team changing rooms in the nude apart from an Akubra hat and Tony Abbott is known as “onion” and walks around in lifesaving gear. If Kim Beasley was still in politics, there would be fat jokes. It’s that level of humour.
To be fair, there are also some very topical references as well, as the show is clearly shot on the day of broadcast. This means that Sammy J can include up-to-the-minute mentions of Egg Girl, franking credits, candidates disgracing themselves online and the Royal baby’s name. But beyond that, it’s a show that was written well before time and mainly looks at generalities of the campaign (i.e. the Club President will sack people if they don’t perform), what the fans think (there’s a scene where some hardcore Blue Ties fans hark back wistfully to the great Premiership of 1996) and occasional cuts to clips from The Pollie Show, another Sammy J staple conceit and one he won’t able to do any longer, it seems.
For those of you with very long memories, Countdown to Glory is a bit like 90s newsroom sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey, solid enough but mainly notable for whatever topical references it managed to shove into the plot the writers had written weeks, probably months, in advance.
Have said that, with week one of Countdown to Glory focusing on the lead up to tomorrow’s Liberal campaign launch, and this week’s batch of episodes presumably being about that, it could get excitingly topical. Assuming Sammy J has the skill to quickly turn whatever happens tomorrow night into sports comedy gold.
Am I (Mr) Black Enough For You
Looks like we owe the team behind Mr Black an apology. Ever since we first heard about this sitcom we’ve been making wisecracks about how much it’s obviously a Kingswood Country knock-off, with a bit of Meet the Parents and All in the Family mixed in. It was simplistic and superficial of us – we were leaping to judgement based on nothing but a brief synopsis, when what we really should have done was reserved our opinion until were were able to watch at least the first episode and give the show a fair go.
Because what this show is really ripping off is Adam Zwar’s earlier series Wilfred.
Okay, “ripping off” is harsh (can you even rip off yourself?), but seriously: Wilfred was a show about a gormless wimp whose girlfriend was non-romantically devoted to a third wheel in their relationship who was constantly trying to break them up behind her (generally oblivious) back. Meanwhile, Mr Black is… you see where this is going.
There are a few tweaks here and thank God for that because Wilfred was creepy enough back in 2007; boyfriend Fin (Nick Russell) might wear a t-shirt that reads The Future is Female, but he has a bit more spine than the Wilfred version of his character (he even moves out in the first episode) and Angela (Sophie Wright) has a bit more of a clue as to what Wilfred her father is like. Even though she does move her dad into their home on a permanent basis without telling Fin, which… yeah, not good.
But to balance that out, Mr Black is a total piece of shit.
Look, Stephen Curry is a great actor and he’s actually really good here, but the character he’s playing is not a loveable blowhard like Ted Bullpit or a well-meaning but racist and sexist dinosaur like Ted Bullpit or even someone you could stand to be in the same room with for maybe five minutes like Ted Bullpit. He’s a bully and a thug, a creepy sleaze and a dead-eyed sociopath, and considering the only moment of warmth between him and his daughter involves him playing a delightfully controlling game of “answer my random general knowledge question that came out of nowhere” we’re fairly sure the show wants us to see him that way.
Which leads to the question; who thought a version of Meet the Parents where Mr Fokker had no redeeming features whatsoever was a good idea?
When we were expecting this to be a Kingswood Country revival – and honestly, there’s still plenty of time for it to go that way – we thought “smart move Mr Black creator, writer and producer Adam Zwar”. Zwar has always been a canny judge of what the television networks want, and his CV is packed with series that, while often not to our taste, are shows that we can totally understand being made by Australian television networks.
We thought this was going to be a Kingswood Country revival because comedy today has swung back towards the light and silly. It’s big characters and wacky antics that get laughs; even something like Get Krack!n made serious points by going totally off the wall. Having an average guy dealing with a cartoon monster of a father-in-law? That fits that vibe quite nicely.
Instead, Mr Black (episode one at least) is a throwback to the golden age of Cringe Comedy, a show that takes a comedy premise, pushes it firmly into the uncomfortable area, and then just stares back at you. It doesn’t even look like a comedy, which is to say it looks polished and professional in the way of most Australian dramas but if we wanted artfully shot scenes set in chilly inner city residences we’d go to the St Kilda Film Festival.
Oh sure, there are jokes: look, Fin is telling his woes to his best friend over the phone, only it’s not his best friend, it’s a cold caller wanting to know if he’s happy with his phone plan! Previously on Mr Black: Mr Black almost drowns while trying to film women’s butts. Which is a little strange because Mr Black isn’t 60 (the press release says he’s 48 and don’t get us started on how that doesn’t work) and so not really someone who needs to create his own blurry out of focus swimsuit porn when he has… a phone?
The whole thing is weirdly misjudged: the very first scene is Mr Black stopping his mobility scooter in the middle of traffic then beating the shit out of Fin’s car when he honks his horn. Sure, you don’t fuck with Mr Black – but if the premise of the show is that Mr Black despises Fin for not being man enough for his daughter, then wouldn’t Fin standing up for himself be the kind of thing he might, you know, respect?
The power dynamic established here feels all wrong for a comedy. You get laughs out of this set-up by having Mr Black be largely ineffectual yet unaware that time has passed his kind by – if he’s a real threat to the relationship then he’s a threat, not a source of comedy. And if he’s just a nasty controlling shit, then what we’re watching isn’t a comedy tug-of-war but a creepy psychodrama about a bullied man clinging desperately to a woman who either doesn’t realise or doesn’t care that her partner is being psychologically abused by her best friend. You know, like Wilfred.
Yes, it’s the first episode and yes, they’re establishing the dynamic and yes, by the end of the episode it looks like Angela has wised up to her father and is now on Fin’s side. But why establish Mr Black as a total bastard in episode one if you’re going to have to walk that back in episode two? In Wilfred Wilfred could be a dick because at the end of the day he was still a dog and the whole show was a fantasy; the way this stands at the moment, this is just grim.
But as usual, we’re overthinking things. They’ll have to team up once or twice against a mutual bad guy, they’ll fight over the right way to help Angela when she’s in trouble, Mr Black will try to make Fin a man by going to the footy, Fin will try to educate Mr Black by doing something wanky… that’s at least five out of the next seven episodes sorted. And then the final episode will see Mr Black about to finally go into a home then at the last minute Fin says he can stay and gets hit in the balls for his trouble.
Kinda like the audience really.
It’s a Fine Line Between Pleasure and Pain
What exactly is a comedy? We’ve gone on and on here over the years about the way Australian television is happy to treat comedy as some kind of special ingredient to liven up an otherwise boring project, but it’s an approach that’s become so ingrained that there’s a boatload of shows currently on the air where we’re not exactly sure what to think.
Look, Lego Masters is hosted by a comedian (well, Hamish Blake) who spends most of the show cracking wise, but is it a comedy? Nope. The Australian version of Pointless – yes, it’s still on the air – is hosted by Mark Humphries, a man currently doing comedy sketches on the ABC’s top current affairs program, but is it a comedy? Nope.
So what about the return of Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation? It’s hosted by a comedian and features a bunch of wacky bits – but we’ve already established that’s not really enough to make a show a comedy. It’s tempting to just say “it’s really funny”, because, you know, for the most part it is. But if being funny was all it took to be a comedy then AFL footy show The Front Bar would be getting two thumbs up from us each week.
Actually, that’s not a bad comparison to make: while both shows have a (relatively) serious hook to hang their comedy on, what makes them comedies (as far as our viewing schedules are concerned) is that they both make it very clear indeed that being funny is their top priority. They’ll happily derail a segment to get a laugh, which isn’t something you can say about Lego Masters.
It’s also what separates them from a show like Hughesy, We Have A Problem, which is ostensibly more of an outright comedy but in practice has a host (and a format) that keeps dragging things back to the fairly mundane premise. It’s been around long enough to have loosened up in theory, but each week it feels like a show where the people running it think the comedy gold lies in the various problems being presented and not the guests being wacky.
(to be fair, the guests aren’t always that wacky either)
Of course, Australian television is littered with panel shows that had the opposite problem: they let the guests run wild and the show ended up a sloppy mess. So it’s no real surprise that at the moment the pendulum has swung the other way and even the “off the wall” shows like Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation are relatively firmly locked down as far as what happens and when.
The trick is, as it has always been, to put people in charge who can do both. TAYG continues to work even when it’s clearly a more sedate show than it was during its final years on Ten because Shaun Micallef is able to keep the show moving forward while throwing in as many gags and physical bits as it can handle.
The short answer as to why Hughesy, We Have A Problem (which finished up over the weekend) doesn’t work as well is because as a host, Dave Hughes lacks the confidence to let things go off track. Not that the show would really let him: when you have a (relatively) high concept like “solving people’s problems” (or “making shit out of Lego”), that’s what at least some of your audience have tuned in for, and if you don’t deliver they’re going to be pissed off.
The Front Bar, on the other hand, is based around the idea of a couple of mates talking shit about footy, which is about as low concept as you can get. It’s a comedy because the people in front of the camera are funny, and they’re given enough rope to be funny without having the format hold them back.
But what about TAYG? It has a very funny host who gets to do what it takes to get laughs: it’s also a game show with regular segments and a winning team at the end of the night. Okay, the winners are fairly arbitrary at best, and the segments are really just an excuse for a bunch of pop culture jokes. Also, the team captains are pretty funny in their own right, the guests are usually well chosen, the whole thing moves along at a decent pace and nobody is taking any of it all that seriously despite the decontamination outfits in the final segment.
So either the difference is an extremely subtle one relying on a wide range of variables that are hard to define at the best of times… or Hughesy needs to throw more bananas.
Monday is the banana. Robyn is us. #YourGenAU pic.twitter.com/5FxpQtH0nC
— Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation (@YourGenAU) May 5, 2019
Eh, let’s go with the bananas.
Heavy on the Lows
Press release time!
Multi-Award winning comedy The Letdown returns to ABC this May to mine the highs and lows of parenthood
Internationally acclaimed, AACTA award winning comedy series The Letdown returns to mine the hilarious highs and lows faced by new parents, starting on ABC and ABC iview from Wednesday 29 May at 9pm, with the complete series available to binge on iview following the initial broadcast.
Following a first season hailed by The Sydney Morning Herald as “the funniest, most truthful thing on TV right now” and that drew raves from Vanity Fair and The New York Times, The Letdown season two picks up where we left off with Audrey (co-creator/writer Alison Bell in her twice AACTA Award nominated role) and the local parent’s group she thought she didn’t need. Their babies are now turning one and as they learn to walk, so too do their parents (metaphorically). At first, it’s all baby-steps, but ultimately, everyone will find their feet, with a new normal that brings more change, more chaos and more comedy.
Reprising their roles as new parents are Sacha Horler (Sando), Lucy Durack (Sisters), Celeste Barber (of #challengeaccepted Instagram fame), Duncan Fellows (Secret City), Leah Vandenberg (The Wrong Girl), Leon Ford and Xana Tang. Also returning are Sarah Peirse, Claire Lovering, John Leary, Gareth Davies, Fiona Choi and guest stars Brendan Cowell (Game of Thrones), Patrick Brammall (No Activity) and TV Week Logies Hall of Fame honouree Noni Hazlehurst. They are joined this season by Bert LaBonte (Book of Mormon), Felix Williamson and internationally acclaimed standup Felicity Ward (Ronny Chieng: International Student).
Season two of The Letdown hails from creators/writers/producers Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell and is produced by Julian Morrow (The Chaser, The Checkout) and Linda Micsko (Maximum Choppage) for Giant Dwarf. Directing this series are Trent O’Donnell (The Good Place (NBC), No Activity (CBS All Access), New Girl (Fox), Amanda Brotchie (Picnic at Hanging Rock, A Place to Call Home), as well as Scheller and Bell, making their directorial debuts.
Season one of The Letdown will be available to binge on ABC iview from 29 May. Netflix will distribute the second season globally outside of Australia, continuing its partnership from Season 1, which is also available on Netflix in Australia.
Two points:
a): Hopefully it’ll be better than the middling first season.
b): Is this an ABC series that’s been picked up by Netflix, or a Netflix series that the ABC gets to show out here on an ad hoc basis? It looks like s1 is going to be available on both Netflix and iView in Australia at the same time, which seems weird (iView is free, Netflix is not), while s2 is going to be iView exclusive even though Netflix has it everywhere else?
Geez, imagine how confused we’d be if this was a series we were actually excited about.
The Housemate: Short term let
Deep within the depths of ABC iView, we stumbled across The Housemate, a short comedy series written by and starring Gemma Bird Matheson and Alex Keddie. The Housemate imagines a world in which a room in a decent and affordable inner-city rental property is so scarce that the only hope some people have of ever getting one is to be a contestant on a The Bachelor-style reality show called The Housemate.
It’s funny because we are literally months away from this actually happening.
But sadly, despite its topicality and resonance, The Housemate isn’t that hilarious. It’s more the kind of multi-part sketch you’d expect to see in one of those ensemble sketch shows that contain a lot of TV parodies. You know, the type of sketch shows that networks insist on making pilots of every so often, like last year’s Skit Happens, which featured “a parody of Love Island but with desperate, single women competing for the interest of a cute fluffy cat”.
To be fair to The Housemate, it does wring about as many jokes out of a The Bachelor-style program about finding a flatmate as it possibly can. Including a sequence where the voiceover man describes how it’s been “a rocky road” for friends Gemma and Alex to find a new housemate, while Gemma and Alex are sitting on a sofa looking sad and eating some Rocky Road.
There’s also a mildly amusing inner-city twist on The Bachelor’s rose ceremony, where the surviving contestants receive a latte, with vegan contestants getting an almond milk latte but being asked to pay 80c extra. But otherwise, as far as the laughs go, the show lives or dies on whether the prospective housemates are actually funny or not.
In a wise move, the two vegan contestants who start out on the show are dispensed with in early episodes (turns out there are only about three funny jokes about vegans and they’ve all been done to death by comedians in the past half-decade), leaving the far funnier creeps and oddballs remaining in the show.
Of these, the stand-outs are:
Molly B (Laura Wheelwright, Wolf Creek, Get Krack!n), an intense shop assistant at Sportsgirl who seems to know everything about Gemma and Alex because she’s been stalking them on social media.
Tiana (Tiana Hogben, Get Krack!n), who seems incapable of expressing emotions but somehow makes it through to the final round.
Marg (Heidi Arena, Little Lunch, Audrey’s Kitchen), a 47-year-old mother of two who recently split up with her husband.
In the end, though, even with these solid comedy characters played by very able comic performers, The Housemate fails to fire because for the conceit to work the action has to take place within the confines of a reality show, thus limiting the comic possibilities.
Of course, had they taken the opposite approach, as Get Krack!n and This Time with Alan Partridge have done, where the writers took liberties with conceit to get laughs, it might not have worked either. Parodies of TV shows, despite their proliferation in comedy across the decades, are often very hard to get right. The makers have to both be true to the show they’re parodying and exaggerate the show enough to get laughs. But be too true to the show and it’s not funny, and be too over-the-top and it’s no longer true.
The Housemate’s ultimate problem? It veers too much towards the truth and thus is fairly thin on laughs.
The Weekly is a Long Time in Politics
Chris Lilley’s Lunatics might have been grabbing all the comedy headlines over the last week or so, but that doesn’t mean The Weekly hasn’t been pulling crowds for its election coverage. No, it’s the general ineptitude of The Weekly that explains why it hasn’t been pulling in crowds – in fact, it’s shedding around over a hundred thousand viewers from its lead in (a show about portrait painting, no less) during an election campaign where it’s pretty much the only comedy take around.
Ok, so either Australians want their politicians treated with respect – which seems unlikely – or they want to laugh at their politicians but know the laughs are thin on the ground when The Weekly rolls around. Who else but Charlie Pickering is going to tell Australia that Luna Park is “the Bill Shorten of amusement parks: you think it’s going to be shit going in… and it is.”
Let’s break that down just a little because bluntly calling the opposition leader “shit” during an election campaign used to be the kind of thing that people actually noticed. We’ve all become used to the way The Weekly‘s political comedy is literally just pointing out things that actually happened in real life, but that’s the trap: we’re so used to this show being nothing but regular news stories read out in a slightly strangled voice by Pickering that when they slip in a bit of commentary it’s way too easy to just let it slide.
So where exactly is the joke in saying Bill Shorten is shit? This isn’t like when Mad as Hell used to pummel Shorten each week for his crap zingers; this is the host of a supposed comedy show describing the opposition leader as “shit” because… again, where exactly is the joke? That Luna Park is shit… and so is Bill Shorten? That some amusement parks seem like they’ll be shit and then they actually are shit… and so is Bill Shorten? Little help?
(then again, this is a “comedy” where one of the jokes was Scott Morrison saying “Bill Shorten is trapped on a costings merry-go-round” followed by Pickering repeating what Morrison had just said then moving on)
Look, we totally understand that the Australian media is currently dominated by upper-middle class types making six figures a year and writing news stories where bringing in $140,000 a year makes you a “hard working average family”. We get that this means that pretty much all the news we get is presented by people who would naturally side with the Liberal party even if Labor’s current bunch of policies didn’t threaten the negative gearing on their multiple investment properties. And we know that even if a journalist in this country somehow managed to look beyond their own self-interest when covering the news, the fact this election is looking pretty darn one-sided means they have to big up Morrison’s team simply to keep the punters interested.
But the ABC putting The Weekly on during an election is the biggest betrayal of the Australian people since… oh, let’s say the last time One Nation voted on anything. The Chaser might have been struggling during their last election campaign, and they weren’t all that engaged with the one before that either, but at least they were covering it and pointing out funny things; The Weekly can’t even manage that. Oh look, they’re still going with that “Australian Property Market” joke even though the current minor drop in housing prices is a much-needed correction after a decade or more of massive rises that have priced large swathes of the population out of the market.
Again, what exactly is the joke here? Because it’s possible we’re meant to go “ha ha, rich people are suffering” but the bit is so vague it’s much more likely we’re meant to go “oh no, the market is imploding”, which… isn’t really a joke? It’s the kind of thing a shithouse political cartoonist would do, and even then they’d throw Bill Shorten in there somewhere lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite so we could at least get that it was blaming him or something.
There’s a lot of reasons to dislike The Weekly and we’ve almost certainly listed them all over the years but here’s one we haven’t dusted off for a while: it’s a show where just about all the “comedy” comes from simply pointing out obvious things. Bill Shorten is shit! The Housing Market is struggling! It’s like a couple of really stupid kids watched a bunch of Clarke & Dawe and Micallef clips and thought “yes, comedy is all about explaining things!” without realising that the explanations have to be more than just pointing out stuff to turn it into comedy.
We were slightly excited when we figured out the reason why The Weekly was slightly better in the run up to the election announcement was because they were clearly stuck waiting for the big news and couldn’t put together their usual crap “explainer” segment that drags the rest of the show down. But now the election’s here and oh look, a lengthy report on that train crash Barnaby Joyce radio interview that is just… a slightly annotated version of that train crash Barnaby Joyce radio interview. It was bad enough when Mark Humphries decided that pretty much all he needed to do for his Barnaby Joyce impression was say “Labor” a whole lot; at least he bothered to dress up a little for his shithouse “joke”.
So here’s a bit of explaining from us: if all your comedy does is repeat what’s in the mainstream news with the occasional “what’s up with that”-style interjection, you’re not doing comedy. You’re also not doing news. So what are you doing?
Let’s go with wasting everybody’s time.
In attack of the defence of Barry Humphries
Last week came the news that the annual best-in-festival award dished out by the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Barry, named after Barry Humphries, would be renamed in light of Humphries’ comments on transgender people last year.
Humphries is a household name for his iconic characters Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, but last year came under fire for saying that being transgender is “a fashion”.
“How many different kinds of lavatory can you have? And it’s pretty evil when it’s preached to children by crazy teachers,” Humphries said in an interview with The Spectator magazine.
Previous winners of the Barry, including Hannah Gadsby and Zoe Coombs Marr, called for the award to be renamed after he made the comments.
Last year we wrote about Humphries comments, which had led to a number of people in the comedy industry suggesting Humphries was past it and should retire. And after much consideration – and we’ve been huge fans of Humphries over the years – we agreed with them:
It’s not like Humphries is incapable of understanding the issues trans people face, he’s an intelligent person who reads widely and thinks about current issues, so how can he hold such hateful and ridiculous views on trans people?
So, as much as we’ve enjoyed his work over the years, we think it’s time for Humphries’ to take his final bow. And shutting up about issues he can’t be bothered to understand would be a good idea too.
But given that plenty of people seemed to condemn Humphries’ comments last year and to agree with MICF’s recent decision to rename their awards, we were interested to see this defence of Humphries’ “right to offend” and create “edgy comedy”.
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s decision to rename the Barry Award, its top performer award, named in honour of Australian and world comedy great Barry Humphries, tells you everything you need to know about the state of comedy today.
Humphries has been caught out for remarks he made about trans people. In an interview with the Telegraph in 2016, he said gender-reassignment surgery was ‘self-mutilation’ and called Caitlyn Jenner a ‘publicity-seeking ratbag’.
Like so much of his comedy, what he said was sharp, unkind and challenging to the consensus. Key KPIs for edgy comedy, you would have thought. But it seems being edgy in 2019 is a risky business.
“Sharp, unkind and challenging to the consensus”? Or just simplistic, mean and utterly wrong?
The article also includes this:
In the past, Humphries’ creations took aim at the conservative elite, with creations like the alcohol-swilling and lecherous Sir Les Patterson, and at celebrity culture and snobbery with his most famous character, Dame Edna Everage. Now that his target has shifted to PC, some people want to revoke his right to offend, and to make out that he basically is Sir Les.
After all, who is creatively braver? Left-leaning comedians preaching to the converted or a young Barry Humphries, producing genuinely challenging satire that offended conservative Australia? Those appalled at Humphries’ comments sound a lot like the blue-rinse conformists who used to complain that Dame Edna and Sir Les were damaging Australia’s reputation overseas.
The “right to offend” and the description of said offensive comedy as “edgy” is often cited by writers from the right in defence of certain types of jokes and it’s notable that the writer of this piece is a contributor to conservative magazine The Spectator, where Humphries’ original comments were made (Humphries himself has also written for The Spectator on numerous occasions).
Over the years, we’ve seen the “right to offend” invoked in defence of jokes about rape, violence, women, sexual minorities, ethnic minorities and non-cis-gendered people. But what commentators from the right are arguing for isn’t for comedy that’s “edgy”, they’re arguing that comedy should be allowed to punch down.
They also don’t want to challenge the status quo – they are the status quo and they want to stay there. And when they talk about “left-leaning comedians preaching” what they’re really saying is that they want people from the “left” to shut up so that they can have the stage.
Comedy has historically been one of the few entertainment outlets for people who want to challenge the status quo with genuinely fresh ideas and, yes, those people have tended to come from the left. Why? Because punching up, the act of parodying and satirising the powerful – a staple of comedy – is always funnier than punching down, the act of making jokes about those less able to defend themselves.
SIDEBAR: To ask a topical question: why is no one laughing at Chris Lilley’s Lunatics? It’s because attitudes to mental health issues, race, gender, sexual violence and sexual and gender minorities – staples of Lilley’s humour – have shifted so significantly in recent years that his punching down-style is now falling flat. It’s extraordinary to see people who previously defended shows like Jonah from Tonga come out against Lunatics (see our recent article on this for some examples) but they are.
What is ironic here is that once upon a time, what Barry Humphries did genuinely was edgy. He regularly punched up at our staid and righteous political leaders, and at the ridiculous, conservative attitudes of this country’s largely suburban population. He was a ground-breaker, an acute social satirist and character comedian who rightfully became the most famous comedian this country has ever produced. There is no Australian comedian who’s been as successful as him for so long, and it’s hard to think of a better choice to name an Australian comedy award after.
But if his idea of funny now is to blow off at unisex toilets and concoct a load of nonsense about left-wing teachers forcing kids to be trans, or whatever the hell his argument is, then removing his name from a major comedy award is the right thing to do. His comments weren’t funny, his recent appearances on TV have been downright weird, and like a lot of people said last year: maybe it’s time he shut up and retired.
The Lunatics are the people who commissioned this
The reviews of Chris Lilley’s Lunatics are in, and it’s not looking good for this country’s most hyped comedian.
…one of the underlying problems in Lilley’s humour still remains: he continues to punch down, making fun of people who have not been afforded the same privileges as he. There’s also the fact that his now very familiar shtick hasn’t matured since his breakthrough in 2005’s We Could Be Heroes. In fact it’s more juvenile than ever.
Some questionably reductive depictions of mental illness aside, Lunatics is more mawkish than outrageous.
Whether anyone but the die-hards will watch to the series’ emotive end is another matter.
But the biggest offence in his new Netflix series Lunatics is that it isn’t very funny at all -at least not in the two episodes I watched. And I say that as a big fan of We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High.
Despite a long break since the disappointing Jonah from Tonga now it just feels like we’ve seen it all before. That’s despite a parade of new characters for our entertainment.
Lunatics is designed to aggravate and make you feel uncomfortable, but the bait isn’t worth taking because we’ve been here so many times before; to be outraged is too easy.
The repetitive nature of Lilley’s comedy and his inability to evolve makes him stick out even more, especially at a time when there is a great reckoning in comedy. Comedy has changed and audiences are less receptive now to what may have been once the norm. To bring back Lilley’s defence: we can put the jokes of the past in their context — racist, sexist, homophobic — but that doesn’t mean they’re going to fly in 2019.
Where before Lilley’s characterisations revealed some redeeming features of each of his creations, Lunatics attempts in its death throes to justify each of the central six’s abhorrence by suggesting that, “If you wanna be weird, be weird. You do you.” It’s not enough, and feels entirely ham-fisted in each of the six’s individual versions of a happy ending.
Perhaps it’s Lilley reassuring himself that the weirdness he imagines can be considered OK because he’s being authentic to that which comes from his creative night terrors.
I laughed really hard at one moment (and only one). A supporting character did something that was very much a step too far for them and the humour was in that character having the wherewithal to back themselves. It was very well delivered but not worth watching the 9 episodes necessary to get the context and appreciate it.
Surely after that critical slating – and the above reviews are just scratching the surface – this must be Lilley’s final big series. No one will commission a show from again, right? Unless he makes some seriously big changes to what he produces?
We get that awful characters equals classic comedy – Basil Fawlty, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Fleabag, David Brent/Michael Scott in The Office – but usually, there’s a bit more going on than “here’s someone dreadful or odd at the centre of the show”. Other characters questioning their behaviour or fighting back, for one thing.
Lilley’s habit of rarely allowing his supporting players to speak is a big problem; almost the entire show is an idiot loud-mouth dominating the whole thing. And when you factor in that there’s almost no plot – and its run time is more than five hours – well, most people will tune out fairly early in this series, we suspect, and few will see the promised happy ending.
And we assume that happy ending concerns big-legged Becky, the only character who isn’t an awful human being and who the audience might, therefore, give a vague shit about. It’s hard to imagine fashion store owner Keith, real estate agent Quentin or future Lord of the Manor Gavin ever finding any peace within themselves by, say, changing for the better and becoming decent members of the society. Even pet psychic Jana and ex-porn star Joyce would have to undergo a lot of transformation to generate any pathos. And if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from We Can Be Heroes, Summer Heights High, Angry Boys, Ja’mie: Private School Girl and Jonah from Tonga, it’s that the central character in a Chris Lilley series never changes. Ever.
In fact, Chris Lilley series never change ever. They’ve always been mirthless, plotless, pointless, meandering, indulgent affairs that stretch the definition of “comedy program” to breaking point.
Why the hell do people keep allowing him to make them? And how can we get them to stop? Our only hope for Lunatics is that metrics-obsessed Netflix notices that large numbers of people fail to complete the series or stop watching part-way through early episodes. That’ll kill a second series stone dead.
So, if you think there are people out there who could make a better series with Netflix’s money than Chris Lilley – and we can think of at least a dozen – then do the right thing: stop watching.
You’d Have to be a Lunatic…
If there’s one thing we have to thank Chris Lilley for, its opening our eyes to the way the Australian media works. It was obvious to us when Angry Boys launched that Lilley was a performer with no new ideas, a man seemingly content to do the exact same material – material lifted from one of the nation’s grottier playgrounds at that – again and again and again and… you get the idea. Surely our nation’s media would point this out? Surely just being a Logie winner with a smash hit series under his belt didn’t put him above serious criticism when his work was so clearly flawed?
Ahahaha what fuckwits we were. Film criticism might be about slagging off overseas crap and theatre criticism might be about making everyone feel like they’re not wasting their lives, but television criticism is about “supporting the local industry”, and that made Lilley above reproach even when he was out there trying to make “sneaky nuts” a thing. He made a show where he played a character – in blackface – taking a shit on a police car: turned out the real outrage was that that ABC forgot to nominate it for the Logies.
Chris Lilley and dozens of his fans are angry boys and girls after the ABC forgot to submit the artist’s comedy TV series Angry Boys for the publicly voted section of the Logies.
Bet that “dozens” still burns.
Of course, that’s all in the past now, right? Lilley’s steady downward spiral hit rock bottom around the time of Jonah from Tonga, and now he’s about as likely to get a good word in the local press as the dad from Hey… Dad! is to get a comeback tour. But there is one lone voice willing to call out Chris Lilley’s name in defense of the comedy “provocateur”, and if you guessed this lone warrior was employed by Fairfax (now Nine), clearly you’ve read a newspaper in the last five years:
Chris Lilley is no stranger to controversy.
Some of his best-known characters – Tongan schoolboy Jonah Takalua, introduced in 2007’s Summer Heights High, and African-American rapper S.mouse, from 2011’s Angry Boys – drew widespread criticism after they were labelled “blackface”.
You know what? In 2019 we really don’t need the quotes around “blackface”. If Lilley was parodying a specific existing human being then maybe – maybe – there’d be room for discussion. But these were generic characters Lilley created on a comedy program for parody purposes: it’s blackface.
But amazingly, this article gets worse:
In the past, Lilley’s razor-sharp, sitting-on-the-line-in-the-cultural-sand characterisations have proven easy targets.
Pat Mullins, the housewife from Nollamara in Perth, Western Australia, who suffered from skeletal dysplasia of the femur – that is, one leg is shorter than the other, allowing her to “roll” in a straight line – was one of Lilley’s most loved characters.
The accusation critics would level at that performance – that it is “disability appropriation” – is hard to reconcile with the fact that Pat’s death was devastating, and that Lilley’s performance as the character was both nuanced and genuinely moving.
“Razor-sharp”? Remember that episode in Summer Heights High where Mr G took a shit on his classroom floor than blamed it on a down syndrome student to get them thrown out of his drama class?
More importantly, where exactly were the critics calling out We Can Be Heroes for “disability appropriation”? Turns out it happened once – two days before this article ran. And the point wasn’t “how did this awful We Can Be Heroes show get made” but “why is Chris Lilley’s tired old act still acceptable in 2019” – the article even says:
I used to watch and enjoy his shows years ago. I found some of We Can Be Heroes heartwarming. I thought that Summer Heights High was a clever insight into the stereotypes at high school.
And while we’re here, what does the “genuinely moving” death of a character have to do with anything? If Lilley dressed up in blackface and did an Stepin’ Fetchit routine, would tacking on a tragic death scene suddenly make it all better?
Similarly, the characterisation of Jonah Takalua was battered by accusations of “blackface” which, curiously, did not surface materially when we were introduced to the character in 2011 but took until 2017 to find momentum.
Fun fact: like it says at the start of this very article, Jonah debuted in 2007. Easy mistake to make – unless you’re writing about how social media has made Lilley’s brand of comedy a tough ask, in which case those four years makes a huge difference in social media terms.
Oh wait, no they don’t:
And what should we make of Lilley’s Ricky Wong, the Chinese physics student from We Can Be Heroes, who eschewed academic overachievement in favour of art, and took the role of Walkabout Man in the high school musical Indigeridoo.
To summarise: that’s a white man, playing an Asian kid, wearing indigenous face paint, playing an Aboriginal. How that didn’t turn into a tsunami of social media protest goes some way to explaining how flimsy and inconsistent such firestorms can be.
To summarise: Ricky Wong appeared in 2005’s We Can Be Heroes. The reason why there wasn’t a “tsunami of social media protest” is because there was no social media to protest on. Up next: we complain that the US Navy didn’t use their helicopter fleet to rescue passengers from the Titanic.
We could go on, but this whole fucking article is so stuffed with straw men we’d be here all week. If you’re a television critic – uh, “entertainment editor-at-large” – and you don’t realise that society has changed a lot since 2009 – you know, the year Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno was released, which might explain why there wasn’t a social media outcry over it either – then have fun calling things you don’t like “gay” a la South Park circa 2005.
Bizarrely, this entire article is defending Lilley against claims that his South African Lunatics character Jana was going to be yet more blackface when clearly the initial point of the character is that she might possibly be a blackface character. Why else make her South African? Shit, just look at the photo they released of her:
That’s Lilley walking right up to the line like he always does. Which this article says is a good thing:
It is true that Lilley is a provocateur. His art plainly hungers for both the endorsement of the cool kids at school and the opprobrium of their parents and teachers.
So if he’s just doing the kind of thing that’s central to his comedy, and if it’s part of what makes his comedy work, and if his comedy is “impactful” and “nuanced’ and “genuinely moving” because of it, then why feel the need to leap to his defense? Surely the virtues of his approach to comedy are self-evident?
Unless, of course, you know you’re talking shit.