Australian Tumbleweeds
From the archives: A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy
Just over two years ago we lost John Clarke, if not the greatest satirist the Southern Hemisphere has ever produced then certainly in the top two. Clarke was best known for writing and starring in the sitcom The Games and for his weekly sketches with Bryan Dawe, but he did an awful lot of other great things too.
One near-forgotten Clarke classic is A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy, a satire on the economic recession of the late 80’s/early 90’s, written by Clarke with his The Games co-writer Ross Stevenson. A Royal Commission… was originally a stage production presented at the Belvoir Street Theatre and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 1991; it was then made into a TV show for Seven in 1993 starring some of the cast of Fast Forward.
With its in-depth, thoroughly researched and highly critical satirical analysis of government policy, the public service and business practices, A Royal Commission… is a world away from Seven’s typical comedy fare of the era. Sure, Fast Forward poked a bit of fun at the collapses of various banks and big corporations, and the then Labor government, but it tended to do so through the prism of pop culture parodies, like its version of Star Trek starring Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.
Other Seven comedies of the era, such as Acropolis Now, raised most of their laughs through crude stereotypes. Acropolis Now seemed like a revolutionary comedy, “holding up a mirror to multicultural society” as The Late Show laughingly put it, but it was more a re-working of Kingswood Country, Seven’s early 80’s family hit sitcom which featured a lot of gags about the Greek son-in-law (played by Lex Marinos). The re-working being that in Acropolis Now, the Greeks did the same Greek jokes but about themselves.
Comedy on commercial television in the early 90’s wasn’t exactly intellectual. Unless, of course, you tuned into A Current Affair on a Friday to see John Clarke and Bryan Dawe’s weekly sketch. You never saw Clarke & Dawe in Nine’s yearly network promo “Still the One!” but they were hugely popular and were a weekly feature on A Current Affair for eight years.
Even so, the idea of bringing a show like A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy to Seven would have been a bit daunting, hence the association with Fast Forward, the hugely popular sketch show starring Magda Szubanski, Jane Turner, Gina Reilly, Marg Downey, Michael Veitch, Steve Blackburn, Geoff Brooks, Gerry Connolly and Glenn Robbins, amongst others.
It’s also notable that A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy aired just eight days before Seven’s new sketch comedy series and successor to Fast Forward, Full Frontal began. Conceived when the Fast Forward team decided to disband after four exhausting years, Full Frontal featured a cast dominated by newer, slightly younger, and less well-known people, including Eric Bana, Greg Fleet, Matt Parkinson and a New Zealander called Rima Te Wiata.
The first series of the show is notable for being a sort of long, slow handover from the old Fast Forward cast to the new Full Frontal cast, with promotional material highlighting the fact that Fast Forward favourites like Michael Veitch and Marg Downey would be making cameo appearances.
This made a lot of sense: the Fast Forward brand was huge in the early 90’s and people would tune in to see the Fast Forward cast in just about anything. No wonder Seven marketed A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy as Fast Forward presents… A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy – the mere mention of Fast Forward was guaranteed to add hundreds of thousands to the viewing audience.
And, so, the mock trial that is A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy was chaired by Dame Victoria Market (Marg Downey), with Jane Turner as the Clerk, Glenn Robbins as a police constable, and Magda Szubanski, Gerry Connolly, Michael Veitch, Geoff Brooks and Steve Blackburn as various witnesses. And Gina Reilly outside the court reporting as Peter Harvey…Canberra. All of whom are great in it, by the way. The commercial reality of the need to associating this show with Fast Forward is one thing, but Fast Forward wouldn’t have become the powerhouse it became without its brilliant cast.
Magda Szubanski, for example, plays not only a minor Treasury official (male) and a courtroom cleaning lady, but also ACTU Secretary Bill Kelty (a man noted for his mad curly hair and distinctive Scottish-ish accent). Also in drag are Jane Turner as Laurie Oakes and Gina Reilly as Peter Harvey. Plus, Glenn Robbins plays President George Bush (senior), John Hewson and Derryn Hinch, Michael Veitch is both Paul Keating and Alan Bond – two rather different personalities – and Gerry Connolly pops up variously as Bob Hawke, The Queen, Prince Charles and, most brilliantly of all, Geoffrey Robertson.
If you’re familiar with Monty Python’s courtroom sketches, where literally anything can happen, this is what’s going on here. Only Frank Gallacher (All The Rivers Run, Cluedo and, later, Tangle) as Malcolm Turnbull (yes, the future Prime Minister but then high-profile lawyer Malcolm Turnbull) gives this any kind of reality.
And real it is, even with its ludicrous ending. Almost 30 years on, we’ve forgotten the impact of late 90s recession and many of those associated with it, but it was the Donald Trump or Brexit of its day, something which dominated the news, dragged on for months and years, changed the status quo and ruined a lot of lives. If you’re too young to remember it, lucky you, but if you lived through it and remember the key players, this is very much worth taking a trip down memory lane for.
It Don’t Matter If You’re Black or White
First, the good news:
Correcting some confusion – in the new show Lunatics, Chris Lilley is not portraying a woman of colour. When the series is released you will see that Jana is a white woman with huge 70s style curly hair.
— Laura Waters (@LauraWaters1) April 11, 2019
Then the bad:
Well, Meet the Fockers was a fair few years ago. And Kingswood Country was a few years before that. And All in the Family was even before that. So yeah, this probably does count as cutting edge Australian comedy.
At least they haven’t had to officially announce that nobody’s appearing in (Mr) blackface.
(Hopefully Not) Back in Black
We knew this day would come. We just hoped we wouldn’t be around to see it:
AUSSIE COMEDIC GENIUS CHRIS LILLEY IS BACK — AND HE’S SIX TIMES AS FUNNY
LUNATICS
LAUNCHES ON APRIL 19, 2019
ONLY ON NETFLIX
Lunatics Synopsis:
Lunatics is a 10-part comedy series presented as a documentary with the characters played by writer/creator Chris Lilley (Summer Heights High).
The documentary examines the lives of six extraordinary individuals and explores the idea that people are not what they seem at first. Through documentary interviews, self recorded and fly on the wall footage the six intriguing subjects are observed over a period of months. Their stories unfold with hilarious results. As eccentric and odd as they all are, they are scarily recognisable types and they teach us that its ok to just be you.
Character Descriptions:
Keith, a fashion retail veteran embarking on a new business venture who struggles with objective sexuality issues and his deep love for a cash register.
Becky, an extraordinarily tall University freshman embarking on life in an American college with her twin sister and dealing with social issues and life with massive legs.
Gavin, a confronting young boy and future Earl of an English country estate dealing with the pressures of his future and trying to be a kid.
Jana, a lesbian Pet Psychic to the Stars who from her South African home base struggles with an unrequited love for her personal assistant.
Quentin, an incompetent real estate agent about to inherit a family business who dreams of being a world-renowned DJ and street artist.
Joyce, an eccentric elderly ex porn star and hoarder who is now a recluse who obsessively collects things while facing an impending eviction.
That’s a lot to take in. But we know what you’re thinking: are any of them in blackface? That header image makes it hard to tell, but good news: there are pictures!
Jana!
Quentin!
Gavin!
Becky!
Keith!
And the hording former porn star! Where does he come up with these crazy – or should we say crazeeee – characters?
Okay, so none of them are in blatantly obvious blackface as far as we can tell… though Jana and Becky are definitely looking extremely borderline. But that’s not to say Lilley’s comedy won’t be getting a little dark. We just have one question*: when they say “AUSSIE COMEDIC GENIUS CHRIS LILLEY IS BACK — AND HE’S SIX TIMES AS FUNNY” what is he meant to be six times funnier than?
Because if it’s bowel cancer or a surprise firing at work, that’s a pretty low bar.
*edit* Oh joy, we found the trailer:
*we have so many questions
Cliff-edge comedy
Ryan Shelton’s Instagram serial Cliff returned for a third series last month and featured a whole bunch of celebrity guest stars.
In previous series, Shelton has played all or most of the roles – the show’s “hero” Cliff Schnitzel and Cliff’s on-again/off-again partner Rebrecca – but in this police-themed series there were appearances from Luke McGregor as a Desk Sergeant, Heidi Arena as The Chief, Clarke Richards as a waiter and Shelton (again) as hard-nosed detective Bobby Pong.
And character names like Bobby Pong weren’t the sum-total of the gags. Oh, no. Cliff 3 features silly wigs, over-the-top acting, and several dreadful puns. Basically, if you’re after a quick, uncomplicated laugh, you’re unlikely to find better on Instagram.
But why Instagram? Do Instagram users, who seem to mainly be interested in fashion, clean eating, hot bodies and Khardasians, want a very silly sitcom? We suspect that’s not really the point.
When Ryan Shelton started making Cliff, Instagram only allowed users to upload up to 15 seconds of video, and it seems that Cliff was a way for Shelton to experiment within the restrictions of the medium. But now that the maximum length of a video on Instagram is 60 seconds, what’s been the impact?
The short answer is not much, as most of the episodes run for about 15 seconds anyway. Which is probably a good thing because this is a show that would struggle to sustain itself if it went on for much longer.
Remember Danger 5? The parody of 1960s spy movies that for some unknown reason got 12 half-hour episodes and a whole heap of praise as a comedy? Its problem was that it barely had enough jokes about the 1960s spy movie genre to make one decent half hour of comedy, let alone 12. So, we’re glad that Ryan Shelton has had the good sense to confine Cliff to a small number of episodes on a platform where video content has to be short.
Imagine if each episode of Cliff went for half an hour? Or even 10 minutes. It would exhaust the audience with its relentless, trad gags, and, basically, become really, really annoying.
Understanding how to use the medium you’re working in, to your advantage, is the key difference between a comedy firing and not firing. And on Instagram, Cliff fires.
The Week(ly) Shall Rise
Ok, so you know how, week after week after week, we complain that The Weekly is the same old thing? This week they changed it. And in a development that shocked us to our very core, it actually made the show better. Who even knew such a thing was possible?
Yeah, maybe we should be a little less snarky when we’re trying to pay a compliment. Here’s how it broke down:
*Usual rubbish intro with that pointless checklist – ooh better not turn over before Pickering gets to Dog Anti-Vaxxers.
*A couple of middling Eddie McGuire jokes which were made worse by being back-to-back
*Press conference jokes! These are always gold… FOOLS GOLD that is #zing
*Judith Lucy Wellness Warrior. Nice work as always, only reason we’re still watching.
*Oh great, a bunch of clips from A Current Affair. Remember when The Chaser used to do this stuff and it was funny and had a point?
*Hang on… isn’t that Briggs? Sitting at the desk with Pickering? Did this ever happen last year?
*Briggs on a bike isn’t our favourite segment, but we’ll give The Weekly a thumbs up for it going into an election because having Briggs – a cast member who really only has this occasional segment – conduct the political interviews off the lot makes it almost possible to see the interviews as a separate thing that doesn’t taint the integrity of The Weekly. Not that it has much integrity to taint, but at least having the bits with politicians as an entirely separate thing handled by a solo cast member means they don’t feel quite so much like the show is cozying up to the people it should be making fun of.
*And it’s interview time. Hey, clips from Get Krack!n – oh, now the rest of The Weekly is going to look sad in comparison. Awww.
*Another shit clip joke bit. Ha ha, politicians have to say and do stupid stuff in locations they know little about because if they don’t the media won’t cover their policy announcements.
*Hard Chat. What’s left to be said about this segment that hasn’t been said about being buried alive in a landslide of shit?
*And… that’s it? The show’s over?
It turns out that all you have to do to lift The Weekly from a totally pointless show to an almost tolerable one is get rid of the extended news segment where Pickering “takes down” some tepid weeks-old issue that social media has already passed judgement on. Or get rid of Hard Chat / Tom Gleeson, because halfway through the main interview we started to wonder if he’d been cut and seriously, when you start to think there’s a good chance Tom Gleeson isn’t going to turn up watching The Weekly becomes a lot more pleasurable.
But of course, next week they won’t have a segment with Briggs they have to try and fit in and things will go back to usual. The Weekly clearly has problems that run bone-deep – the bits where they do snarky voice-overs over footage of politicians really need much smarter voice-overs to seem better than the time-fillers they currently come off as – but it’s depressing to realise how little needs to be done to make the show noticeably better.
Especially as, as Charlie Pickering reminds us at the end of every season, it’ll be back next year.
All the Sir Murray Rivers run
Almost two years after the untimely death of John Clarke, his long-time comedy partner Bryan Dawe is back doing a weekly satire segment on ABC radio as Sir Murray Rivers.
For many years, Dawe has been popping up on ABC Radio in the guise of Sir Murray Rivers, retired QC and stalwart of the Liberal party, but now his appearances are a weekly thing. The Overnights program is where you can hear Sir Murray’s Right of Reply live, or all the segments are available to download on the ABC website (search for Sir Murray Rivers for a list of them, as annoyingly they’re not all collated on one webpage).
Sir Murray Rivers won’t be to everyone’s taste – he’s a member of the Melbourne Club, who slurs his reactionary views into a tape recorder in between gulps of something decent from said Club’s cellar – and to describe him as “born to rule” would barely scratch the surface, but he’s an interesting voice to hear never the less.
Put it this way, if you’re old enough to remember the 1999 Republic Referendum then Rivers was the sort of well-heeled chap who’d appear in TV debates as a spokesman (and they were almost all men) for Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy. He’d be the one saying what a “splendid woman” The Queen is. And that would be his entire argument for not voting for a republic.
It was hard to believe that such posho anachronisms hadn’t been parachuted in from an aristocratic fox hunt somewhere in England, let alone that they were Australian-born and lived among us, but they were. Oh yes. And they’re still here, occupying wing-back chairs in inner-city members clubs, sitting on the boards of some of this country’s most profitable enterprises, and discretely pulling the levers of the Liberal Party in their own self-interests. They are the literal equivalent of Labor’s faceless men, except that no one in the media ever seems to mention them. Presumably, because they own most it.
But if you want to know what they’re up to, Right of Reply will tell you. In Sir Murray’s missives so far, we’ve heard about his work at the Centre for the Retention of the Monarch and on the United Nations Year of the Inside Trader. Plus, he’s got views on the environment and Malcolm Turnbull, and some tips on tax avoidance and investment opportunities.
Right of Reply is a different style of satire to Clarke & Dawe – more in the mould of Barry Humphries’ Sir Les Patterson – but it’s every bit as cutting.
Vale Get Krack!n season 2
Australian television hasn’t been known for its parodies for a while now – unless The Weekly really is a parody of a real news satire – so Get Krack!n took a little while for some to get their heads around. Often it wasn’t so much a parody of the style and format of morning television as it was sending up the attitudes behind it. Because those attitudes suck ass.
So while GK could and would run parodies of specific morning TV segments, a lot of the laughs, especially in the second season, came from the way someone would just bluntly express the thinking behind typical morning television segments – or just as often, talk about how that kind of thinking was fucked.
As an comedic approach this has diminishing returns: once the shock wears off, there’s not a whole lot left but the thrill of being told something you probably already know. And the back end of season two felt like it was falling into a bit of a rut, as the wild changes in format from earlier in the season were smoothed out in favour of a series of episodes where the big change week-to-week was the target of the satire (the lack of action on climate change, men). As these had been targets throughout the show – and often went back to being targets even after their big spotlight episode – it occasionally seemed like the series was running in place.
The show hadn’t really built up the collection of regular segments and characters that this kind of series usually relies on either, which was a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it gave the show a free hand to be whatever it needed to be each week; on the other, having to reinvent the whole thing each week left stretches of the show feeling dragged out to make up the running time. It wouldn’t have hurt to have a few regular segments that could have been adapted to the weekly topic – having a male co-host take over the show might have worked even better if there’d been a stronger idea of what the show actually was.
Having a stronger idea of who the Kates were as comedy characters would have been nice too. The Katering Show was about two friends doing a no budget cooking show that only one of them was into. Dropping those characters into breakfast television seemed like a promising dynamic, but gradually any real differences between the pair faded away. McLennan was always slightly more into it, but where The Katering Show (and early Get Krack!n) would play with this a little (McCartney would stumble into success to McLennan’s horror; McCarthy would surprisingly be excited about something nerdy), by season two both of them were roughly on the same page, which read WE’RE OVER IT.
Not that Get Krack!n was particularly well defined in any direction. Some episodes it was a cartoon where the whole show could be flooded out safe in the knowledge it’d never be mentioned again; in other episodes we needed an explanation as to why the male co-host wouldn’t be coming back (though that did set up that episode’s “no men” premise… which was only really used to have malfunctioning robot cameras).
Still, breakfast TV itself is pretty sloppy, so all this could be read as part of the satire. At least the Kates’ pregnancies was an on-going plotline that went somewhere, unlike that manipulative producer who was constantly mentioned throughout.
(seriously, was she just a plot device to introduce various elements to piss the Kates off? It really felt like it was a subplot that was leading somewhere, but then it just… vanished)
But enough of our griping, because none of this really mattered when it came to the final episode. In fact, a lot of what had seemed like flaws worked in the show’s favour in episode 8; while in-show the development that allowed the Kates to step out of the way on their own show was Kate McLennan going into labor as part of the ongoing pregnancy subplot, it felt like a logical next step for the show in large part because having the Kates walk away from their show felt like where things had been heading for a while.
One of the things Get Krack!n struggled with as it increasingly overtly tackled a range of social issues is that it never quite figured out whether the Kates were part of the problem. Getting indigenous actor-writers Miranda Tapsell and Nakkiah Lui in as their replacements solved that. The show had been openly and aggressively questioning the whole premise of a great deal of Australian television (and Australian society) at a time when POC and women are increasingly getting very, very fed up, and the only safety valve had been having a couple of white women hosting things. Once Miranda and Nakkiah took over, all bets were off.
There are a lot of different ways to be massively unfunny, and playing it safe is perhaps Australia’s favourite. Get Krack!n‘s final episode felt radical because behind all the messages about racism and the high cost of blending in it said something that’s been obvious (in comedy at least) for a while: the status quo in Australian television is dull and lifeless, and when you get rid of the people with nothing left to say the people who replace them are going to be a lot more interesting.
We know we bang on about The Weekly a lot here, but you don’t have to be us to see this episode as a direct retort to five years and counting of Charlie Pickering and Tom Gleeson running the same segments into the ground on The Weekly. Give those spaces to people with something to say and they’re going to make much better use of those spaces.
Of course, not everyone was happy with a finale that challenged the status quo:
The ABC is reviewing allegations of editorial policy breaches after it received a number of complaints relating to the final episode of satire program Get Krack!n.
A spokesman for the national broadcaster confirmed to The Australian it had received “fewer than 20 complaints” about the finale, which attracted 365,000 national viewers on Wednesday night, but said the episode did comply with ABC editorial policy and standards.
“We have received fewer than 20 complaints about the program, along with compliments. We will assess all complaints that allege breaches of ABC editorial policies and deal with them according to our usual processes,” an ABC spokesman said.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority also received a “handful” of complaints relating to the final episode, however referred the complaints back to the ABC.
And no wonder:
Along with being littered with the f-word and c-word, it featured male and female genitalia and ended with Lui attempting to defecate on a cushion featuring the face of a white woman.
Said “white woman” being one of the show’s hosts. But we guess saying “featuring the face of Kate McLennan” wouldn’t have sounded quite so shit-stirry, hey?
Which suggests that from a number of different directions the Get Krack!n finale accomplished everything it set out to do.
Week Sauce
Week two of The Weekly 2019 and one thing is clear: Judith Lucy, brilliant as she is, is not going to save this show.
If you don’t think The Weekly needs saving, fair enough: it’s a solid ratings performer and is also… a show… that exists… But c’mon: having a regular weekly comedy show in Australia is a privilege, not a right, and settling for whatever it is that The Weekly is doing is an abuse of that privilege.
You need look no further than this week’s final episode of Get Krack!n for proof of that. It’s not for us to assume that the Kates were well and truly over their latest show – that’s for their constant firm declarations that this was the final ever episode to say – but they handled things in completely the right way by stepping aside for their final episode and giving the time and space to people who had something new to add.
But The Weekly? Two weeks in and the formula is set, and it’s a formula where Lucy – again, a pleasure and a delight to have back on our screens – is a semi-regular segment presenter while Tom Gleeson is a regular with a segment that stopped being funny two years ago. Gleeson, let’s not forget, has a whole entire different show airing right before The Weekly where he gets to do his act; maybe we don’t need to see him at the desk every single episode this time around?
Of course, The Weekly is basically a tonight show: Pickering is the host, Gleeson is the sidekick / band leader, Lucy is a semi-regular and Briggs is… in all the promo photos. They even have two interviews a night just like a tonight show, only Gleeson gets to do one of them and every guest knows exactly how that’s going to play out.
The thing with tonight shows – at least, the old-fashioned kind – is that occasionally they would mix things up. You had your monologue (just like The Weekly), you had your guests (The Weekly), but you also had the stretch between the monologue and the first guest where the comedy bit would go, which on your better tonight shows was where the show would try new things.
Often they sucked, and more often they were pointless, but the point was that in a way they were giving back: the show was boring and predictable, but to make up for that they would try something new on the off chance it might work out (or even just jolt the late night audience awake).
The Weekly could easily do this. Give Gleeson a few weeks off and try someone new; cut down on one of Pickering’s news reports and try a joke that goes beyond “Here’s our Australian housing market update [cut to shot taken from disaster footage]”. Also, that bit? Not exactly hysterical if you don’t own a house. Only really works if you have investment properties. Maybe not a great way to counter the view that Pickering is fronting a show by and for private school graduates sniffing around for a third holiday home.
Instead, Judith Lucy gets the slot recently vacated by the only other woman on the show and does sketches that are great, but also a break from the “serious” business of the show that Pickering will keep on handling thank you very much. Fuck this shit: if you can’t try something substantially new after five years, either you’re doing everything right or doing everything wrong. This is The Weekly we’re talking about; do we really have to spell it out?
Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution
It’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival time, and you know what that means: we continue to ignore stand up comedy just like we always do. But this year’s launch featured Australia’s biggest comedy superstar, Hannah Gadsby – and in good news, it seems that the future of comedy doesn’t necessarily have to involve jokes:
“I believe there is a revolution in comedy about to happen – a real, big, global revolution … where the joke is not the only tool in a comedian’s kit,” she said.
Guess [insert unfunny comedian’s name here] is breathing a sigh of relief right about now, right guys?
What’s actually interesting about this statement is the way that, while it’s not exactly… wrong… it reflects a reading of Nanette‘s success that doesn’t seem to line up with the facts.
(we’re assuming you know that Nanette was the world-over smash hit that turned Gadsby from a Melbourne-based comedian about to quit comedy to an international superstar now based in LA)
Gadsby has mentioned a whole bunch of times in interviews that for her the big deal about Nanette was that it was a show that didn’t have to rely on jokes (she’s even gone so far as to say it wasn’t really a comedy performance). Not only wasn’t it built around jokes, it was a huge success the world over, therefore – as her comment above seems to suggest – it’s fair to assume its success came about because comedy audiences currently crave performances with more to offer than jokes.
And while reviews of her new show Douglas are currently thin on the ground (it’s only been previewed in Adelaide to date), it does sound like she’s sticking to her guns:
But at its core Douglas is about names and labels, and how they can mean a lot, or very little. They can shape the world, be oppressive and belittling or even a little bit liberating, whether it’s pedants questioning Nanette’s classification as ‘comedy’, living in a world categorised and named by long-dead men or, perhaps, a medical diagnosis.
…
In and around Nanette Gadsby repeatedly said that she needed to quit comedy, and despite that show’s career-making success, she wasn’t wrong: Douglas shows that she’s now doing something quite a bit bigger, whatever you might call it.
So while there might be laughs aplenty in her new show, it also sounds like jokes are no longer the only tool in her kit. But the trouble with this “who needs jokes when you have truth” argument is that it ignores another possible reason why Nanette was so successful:
Gadsby won the festival’s prestigious Barry Award for best show in 2017 with Nanette, which went on to sell out tours in London and New York before being picked up by Netflix. Roundly praised by critics, it was a raw and personal take on her experience of abuse as a young gay woman, which tapped into the #MeToo zeitgeist months before the Weinstein scandal broke.
If anything, “tapped into the zeitgeist” is an understatement. As stand-up comedy (especially in the US) was rocked by various high profile types in the vanguard of artistic expression being revealed as sex pests – ok, it was mainly Louis CK – and across the entertainment industry case after case of high-profile men getting away with sexual harassment – again, mostly Louis CK – came to light, Nanette put Gadsby in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to express a lot of people’s frustrations with both comedy and society in general. It was the kind of art that people flock to as a way of understanding the current cultural moment; it’s highly unlikely Gadsby or Australian comedy will see anything like it for a generation.
Which makes it a little difficult to extrapolate any kind of universal comedy messages from its success. It worked because it struck a nerve, but Gadsby can’t go around saying that other performers need to follow her lead in doing the same kind of material she did in Nanette even though we all know that it was the subject matter that made the show a hit. Yes, it was a well put together show, but does anyone really think it would have done anywhere near as well if it had been about airline food?
(okay, a terminal illness might have worked – but even that isn’t a highly topical subject that roughly half the population are currently angry about)
It also worked because it expressed what was going on in society in a way that left no room for interpretation – not getting the joke isn’t a problem when you don’t really have any jokes. Which again, is fine when you have something to say that people want to hear; when your message is a little more mundane, it really helps to have a few decent laughs scattered in there.
Gadsby is a seasoned comedy professional with a global profile that’s the envy of every single other stand up comedian in the country, but there’s nothing her current success can really teach anyone. There are dozens of stand up comedians who work hard, create good comedy, never really get the success they deserve, decide to put on one final show to really go hell for leather, and then vanish without trace. The difference between them and Gadsby is that for a variety of reasons largely out of her control, Gadsby won the comedy lottery.
Good luck getting a lottery winner to teach you how to do it.
The Weekly Pleads the Fifth
Let’s get one thing straight: the main thing that kept us watching the first episode of the newly returned Weekly was to find out if Briggs was going to be in more than the opening pre-recorded segment. And he wasn’t! Way to start the way you mean to go on, The Weekly. Briggswatch 2019 is go!
Otherwise it was just the same old same old “say things loudly and throw in the occasional pause and hey presto, a regular news story becomes comedy” from host Charlie Pickering. Who knew that saying “There, I said it!” after a news story made it hilarious? Or that repeatedly reminding us that we were watching the start of “Series five” of The Weekly would make us think he was desperately trying to reassure viewers they weren’t watching a repeat because every episode has been basically interchangable since Pickering gave up doing outside segments in week four of series one?
But it was when they showed the #eggboy clip that we really remembered the big problem The Weekly faces above and beyond being shit: unless you have something new to bring to the news cycle, a “week in review” show is completely pointless in 2019. And 2018. And 2017. And pretty much from the day The Weekly began, so we don’t really know what we’re complaining about here.
What’s constantly bizarre about The Weekly is that if there has to be a show with nothing more to it than someone re-reading news stories and slapping a bit of comedy outrage on at the end, why would you put Charlie Pickering in charge of it? Back in the days when Mick Molloy used to go nuts, or even when Dave Hughes used to lose it, there was some comedy value in seeing someone get all worked up. But Pickering? Yeah, nah. Though his head does seem to be gradually turning into a basketball, so that’s a reason to keep coming back.
At least they knew enough to get exciting new correspondent Judith Lucy on board early to let us know she was the show’s new “wellness warrior”, so we’re probably not going to be seeing a lot of Scott Morrison slams during her occasional segments. But hey, there’s booze jokes, references to having fat injected up her clacker, and wellness porn, which all seemed a whole lot fresher when it was followed by a segment titled “The Pedo Files” because that pun was past its use-by date 20 years ago. Mind you, ending a segment on sex offenders with “Moving on, Tom Gleeson is still to come” was definitely not what we expected.
And of course, Gleeson was back, making it two shows in a row in prime time on the National Broadcaster featuring Tom Gleeson, which really does feel like some kind of terrible mistake. Like Pickering, it’s not that he’s rubbish – though basing an entire comedy career on “hey, I’m really committed to acting like a prick” is the kind of thing that definitely edges you towards the rubbish bin after the first decade or so – as it is that he’s just very deeply average.
This is the fifth year of The Weekly, and if you’re the kind of person who gets annoyed when Get Krack!n keeps on making jokes about shitty men here’s a tip: every time the Kates complain about how crappy dudes have it easy, think of Charlie Pickering and Tom Gleeson. Pickering has a show with his name in the title: Gleeson is appearing in two shows back-to-back. And if you think either of them are so good at their jobs that they deserve that kind of free ride after five years of churning out the same utterly disposable pap, we hope you enjoy your position in the senior levels of ABC management.