Australian Tumbleweeds
Why is Australian Comedy So Shit – An Official Investigation
For years now we’ve argued that we need more Australian comedy in general if we’re ever going to get more of the good stuff. Guess what? We were wrong. Our theory was that Australian television needed to make a lot of bad television before anything good would come along as the bottom 90% of anything is always shithouse. Let’s say it again: WRONG.
Going by our theory, once we had a Mad as Hell, everyone would be working hard to make a show that was even better. Why try to make a show worse than a show that already exists and is doing well? Obviously the current show would become the new benchmark and the only things that would get on the air would be shows that were even better.
Oh look, The Weekly‘s back for 2018. There goes that theory.
Meanwhile over at Channel Ten, they’ve been airing the best comedy panel show made in this country this century in the form of Have You Been Paying Attention? So again, going by our theory, Ten’s post-HYBPA? comedy output should be striving to be even better. And again, our theory is wrong: our apologies for reminding you of Cram! and Show Me the Movie. They’re shit.
Obviously not everyone in Australian comedy can be as funny as Shaun Micallef or Working Dog. And maybe in the past this lack of talent might have been enough to explain some of the clearly substandard “comedy” shows being put to air. But increasingly it’s clear that those who control what we get to see on television are actively encouraging this downward trend. It’s not an accident that standards are falling: rubbish is what the networks want to put to air.
Don’t believe us? Explain Peter Helliar. Not only is he a regular on The Project and host of Cram!, but he has a ten part sitcom coming up on Ten later in the year. Remind us again: what’s he done to make him a commercial network’s top comedy property? We’ll wait.
And then there’s The Weekly. We, uh, haven’t been big fans and going by its recent run of average ratings and zero media presence we’re not alone. So after four years of failure, maybe it’s time to try something new? It sure is – that’s why the ABC have not only brought it back but are now running it after Gruen, the strongest possible lead-in they could give it.
So while Mad as Hell – you know, the show that does everything The Weekly tries to do, only funnier – airs at 8.30 when viewers have a natural point to turn over to another network (but they don’t, because it’s a show worth watching) good luck finding a show on a rival network to turn over to if you don’t want to watch The Weekly when Gruen finishes at 9.10pm. With a popular lead-in and no alternative viewing up against it, The Weekly is in the best possible position to rate well… unless it turns out people would rather turn their televisions off than watch Charlie Pickering. Lets see how that pans out.
All of which begs the question: what’s going on here? It’s not like the decent comedies are rating flops or anything – they’re actually doing really well. And the shit shows are generally doing badly – if The Weekly was a ratings powerhouse the ABC wouldn’t be using actual ratings powerhouse Gruen to prop it up. So logically then, our television networks should be looking to succeed by… doing the opposite of what they’re actually doing?
It’s not even like the way to make good comedy is a mystery. Hughsie We Have a Problem isn’t exactly our cup of tea, but by giving a proven comedy talent – we can’t stress enough that Hughsie definitely isn’t our idea of a rockin’ good time, but he’s good at what he does – a show where he can dick around doing what he thinks is funny, the end result is a good use of his skills and abilities.
Likewise with Tonightly, which is proving to be a nice little earner comedy-wise. Again, that’s largely down to a format that lets those involved focus on doing whatever it takes to be funny; Tom Ballard is not our favourite Australian comedian but given a format that plays to his strengths he’s able to create a pretty decent comedy program.
What unites these two very different shows is that they work because they let the funny people be funny. And these aren’t even Australia’s funniest people! Time and time and time again the path to decent comedy is shown to be “let the experts handle it”. This isn’t a sure-fire recipe for success – hello Randling – but it definitely beats the alternatives. When you hire funny people and let them make a funny show, usually you get a show that’s funny; how hard is this to understand?
“That’s easy for you to say,” we hear an imaginary voice say, “but now more than ever television is a cutthroat business – what you’re describing is the kind of risk-taking that gets executives fired”. And that’s a bad thing? Isn’t the risk of being fired why they’re paid hefty six-figure salaries? And how is continuing down our current path good for them? With Australian audiences flooded with viewing choices, choosing to make bland forgettable crap is pretty risky in itself.
We’re not saying these executives are incompetent. Their decisions are made based on a huge range of variables, many of which actively work against the creation of quality television. But every time they decide to greenlight a show that isn’t fit for purpose – seriously, is Cram! even a television show – it gets just that little bit harder to get excited about Australian comedy.
And if we don’t give a shit, who will?
Sando 2: More Sando
Remember how last week, Sando only had two jokes? This week it had one. Which was also one of the jokes from last week: the list of fake suburbs at the end of the Sando’s Warehouse ad. And while we quite enjoy a comedy list of fake suburb names as much as the next person, by episode 4 this won’t be funny anymore. Not funny at all. In fact, we’re seriously concerned about how funny it’ll be next week.
Other than that, Sando just kept being Sando. The idiot son was still an idiot, the resentful daughter was still resentful, Sando’s ex- and the counsellor were still trying to get it on without the daughter finding out and…wait…there was a new character. The excitement. Enter Vic Jr, the product of the affair between Sando and the resentful daughter’s one-time fiancee.
On the surface, Vic Jr. seems like exactly the sort of character Sando needs: a smart-arse, older-than-his-years nine-year-old kid played by the brilliant-for-his-age child actor Zane Ciarma. Problem is, Vic Jr, like every other character in this show, has no funny dialogue whatsoever. So even though Ciarma’s acting his heart out, there’s no laughs here at all.
One other thing occurred to us: it took Hey Dad..! four years to bring in Arthur McArthur, the smart-arse, older-than-his-years kid played by Matthew “the little fat kid” Krok (also a child actor who was brilliant-for-his-age). It took Sando one episode before it played the “hilarious kid” card. What next, a robot character? A whacky next door neighbour? This really is a desperate program.
Here’s an idea: make some of the dialogue funny. Don’t just rely on mildly whacky situations and parodies of cheap TV ads from the 90s for laughs. Write a decent, funny script. And maybe don’t rip off character ideas from Hey Dad..! because funny kid characters can start to grate very quickly.
It’s the Movies that Got Small
There’s only one question when it comes to Rove’s new comedy panel game show Show Me The Movie: is it as shithouse as Cram!? Unlike Cram!, this one is actually about a topic that isn’t just “you know, stuff” – people generally like movies, most people know some dumb facts about movies, and as this reminds us repeatedly, there are already a shitload of terrible parlour games that are in the public domain that they can base the show on instead of coming up with something people might want to watch.
It’s also hosted by Rove, who is most definitely a better host than Peter Helliar. The jokes are terrible, the cast are… Angela Bishop is on this so *makes vaguely disgusted confused gesture*… but at least with Rove running the show there’s a bit of energy to proceedings. Remember when he went to the USA to replace Jay Leno? Best joke of his career.
Australian television networks clearly don’t want to give up on the idea of television just yet, but as the future for them is clearly going to be advertising-based reality television and sport they don’t want to put too much effort into actual programming either. Which is what makes shitshows like this so frustrating: if they really wanted to make a comedy show people would enjoy, they’d have run as far from this as they could.
The set looks like it cost five dollars, the movie facts are a half days work for someone with a working internet connection – seriously, an entire segment about iconic roles actors turned down? – and the panelists are… Paul Mercurio is on this so *makes vaguely disgusted confused gesture*. They even had a final “Speed Round” where the joke wasn’t that all the questions were about Speed! Jesus wept.
Nine’s started running promos for the return of Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation, which is pretty much the only successful Australian comedy quiz show since Spicks & Specks. Rove isn’t as good as Shaun Micallef but he is as good a host as Adam Hills, which suggests that perhaps the way to go with this show might have been to create a more intimate, messier, nerdier movie show featuring comedians and team captains that were actually real movie fans rather than just people who’ve seen movies.
But then they wouldn’t be able to have segments where they a): show the trailer for a new release movie, b): proceed to answer questions about what was going on in the trailer, then c): cut to Rove interviewing the star of the new release movie for all of 90 seconds while weirdly sitting alongside the star like they were both in the front seat of a car. Guess that advertising-based reality television future isn’t as far off as it seemed.
Still: officially better than Cram! Whoo-hoo.
Make us laugh, Sando
You know what, we’re getting a bit sick of watching the first episode of a new sitcom and just sighing. First Squinters, now Sando, a show with so many obvious problems in episode 1 that we’re wondering whether it will even be a television program by episode 6.
Where shall we begin…?
How about the fact that episode 1 contained just two actual gags? Which, for the record, were:
- The list of they-could-almost-be-real suburbs at the end of the Sando’s Warehouse ad (Boggabilla, Shuntsville, Mangwart and Fadgetown).
- That bit where Sando’s daughter welcomes everyone to her daughter’s birthday party and asks that the unvaccinated kids stay in the pen (which is an actual pen).
That’s two gags in a show that ran approximately 26 minutes.
But hey, who needs gags in a sitcom when there are great characters that you can fall in love with, like this is a dramedy. Oh wait, Sando had none of them either…
There’s the title character, Sando, a fun-seeming discount retailer who appears in her own cheap-and-cheerful television ads, except she turns out to be a lying cheat who habitually puts business above family, apart from when she’s sleeping with younger men. But hey, she’ll be heaps more endearing when she loses her business and has to patch things up with her family, right?
And the family, they’ll be hilarious, fully-rounded, laugh-generating characters, right? Well, there’s an idiot son, so maybe. But mainly, no. And apart from that, there’s Sando’s ex-husband, who just seems to be a guy in his 50’s who doesn’t have to work, and who’s, improbably, having an affair with his daughter’s best friend. And while there’s plenty of opportunities there for almost-getting-caught-kissing-type capers, it’s also somewhat Weinstein. Then there’s the daughter, who’s in therapy thanks to Sando sleeping with her fiancé and having a child with him, which, again, doesn’t seem that hilarious in the era of #MeToo (especially after the scene where Sando sleeps with a junior colleague she’s promised a promotion to).
But, hey, don’t worry about any of that, there are still those two gags we mentioned earlier. And, also, this was just episode 1. A sitcom doesn’t need to be funny in episode one, it’s where the characters and the premise are set up. No Australian sitcom is ever funny in episode 1. You wait until episode 2, that’s where the laughs’ll be at. For sure.
Vale Squinters
One of the many things that makes television reviewing such a disreputable profession is that television reviewers rarely have to stand by their judgements. Usually they review an upcoming show with some variation of the phrase “check it out, it’s worth a look” and then move on – some might say flee the scene – without ever having to face the consequences of their recommendations. Book and film reviewers at least cover the entire thing with their review, so if they decide to praise a turd they have no escape; television critics almost never bother returning to see if a show really was worth all that praise they ladled out.
Fortunately, Squinters was no good right from the start. And it was no good in a way that should have sent alarm bells ringing rather than having most Australian critics handing out the kind of fullsome praise that promises little and means even less. Previous car-based sitcoms at least focused on a handful of characters; with a cast in double figures and a run time barely double that, there was barely time for Squinters to set up sketch comedy jokes, let alone anything character-based. And then everyone was doing the exact same thing in every episode – driving to and from work – which meant all the sketches were the same.
It was a show seemingly designed to stymie any attempt to make it funny. Broader, sillier characters would have been funnier at first, then rapidly annoying over six episodes; more character development would only have been possible with less characters, and presumably the big names on the show – only they weren’t really names big enough to make this a must-see – were only doing it because it didn’t ask too much of them.
The list goes on. Driving to and from work is not funny; sitting next to someone in a car isn’t funny; traffic reports aren’t funny – and why were the traffic reports on Squinters played straight anyway? Who sat in the writers room and said “this show about people driving to and from work is only going to work if we make the experience of commuting as realistic as possible – only clearly none of us have ever commuted to work in our lives and the show isn’t about the actual real experience of commuting anyway so lets just bung in some traffic reports. Don’t make them funny though”?
When you watch a classic sitcom, one thing is clear: they’re trying to be funny pretty much all the time. Even the bits that don’t seem funny at first are setting up jokes for later on. With Squinters, a show so doggedly lacking in humour that referring to it in any way as a comedy is a breach of the trade descriptions act, the joke being set up was on everyone who watched it.
After all, they should be announcing a second series any day now.
Stand up and tell a story
Stand-up is the main route into comedy these days. Try naming a comedian who’s been well known in the past 10 years who didn’t start their career in stand-up. Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney? The Chaser team? Chris Lilley? Sammy J? Adam Zwar? Troy Kinne? It’s a short list*. And one that means that the dominant tenor of Australian comedy is that of stand-up, which sometimes makes for great comedy and sometimes doesn’t.
This year’s Tropfest runner-up was Rock Bottom, an animated short film by Nick Baker and Tristan Klein about two insects in a dive bar (played stand-ups Cassie Workman and Luke Heggie).
And while in many ways Rock Bottom is a well-made short film, its basic problem is that it’s a series of 30-seconds-or-so-long bits of barely-connected stand-up from Cassie, then Luke, then Cassie again, then Luke again, etc. rather than some funny, natural dialogue between two characters. We’re not saying some of it isn’t funny – it is – more that it doesn’t work as a film.
If you’re watching a film you expect a story, dialogue, character interaction, not seven minutes of the sort of thing that would appear between scenes on Seinfeld and last for 10 seconds. In Rock Bottom, Cassie and Luke aren’t speaking to each other, they’re just speaking into the air. Which would be fine if one of them was on stage speaking to an audience, but just looks weird when they’re supposed to be two characters interacting.
Conclusion: What works on stage doesn’t necessarily work on screen, even if you illustrate it with some good animation.
A far better and funnier attempt to bring stand-up-style comedy to a different medium can be found in Sarah Kendall’s Australian Trilogy, three 30-minute stories which have recently aired on BBC Radio 4 in the UK.
Based on Kendall’s past live shows (performed at MICF and Edinburgh), these are based on Kendall’s real childhood experiences growing up in Newcastle. This is the world of school bullies, cool kids, social pressure, weird teachers, and being too young to entirely understand what’s happening around you. These stories are funny, gripping and beautifully crafted. Two of the three can still be heard on the BBC website and they’re well worth your effort and time.
* And one we’re not entirely sure is accurate.
Who Let the Dogs Out
If you’ve heard anything about That’s Not My Dog! – and why would you, it’s an Australian film – it’s probably that it features a bunch of professional joksters and no script. Australian film is made without a script: now there’s a news flash. Fortunately it features both a barbeque and a literal truck full of beer otherwise we’d be confusing it with Godard’s latest effort.
To be fair, who needs a script, or even a story, when you have a concept this bloody good: Shane Jacobson and his dad (played by his real-life dad, who is actually pretty decent) invite a whole bunch of local comedians out to their homestead for a barbie, complete with the aforementioned literal truckload of beer. There is one catch: they all have to bring along their best jokes, which they then proceed to tell for the next 80 minutes or so.
It’s important to stress that none of this is actual stand-up comedy as we currently know it; everyone stands around and tells the kind of generic jokes you find in joke books piling up in op shops across the land. The film stresses the fact that these comedians are bringing the best jokes they know to this gathering, but going by the quality of the gags Jacobson might as well have told them to bring along an ouija board so they could summon up the ghost of Maurie Fields.
Back in the days when these kind of jokes were considered actual entertainment, even the most basic of joke-telling stand-up acts usually ended up giving away something of themselves through the jokes they chose to tell. Rodney Dangerfield’s act was pretty much a well-honed barrage of “I can’t get no respect” set-ups and punchlines, but a large part of why they worked was because through all that we got a sense of Dangerfield’s comedy persona as a put-upon loser. This is one step down from that. And that one step is off a cliff.
All we get here – aside from a few snipped of pub band-level live music and a whole lot of astoundingly blatant product placement – are basic jokes that anyone could tell, told by a range of comedy types – Jimoen, Steve Vizard, Paul Hogan and Tim Ferguson are some of the bigger names – who have no real personal link or connection to the jokes they’re telling. They’re decent enough jokes, so some are funny and some are not, but none of them are worth paying movie ticket prices to hear. In theory it might be worth it to see Hogan and Vizard and everyone else on the big screen, but… it’s not.
Which the producers seem to have figured out: this is screening around Australia for three days only – less than a day and a half to go at this stage – as a kind of “special event”. And maybe it’ll work; it definitely feels like the kind of film you’d want to see with a bunch of mates wandering in and out of the cinema at will (it’s not like you’re going to miss a plot twist) as part of a big night out, not sitting practically alone in a daytime cinema because you love Australian comedy just that much.
Not enough to see The BBQ though. Fuck that.
It’s a Numbers Game
Press release time!
Screen Australia has announced a slate of production funding investments including directorial debuts from acclaimed actors Rachel Griffiths and Guy Pearce, as well as new TV series for SBS, Foxtel, Channel Seven and one for Network Ten led by The Project co-host Peter Helliar. In total $7.4 million in funding has been allocated through the feature film, television and online production programs.
[blah blah blah]
Princess Pictures’ and Pablo Pictures’ eight-part comedy drama How To Stay Married for Network Ten, starring Logie award-winning actress Lisa McCune and comedian Peter Helliar, who has also co-written the script. It tells the story of Greg (Helliar) and Em (McCune) whose 13-year marriage is put to the test by a new job, an unexpected house guest, a redundancy and an experimental sex move. Produced by Jess Leslie, executive produced by Andrea Denholm and Emma Fitzsimons, and directed by Natalie Bailey from a script by Helliar and Nick Musgrove. This series has also been financed by Film Victoria.
[blah-de blah blah]
Screentime’s comedy Orange is the New Brown for Channel Seven – a six-part series that will reflect contemporary Australian life using one-off sketches, original and recurring characters and TV parodies. Produced by Jack Kain, executive produced by Johnny Lowry, directed by Hayden Guppy and written by Nazeem Hussain, Joel Slack-Smith, Sophie Braham, Richard Thorp, Penny Greenhalgh and Heidi Regan. This series has also been financed by Create NSW and is currently in production.
So, uh, it’s not all bad news? Actually, it’s all good news, as the Peter Helliar show isn’t exactly news and we fully support the idea of sketch comedy on the commercial networks. It’ll probably be… well, you’ve seen recent Australian sketch comedy, you know where the bar’s set. But it’s a numbers game: the more sketch comedy we make, the more likely it becomes that we’ll make something good.
If only we could say the same about Peter Helliar projects.
Hacking Through the Jungle
You have to feel sorry for the ABC. On the one hand, they obviously want to put to air the best possible Australian comedy. Obviously.
On the other hand, the best possible Australian comedy is heading overseas as quickly as possible because that’s where all the money, opportunities and fame are. Sure, there are still plenty of talented local comedians but who wants to risk putting untested talent to air? For that matter, who wants to risk putting tested talent to air? They might have the wrong ideas about what’s funny.
So you have to feel sorry for the ABC: they need a steady, reliable source of comedy they can largely leave to their own devices – if you work too closely with new talent it might look bad for you when their show tanks – but can deliver time and time again. And also aren’t The Chaser because they seem to have gone off the whole “comedy” thing.
Fortunately for the ABC, they have Jungle (formerly Jungleboys), the advertising production company that’s currently dominating the Australian sitcom scene in a fashion not seen since… well, ever. They first burst on the scene with a variety of low profile shows – Review With Myles Barlow being the stand out, but there was also the Sam Simmons projects Problems and The Urban Monkey – before pulling in steady work with the utterly forgettable The Moodys. Don’t think we forgot The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife-Fighting either: it’s a high mountain to climb to create the worst sketch comedy in Australian television history, but they gave it a darn good try.
(fun fact: reports from the set of Elegant Gentleman claim that the cast were re-writing – or even just writing – the sketches on the day of filming.)
Interestingly, even when Jungle isn’t busy creating primo Australian comedy, core Jungle members Trent O’Donnell (writer / director) and Phil Lloyd (actor / writer) are out there working solo putting their stamp on things. O’Donnell’s directed many of the last decade’s memorable moments, including the first seasons of Laid, Woodley, The Letdown, and even parts of The Chaser’s The Hamster Wheel because we’re all in this comedy business together, right? And Lloyd’s been one of the more noticeable faces in recent Australian comedy, as seen in It’s a Date, Laid, True Story with Hamish & Andy, Woodley, and At Home With Julia.
But it’s been in the last few years that Jungle has really taken off in Australian comedy. No Activity, Here Come the Habibs, Squinters and the upcoming Sando: that’s what, half of all the Australian sitcoms made over the last two years? Which is a kind of market domination we haven’t really seen before: there have been plenty of shows that have grabbed all the attention thanks to their quality, but this is the first time a group has dominated Australian television comedy through sheer quantity.
It’s even more impressive when you consider that they haven’t exactly been producing any real comedy highlights over these last few years. They make the kind of comedy that fills the gaps between the shows you actually want to watch, sitcoms that have people wondering “why can’t we make great sitcoms any more”. They’re not exactly bad shows, but you’d be a bit surprised if anyone told you that No Activity was their favourite sitcom.
Jungle’s success is a big reminder that for a lot of people involved in television production the quality of the end product is not quite as important as reviewers and commentators – like us – would like to think. Put another way, when it comes to getting work, being able to make a half hour program on time and on budget (especially if the budget is tight) is more vital than being able to make a hilarious program. And with the kind of pressure these executives are under, who can blame them for taking the safe route?
Apart from us, obviously.
Good Afternoon Adelaide
You expect good things from the writers of Mad As Hell. Mad As… has been the funniest show on TV for ages and much of that’s down to the writing. So it was with interest that we’ve been watching Good Afternoon Adelaide, a homage to and parody of local television from the 80s and 90s, made by and starring David M. Green, a writer for Mad As Hell (and the host of 31 Questions).
Made last year and released on Facebook and YouTube, Good Afternoon Adelaide is also currently airing on C44 Adelaide and C31 Melbourne. We haven’t caught the community TV screenings, but what you get on YouTube are clips from fictional show Good Afternoon Adelaide, hosted by uptight journalist Jeremy Dome and smooth-with-the-ladies businessman Norman Vine, the backstory being that the clips were recorded off-air onto VHS by a keen viewer and are the best of what remains of the show (the master tapes of which were wiped).
As for the show itself, it’s everything you’d expect of local TV – cheap set, poor production, technical problems, bizarre local references, terrible hosting, guests which can most politely be described as “best available” – this should be a comedy goldmine. Problem is like the actual shows its parodying (SAS-7’s “legendary” A Touch of Elegance and its Anne Wills-hosted successor AM Adelaide) Good Afternoon Adelaide is a bit slow and dull.
On the real shows, things were slow and dull because the presenters had lots of time to fill and not much to fill it with, but here the problem seems to be that the comedy is improvised and not improvised very well. Occasionally, Jeremy and Norman will say or do something funny, but it takes an awfully long time to get there.
Good improvised shows, like The Trip, work because there’s been a bit of planning involved, the cast has a rapport and knows how to play off each other. That and the less-successful improv gets edited out. In the case of Good Afternoon Adelaide, there doesn’t seem to have been much editing at all. Apart from to make the picture quality look old and faded like it really did come from ageing VHS tapes.
Overall, we like the concept and appreciate the intent and attention to detail, but this should be a lot funnier. It’s also incredibly strange to see a comedy show made now that doesn’t feature any women at all.* What was going on there?
* It would also have been weird to watch a comedy show in the late 80’s/early 90’s that didn’t feature any women, an era in which we saw a female comedy boom with comedians such as Wendy Harmer, Jane Kennedy, Judith Lucy, Jean Kittson, Maryanne Fahey, Jane Turner, Marg Downey, Gina Reilly and Magda Szubanski regularly on our screens.