Australian Tumbleweeds

Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.

Doing Circle Work

File this under guardedly good news:

After months of rumours, Triple M has confirmed that longtime friends and comedy colleagues Mick Molloy and Jane Kennedy will host a national drive show in 2018.

On the one hand, hurrah! Mick is funny, Jane is also funny, and they’ve both been working in radio long enough to remember – and hopefully aspire to – the good old days when radio comedy involved actually making comedy rather than just taking talkback calls for 90 seconds between tracks.

On the other hand, which is currently slapping us in the face telling us to wake up to ourselves, we’re talking about commercial radio in 2018 – and drive time radio at that. Of course it’s going to be talkback-heavy, there’s zero chance of scripted sketches, and the selling point here is less “remember those guys you used to laugh at back in the late 80s” and more “He’s a guy! She’s a girl! Contrasting view points! Stuff about kids and commuter traffic and the footy and cooking! Like Hughsie and Kate for people who can’t stand Hughsie and Kate!”

“I can’t wait to get back to my natural habitat on the drive shift. I imagine the show will be a lot like my usual conversations with Jane minus a couple of good bottles of vino,” Mick said.

Jane says she’s rapt to be working with Mick again. “…I can’t think of anyone better to do Drive with. Plus Micky’s usual excuse of sleeping through the alarm won’t wash anymore!”

The show’ll be airing nationwide from early 2018. So probably less AFL material than we’re currently used to from Mick.

Why Are Articles On The Death Of Australian Comedy Such An Easy Sell?

The end of SBS Comedy’s online branch has sent shockwaves through… well, mostly SBS Comedy. We’ve already mentioned Jazz Twemlow’s hard-hitting take on why satire sucks – short version, it keeps firing Jazz Twemlow – and now we’ve been pointed towards Alice Frazer’s fairly despairing overview of Australian comedy as a whole:

Maybe Australia’s just not funny enough as a country to be allowed a flourishing comedy industry.

No argument here!

Well, maybe just a tiny one: what exactly is the definition of “flourishing”? Because sure, we’d all love to return to the days of Fast Forward and The Comedy Company, but HYBPA? runs half the year, the ABC shows thirty weeks or more of news satire (okay, more than half of that is The Weekly, but it’s still technically “comedy”) plus a steady stream of sitcoms, and even Channel Nine is back in the sitcom business with Here Come the Habibs. Things could definitely be better, but it’s not like it was a decade ago when Spicks & Specks and Chris Lilley were pretty much all the Australian comedy we were getting on television.

Of course, television isn’t the be-all and end-all of comedy. Movie comedy here is pretty much dead, likewise radio, and the stand-up scene is, depending on who you listen to, either full of ground-level excitement or slowly dying as everyone focuses all their attention on the major yearly festivals and ignores stand-up for the other eleven months of the year. But then again, there’s YouTube and “The Internet” giving performers big breaks, so let’s just say it’s probably all evened out… only now nobody is making any money, just like every other form of the creative arts in the 21st century.

The unpleasant truth is, as a country, we don’t seem to like comedy very much.

And yet comedians Hamish & Andy’s latest show was the fifth-highest rating television program nationwide for the second week running. So maybe we do like some kinds of comedy?

As a nation we don’t look after our comedy. After a while, however much we talk up our love for a laugh, it starts to seem suspiciously like maybe we aren’t really that into it.

As consumers of comedy, the idea that we have to “look after” Australian comedy is a bit of a worry. It’s not our job to safeguard Dave Hughes’ career; in fact, it’s nobody’s job. If an audience isn’t laughing and you think “maybe [they] aren’t really into it”, that sounds a lot like blaming your audience for not realising how funny you are. Let us know how that works out for you.

There’s a bunch more here like this:

There’s a weird helplessness that seems apparent in the refusal of Australian industry to give enough time and space to make projects work – when support can make the difference between success and failure, it’s often held back. There’s a wait-and-see attitude coupled with a total unwillingness to actually wait and or see.

(wait, doesn’t the ABC give pretty much everything two seasons automatically? Didn’t SBS Comedy online run for three years?)

And this:

Part of the problem might be Australia’s unwillingness to look at itself. Really interesting comedy has to come from truth, and we have a deep unwillingness to really acknowledge a lot of the reality of our country, from the atrocities of Manus Island to the fact that we’re not really as live-and-let-live as we pretend to be.

(wait, do you really want to be the comedian who goes out there with a tight five on how funny Manus Island is?)

But it seems the real problem being discussed here is this:

This is anecdotal of course, but it’s hard to get people out of the house to watch live comedy shows. We just don’t seem to have that culture that exists in, for example, the UK where people consider a comedy show as one of their default options for a night out. This is a problem, because dying repeatedly in front of generous audiences (who are willing to roll the dice in the hope of seeing something extraordinary, or truly enjoy a night of watching noble failure in the pursuit of laughs) is the best training ground for good comedy, and without that grass-roots market for taking risks on comedy, why would we expect people to take chances with their time or money on supporting Australian television or film comedy?

And there’s the rub. If your definition of “a flourishing comedy industry” is “a wide range of live comedy venues that pay money” then sure, things are in the toilet: they’ve been in the toilet for years. Australia is a big country with a small sports-mad population and long daylight hours featuring generally excellent weather so getting people to go out to a dive bar to hear someone tell jokes is always going to be an uphill struggle. Especially as your advertising pitch seems to be “leave the house for the chance to see a bunch of shithouse try-hards fail at their job because they need the experience if they’re ever going to grow”.

Australian comedians are kind of fortunate in that, because we live in an English-speaking nation with a largely western culture, they have easy access to the biggest and richest global market for entertainment. There are more opportunities in the UK than here; there are more opportunities in the US than the UK. The flip side of that is that all this overseas comedy also has easy access to our market, which means that Australian comedians are competing with a large chunk of the world when they try to make Australians laugh. Making hard-hitting comedy that examines the underpinnings of Western Society has international appeal so you’re competing with the world’s best; in contrast, overseas acts aren’t really offering many dumb jokes about the footy delivered in a nasal whine.

So when you say:

Really good comedy leaves us checking our own heads for dicks, and as a society we don’t seem to have a taste for that.

Good news: thanks to being fluent in English, you can focus your career on another society where they do appreciate that kind of comedy. Speaking entirely based on a whole lot of not much, we’re guessing that the percentage of people who want to go out and see live comedy that may not work and might call the audience dickheads (or various other “hard truths”) is a consistent but fairly small number across the globe. In a small country like Australia, the numbers aren’t enough to sustain a decent* live comedy circuit: in the UK and USA, they are.

And as for this:

Work together to support some interesting projects til they become sure bets, because it’s a sure bet that our industry isn’t taking risks any more

You might want to focus your ire on the overseas networks that seem to be funding pretty much all of the ABC’s scripted comedy output these days – you know, the networks who don’t actually come from our risk-adverse, comedy-disliking culture.

The fact is that Australian comedy has always been a tough sell. We’re a small country, so even the best at getting laughs have had to hustle to stay in work. Remember when Shaun Micallef was on breakfast radio? The Chaser are doing radio now too; Dave Hughes’s stand-up career was built on the back of radio and television appearances, likewise Wil Anderson’s. And people often have to diversify their material if they want to keep working: Mick Molloy didn’t become a “sports comedian” until two decades into his career, while Chris Lilley kept on making the same show until demand dried up.

Hell, even Carl Barron made a crap movie. If having that in cinemas doesn’t show our national commitment to comedy, what will?

 

 

*to be fair, Rodney Rude and Kevin “Bloody” Wilson seemed to do pretty well with what we do have.

 

 

 

 

Vale The Weekly season three

So last week’s episode of The Weekly opened with Charlie Pickering sitting behind his desk solemnly informing us that yes, while terrorism had cast a dark cloud over the week’s events the only correct way for us to move forward as a nation was to move forward as a nation or some such.

“It’s been a full-on week. Terror attacks around the world, and earlier this week one just a few kilometers from our studio. But what do we do? Maybe we could not let them take credit for shit… because all they want is attention.” – Charlie Pickering

Or just maybe, you could not begin your comedy television show with a “serious” segment about how serious terrorism is because all that does is give them fucking attention?

“This is Australia: don’t try to out-dickhead us” – the end of Pickering’s hilarious opening rant

But to be fair, Pickering’s let-hope-this-goes-viral-as-a-rallying-cry-against-terrorism speech wasn’t rubbish because it was actively bad: it was rubbish because it wasn’t about anything beyond putting Pickering’s head on camera. It said in a serious voice that… terrorism is bad? And we should stand against it using… the power of various national quirks? “Terrorists are dickheads but guess what: we’re even bigger dickheads!” Hey, dickhead: speak for yourself.

We’ve gone on and on and on this year about the various problems we have with The Weekly. None of that has changed because the show itself doesn’t change because change would require The Weekly to be a show that was made by people who cared about making decent television.

Each week The Weekly is ten minutes or so of Pickering talking over recent news footage with the occasional almost-joke mixed in, a segment where Tom Gleeson demonstrates the hard limit to his style of comedy, maybe one segment where Kitty Flanagan makes the show almost watchable, an interview we forget while it’s happening, Gleeson is back doing another interview where he lobs softball insults at people and we’re back again next week with a promise that Briggs – remember him, the indigenous member of the team who’s in all the promo photos but who for totally non-racist reasons only gets one-quarter of the air time – will be back. Why not just show repeats? They’d be slightly cheaper.

But surely this consistency in the face of a changing world is a sign that they’re doing something right? We’re going to stop you right there for a quick update from living concerned emoji Jazz Twemlow:

Four years later, and it seems the brief for the majority of satirical content is that it has to be shareable, nail something, and travel far online. The problem here is that this can drive satire into the pathology of imagining the shares you’ll get, and working backwards from there. Unfortunately what gets shares is, more often than not, a simplistic approach to one’s rivals: arrogant ridicule, laughing at how racist someone is, pointing out someone’s stupidity. It’s simplicity, and it works, especially when appealing to people whose attitudes are now expressed largely in 140-character chunks of boiled-down, thinking devoid of nuance.

And we look forward to Twemlow scurrying back to that kind of material if he ever gets another job in comedy. Good luck with that considering he also said this:

I’m sorry, but 61 million Americans and roughly 15 million Brits can’t all be racists, but that’s not a popular, or even permissible, thing for a satirist to say.

Yeah, defending racists! Truth to power, Jazz!

The thing is, this approach to “satire” is currently yesterday’s news. Websites are no longer sharing around “nailed it!” clips of “ultimate takedowns”, because unlike the situation eight months ago, their audiences now largely realise that kind of thing is useless feel-good pap. Thanks to the daily nightmare that is President Trump, people – or at least, the left-leaning people who used to pounce on “nailed it” clips – have a vague sense that shit? It just got real.

For these people, a comedian going nuts over some issue just doesn’t do it any more: they either want serious content on an issue, or they want funny stuff to distract them from the serious content on an issue that their friends keep sending them. People want The Handmaid’s Tale, not Inside Amy Schumer. The internet has, as it always does, moved on. Jazz Twemlow is out of a job.

For three years The Weekly has been built around the idea that if Charlie Pickering can nail a topic, that clip will be shared around online and drive traffic back to The Weekly. This was never a particularly good idea: all it really did was drive traffic to sites where clips from The Weekly occasionally appeared, because even at the best of times no-one thought “hey, this clip from The Weekly is so good I want to track down the rest of the show”. But now it doesn’t even do that. And hey, for once you don’t have to take our word for it:

The show is built so strongly around that viral content model it almost seems fair to ask: if a segment on The Weekly didn’t go viral, did it even really happen?

Junkee recently shared The Weekly’s take on the Cooper’s Brewery-marriage equality scandal, and earlier this year the program’s Make Australia Second segment received a modest amount of attention. But there’s been a marked drop in viral content since the first two years of the program.

So The Weekly is fucked. Don’t worry though, because as is traditional Pickering ended the final show of the year with… well, first it ended with an extended promo for Hard Quiz, a show as essential as a holographic toilet.

But then came Pickering telling us that “the other exciting bit of news [there was a first bit?] that we have is, we’ll be back to wrap up the year with The Yearly in December, and we’ll be back for season four of The Weekly in 2018 ladies and gentlemen!”

Is there any other program on Australian television that feels the need to announce its return a year out from its return date? How pathetically insecure does Pickering look shouting out that his show will be back before it has even ended? Is there anyone – anyone at all – so fearful of a future without The Weekly that they cannot go literally one single second without the knowledge that The Weekly will return to our television screens?

We briefly speculated among ourselves that perhaps Pickering announces the return of The Weekly in forty-odd weeks time each year in an attempt to force the ABC to commit to its return: “Hey guys, it’d look pretty bad if you didn’t follow up on that rock-solid commitment we told everyone you’d made…”

But a more likely scenario is that Pickering doesn’t want to give anyone else the glory of announcing the return of his show with his name in the title: not for him the tradition of letting his bosses at the ABC announce his show’s return when they announce the return of all those other shows that keep on coming back. No, it’s The Weekly With Charlie Pickering and Charlie Pickering gets to announce when The Weekly With Charlie Pickering is coming back and it’s always coming back because it’s hosted by Charlie Pickering.

Hey, remember this:

“Someone asked me about my old job, The Project, and asked why I left,” [Pickering] ranted into the microphone. “I just couldn’t watch the news any more.  It never changes: bad theatre by poor actors every night in perpetuity, it’s always the same.”

What would drive a man who felt this way to put his name on a show like The Weekly? What could keep him coming back week after week for over three years? What could force him to not only keep on making this show, but announce he’d be back to do it all again next year before this year’s series had even finished?

See you in 2018, Briggs.

 

Up Top for The Letdown

Press release time!

From Award Winning Comedy Showroom Pilot to Full Series THE LETDOWN starts production

Friday, June 16, 2017 — Production has commenced on the six-part comedy series The Letdown, for ABC in Australia and Netflix internationally with funding support from Screen Australia in association with Create NSW. ABC will broadcast the series in Australia on TV and iview. Netflix will stream the series internationally outside of Australia, and it will be available on Netflix in Australia after its run on ABC.

Produced by Giant Dwarf and co-written by Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell, who also stars, The Letdown was one of six Comedy Showroom pilots which aired last year on ABC TV as part of a joint initiative with Screen Australia.

With the pilot episode receiving the 2016 AACTA Award for Best Screenplay in Television, the series continues with the developing friendships and lives of a mother’s group thrown together through the circumstance of timing. Audrey (Alison Bell) navigates the steep learning curve of motherhood as she deals with sleeplessness, shifting relationship dynamics, her issues with her own mother and her husband’s career ambitions. They say it takes a tribe to raise a child, but these days obliging tribes are hard to come by – so perhaps this unlikely group of women (and one fella) is as good as it gets.

With a stellar cast including Alison Bell, Duncan Fellows, Sacha Horler, Leon Ford, Lucy Durack, Celeste Barber, Leah Vandenberg, Xana Tang, Sarah Peirse and Noni Hazelhurst, The Letdown proves that being a parent can be both extreme and hilarious.

Creators and writers Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell, said: “We are thrilled to be working with the ABC and Netflix on a full series of The Letdown. We’ve learned that making a TV show is actually not unlike motherhood… floods of tears, bursts of love and unhinged hormonal meltdowns – all in the name of comedy.”

ABC Head of Comedy Rick Kalowski said: “From the moment The Letdown’s pilot went out as part of our Comedy Showroom, it was clear the show had struck a chord with its brilliant blend of laughs and heartbreak – the very stuff early parenthood is made of. It is an absolute thrill to partner with Netflix on an ABC Comedy for the first time, and to bring this series to the rest of the world.”

Mike Cowap, Investment Manager Multiplatform at Screen Australia said: “Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell firmly established themselves as bold new voices with this darkly funny concept created as a pilot for our joint ABC initiative Comedy Showroom, demonstrating the appetite for a full series. We’re thrilled that this uniquely Australian story will be seen both at home and abroad through Netflix.”

Sophia Zachariou, Director, Sector Investment at Create NSW, said: “Encouraging female voices in comedy is a key focus for Create NSW and we are proud to be supporting this important next step in the careers of Sarah and Alison, whose original and darkly hilarious comic sensibility was so brilliantly showcased in The Letdown. I can’t wait to see what they will unleash across an entire series!”

Production Credits: A Giant Dwarf production for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with funding from Screen Australia in association with Create NSW. Executive Producer Julian Morrow. Produced by Martin Robertson. ABC Executive Producers Rick Kalowski and Rebecca Anderson. Directed by Trent O’Donnell. Written by Sarah Scheller and Alison Bell.

 

We weren’t overly impressed with The Letdown in pilot form but hey, there were definitely worse pilots being aired on Comedy Showroom. Whatever happened to the part where the audience would pick which shows got made?

And good to see overseas money – thanks Netflix! – once again deciding what we see on our ABC. Did four years of Please Like Me fizzling in the ratings teach us nothing?

The International Brigade

The stand-out pilot in last year’s Comedy Showcase was undoubtedly Ronny Chieng International Student, in which first-year Malaysian law student Ronny falls in with a group of fellow Asian students and local girl Asher, and together they try to navigate their way through a minefield of crazy lecturers, equally crazy students, and Aussie traditions they know nothing about. Happily, the first two episodes have been as funny as the pilot was, and on this evidence, this will be a memorable and hilarious series.

Joining the established group of residents at International House is douchey-but-loveable American student Craig, who after almost destroying their shared accommodation with his mega party in episode 1 has quickly been assimilated into the group.

What we particularly like about this series is that every character, from relatively important ones like Craig to the aggressive guy in the IT shop or Professor Dale’s ex-wife Joy-Anne, have well-defined, laugh-generating personalities and dialogue. Even student administrator Mrs Ford, who could simply have been written as a stock standard, world-weary authority figure, is instead a hilarious creation, endlessly flipping through her folder containing the student rulebook, each page of which is encased in its own individual plastic pocket and annotated with a Post-It note.

Compare this to the supporting characters in many other recent ABC sitcoms, from Please Like Me to Chris Lilley’s various shows, who had almost no defining characteristics. Writing comedy is about getting the details right, and it’s no wonder this is a much funnier series.

This series, written as it is by a Malaysian and an Australia, also gives us the rare opportunity to laugh at both ourselves and other cultures in a way that doesn’t disrespect either. This isn’t like Jonah From Tonga, where the joke – whatever it was – seemed to be on non-white Australians. In Ronny Chieng International Student the joke is on everyone. And in a world where people are demanding both dignity and equal rights for all and the right to insult whoever they want, this is the only Australian sitcom that we can think of that’s achieved both. Which is a huge achievement.

Ello John, got a new program!

Since the untimely death of John Clarke just over two months ago, it’s been nice to see many of his classic sketches again thanks to Clarke & Dawe From the Archives. But it’s also sad to remember that there’s now only so much John Clarke out there to enjoy, and very little unseen Clarke to come.

Next month, Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre is hosting a tribute to John Clarke – one which quickly sold out and should be a great night (we hope very much will be podcast). Then there are the episodes of The Ex-PM, filmed days before Clarke’s death, that will air later this year. So that’s something.

Also, last night, the ABC finally broadcast the episode of Meet The Mavericks featuring Clarke in conversation with British comedian Alexei Sayle. This was filmed last year while Sayle was in Australia promoting his second volume of autobiography, Thatcher Stole My Trousers.

In the book, we discover, that like Clarke, Sayle arrived in London in 1971 and it was there that he took his first formative steps in comedy. Discovering his comic voices and how to deploy it, is a big theme of the book and his conversation with Clarke. And we also hear from both about how they intentionally paused and re-started their careers.

In Clarke’s case, he left huge success as Fred Dagg behind in New Zealand in the late 70s when he came to Australia, slowly rebuilding his career via low-key slots on ABC radio. For Sayle, his career pause happened in the late 90s, when he felt he’d run out things to say in his stand-up. Having chosen to become an author, he found himself appearing at many promotional author Q&As and realised that he was still making the audience laugh by talking about his life. He returned to stand-up in 2012 with a new autobiographical style and hasn’t looked back.

There are also reflections from Clarke and Sayle on growing up as Baby Boomers, in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when everyone’s parents and elders had been shaped by the war. That older generation, Sayle argues, weren’t perfect, but their perspective on life did empower his generation to be creative:

When I first got into television, a lot of the senior executives had been in the war…and these people [who are executives now], who are bureaucrats, are terrified of an angry tweet from a viewer. You think, the TV executives in my day, they’d been fucking bayoneted by the Japanese. They didn’t give a fuck about an angry phone call, and they were like ‘Bollocks!’, you know.

We’d love to have heard Clarke’s thoughts on that topic, but alas the conversation moved on.

Meet The Mavericks isn’t a flawless format, but over its several series, it’s been one of the more interesting shows which see several relatively well-known people in conversation. One of the reasons it works is that it’s just a two people with a similar background talking about what they do for a living and how they’ve done it. No one’s distracted by one of them painting a picture of the other or them having to drive around in an old car, it’s just intelligent chat. Sometimes, the simplest idea is the best one.

Sunday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week

So this explains at least something:

It’s taken a while but TV Tonight can reveal ABC2 is proceeding with Aaron Chen Tonight as a replacement for John Conway Tonight.

Chen, who was a sidekick to Conway, steps into the hosting role due to the show being pulled because of illness.

Long time readers of this blog might remember our repeated head-scratching over what exactly was going on with John Conway Tonight – not so much the show being dropped because of Conway’s illness (ill host = no show wasn’t exactly a surprise when the show is a small-scale personality-driven production), but the off-and-on nature of attempts to bring Chen in to host. Long story short: there was supposedly a pilot with Chen as host filmed, it was lined up to go to air, and then… nothing.

So looked at from the position of ABC executives, this makes sense:

GNW TV, which has been rehearsing and recording with Chen, will complete production before ABC2 announces a return date.

They’ve already tried it once with this team, and three weeks in the show went off the air with no return date in sight: no wonder they want to make sure everything is exactly right before Take Two.

Looked at from the position of home viewers though, and we’re seeing Take Two all right – Take Two of one of the ABC’s biggest comedy flops in years *comedy record scratch*.

No prizes for guessing we’re talking about Randling, AKA “the word-based game show”: while that show had a lot of problems that we really don’t have the time or space to list here, one of the biggest ones was that it was recorded and finished up before a single episode went to air.

No doubt pre-recording the entire series of Randling made sense from a budget perspective (it’s unlikely the ABC were worried host Andrew Denton was going to bail on his own show three weeks in). Plus it was a fucking comedy game show: what possible changes would they want to make mid-series?

Then three weeks in it became clear that (among other things) the heavy focus on keeping score was total comedy death but it was impossible to change anything and even though it was obvious the show was going off the rails they still had twenty-four episodes to go and… well, you haven’t heard anyone talking about Randling lately. Or Andrew Denton, as it basically killed his television career.

Seven episodes of a pre-recorded tonight show could work. There’d just be no topical jokes and no topical guests, which seems like something of a hurdle for a tonight show. Fortunately, John Conway Tonight was more about making fun of the tonight show format than replying on topicality, and Chen seems like a pretty funny guy so this just might work.

Fingers crossed: the last thing anyone needs is another Randling.

Burning Down the House

If you’re a fan of Australian online humour then you know by now that SBS is shuttering their comedy site The Backburner next week:

In fact SBS Online is wrapping up their entire comedy department – it seems that the online component of nightly news-ish show The Feed is going to be taking over as far as laughs are concerned, with an increased focus on video because *sigh* why not.

As you’d expect, there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the demise of one of Australia’s more intentionally amusing online outlets. Though – again, as you’d expect – there’s been slightly less wondering as to exactly why SBS was still running what was basically a stand-alone comedy site in the first place.

Most of what’s currently available at SBS Online ties in pretty firmly with their core business (broadcasting) – and what doesn’t directly relate to a SBS program is usually tied into the kind of programs they do run (food, sport, etc). Three years ago a local comedy section may have made sense, with SBS2 screening the occasional wacky local series like Danger 5: considering the stand-alone Australian comedy output on SBS is now down to one sitcom a year (The Family Law returns June 15th – the day after the Backburner shuts up shop, ironically enough), the rationale for a comedy site not connected to The Feed seems increasingly slender from where we’re slumped on the couch.

But enough of the reasons for axing it: what about the reasons for keeping it? While we’re bummed because it was often funny and funny stuff is hard to find with an .au at the end, more than one commentator has suggested the real loss here is that of a training ground for future comedy stars. Remember this?

Comedians fear opportunities for Australia’s up-and-coming stars are narrowing after SBS announced it is shutting down its comedy website.

Sounds like bad news: obviously we want to give Australia’s “up-and-coming stars” as many opportunities as we can. Thing is, Australia’s up-and-coming comedy stars already have loads of opportunities, what with satirical sites popping up all over the place while the ABC runs Fresh Blood, a full-scale online talent search, every year or two. It almost seems reasonable to say that, if you’re just starting out in Australian comedy, things have rarely looked better.

It’s when you go to move on to the next stage that things get grim. Australia might be great at handing out the comedy equivalent of unpaid internships, but once you decide you’d actually like to make a living from comedy – or any form of the arts really – things get very tough very quickly. Everybody loves comedy so long as they don’t have to pay for it: once the comedians put their hand out nobody wants to know.

To be fair to the Backburner, it seems that they did pay a decent amount by online content standards… which is horrifyingly low by all other standards but hey, we’re talking Australian writing here: if you want to make a living wage expressing yourself, play AFL. It was also a good showcase for a bunch of promising writers, but unless The Chaser is hiring again Australia hasn’t needed any new professional comedy writers since around 1999.

Sorry guys, get back to us when Dave O’Neill’s retired and we’ll see what we can do.

Still the One

“Did you miss me?”

“Like an STD.”

“I love those cars!”

Oh, comedy on Channel Nine, how we’ve missed you. Okay, maybe we’ve really just missed the idea of comedy on Channel Nine – the thrilling possibility of humour that’s as broad as the side of a bus and yet also somehow maybe mildly funny. So the news that Nine was going to put two new comedy shows on back-to-back was about as close to exciting as it gets in an area where the career moves of Tom Gleeson and Luke McGregor are eagerly examined by… well, us mostly.

Of course, this wasn’t as risky a move as it first seemed: one of those shows was the returning Here Comes the Habibs, which we’re able to report is pretty much unchanged from last year. Comedy fans who felt the work of Paul Fenech was on the right track but a little bit too crude to show to the oldies, rejoice: once again you have a show that’s not really racist (but certainly feels like it could be) to share with your loved ones.

Actually “kind of not racist but maybe” was a bit of a theme of this first night, as before Here Comes the Habibs we had the premiere episode of True Story with Hamish & Andy, a show that requires a little bit of explanation: each week H&A will sit down with a member of the general public who will proceed to tell a story about something that happened to them that was (hopefully) funny, like an in-person radio talkback segment.

That’s not enough to hang a television show on, so interspersed with the Hamish & Andy chat show scenes we get a re-enactment of their story, like an extended comedy sketch illustrating (and also at some points clearly making up) other details beyond the core story that’s being told. It’s a fairly complicated set-up (especially if you’re not familiar with shows like Drunk History) but it doesn’t take long to settle into, and Hamish & Andy have been doing this for close to a decade now so they know all the angles to bring up to wring extra laughs out of the tale.

This first episode involved a woman on a trip to Hong Kong with her family who ended up being invited to a dinner much fancier than they expected. Fifty dollar rotten eggs that they felt duty-bound to eat aren’t the half of it: this is the kind of rock-solid comedy anecdote you could dine out on (zing) for years, and it’s a great episode as far as establishing the concept goes.

That said, while this episode makes sure to make it clear that the stuff-ups are all on the Australian’s side and the re-enactment doubles down on this (see the “I’m a guest here” joke)… the over-arching joke is that foreigners aren’t like us, even when we’re the ones getting it all wrong. Culture clash comedy is increasingly tricky to get right, and while this manages it – vomit is the international language of comedy, after all, and these Australians really do disgrace themselves – there’s still a few moments where it feels like things could go the wrong way, which is not really a tone you want in a comedy in 2017.

But our prudish PC quams aside, this was… pretty good? Sure, this week was vomit jokes and next week looks like stiffy gags but the story-telling was strong (we’re guessing these are tales the owners have polished over years of re-telling), Hamish & Andy know which bits to build on and which parts to gloss over, and the re-enactment side of things was silly enough to give the story the spark it needed to work on television. If they keep making it, we’ll keep watching – and it looks like they’ll keep making it for some time yet:

As for Here Comes the Habibs season two, it pretty much picked up from where last season left off – obvious jokes, broad characters, middling storylines… oh right, the actual storylines: okay, the young couple going against their family’s wishes have graduated to secret pants-down action, the rich jerks are trying to buy back their house by selling all their unloved Anzaclava biscuits to the UN to feed refugees, and when the Lebanese family’s son returns home from his mountain-climbing pilgrimage he might as well be tugging on his collar to signal just how awkward his dad’s “now you are a man” speech is. No prizes for guessing how that pans out. Okay, the Ebola quarantine twist was kind of a surprise.

To be blunt, there’s no prizes for guessing the results of much of anything going on here. The idea of having everyone trapped together isn’t exactly subtle but at least it does generate a few half-arsed comedy scenarios (largely about having to go without water, mobile phones, electricity, etc) which it proceeds to drag out well past their use-by date. We’re guessing someone somewhere still finds the stale idea of “oh no, we have to loudly shout nonsense to make the people in the next room think we’re having awesome sex” hilarious, but even the liberal use of wizard metaphors didn’t do it for us.

In fact, the only interesting thing here was the way the writers have written themselves into a hole that’s damaging the show. The basic idea behind most sitcoms is “a bunch of people who don’t really like each other but are stuck with each other”, but here it’s clear that the method of keeping them stuck together (them being neighbours) just isn’t working – these days if you hate your neighbours (and live in a fucking massive mansion) you just ignore them, end of story. So this week it required an ebola quarantine to keep them together, next week they have to join forces against a common enemy, and so on – if your sitcom has to spend a chunk of time each week forcing everyone to be together, that’s time wasted. It’s like if, say, The Office had to spend three minutes each week coming up with a new pointless reason why all these people were in a building together when they clearly don’t get along.

No wonder this kind of thing is going on:

Sammy J’s Democratic Party is the worst form of satire, except for all the others

Remember Playground Politics? Sammy J’s 2016 election satire in the style of Play School? It’s back (on ABC on Wednesdays, as well as iView and Facebook), as part of a new short-form sketch show Sammy J’s Democratic Party. Set in a secret bunker under Parliament House, Democratic Party offers a sneaky peek into the backroom dealing and policy-making process in Canberra.

Through a game show parody, we see what your local member would have to do in order to become a frontbencher (SPOILERS: Say nothing controversial!). There’s also a cop show parody about crimes against the constitution, called (you guessed it) Constitutional Cops, and an interview with a cardboard cutout of Sir Robert Menzies (who it turns out is really into Adele). Plus, there’s a new episode of Playground Politics and (in an homage to The Late Show?) a song from Paul Kelly. Oh, wait, Ned Kelly.

As with Playground Politics, doing political satire via the medium of parodies of well-known TV formats means there are plenty of laughs, but mainly when they parody the TV formats. The political satire itself, while blistering accurate, often isn’t very funny. In fact, occasionally, it’s incredibly heavy-handed.

On the plus side, it’s nice to see a TV comedy doing LOL RANDOMS-type gags that are actually funny. If someone had told us before we watched it that this show featured an interview with a cardboard cutout of Robert Menzies that only wanted to talk about the music of Adele we’d have dreaded watching it; it’s the kind of sketch concept that every two-bit student review and aspiring comedy team making videos for YouTube has done and failed at. Except, that this was okay. It was well-performed, the cutout was comedically crap, and Menzies’ voice was a suitably snooty take on Received Pronunciation.

The Menzies interviews, Sammy J told Junkee, are going to be on every week, so it’s good that they actually are funny. We’re less sure about Constitutional Cops, though, which really is just a half-decent parody of cop shows combined with some obtuse gags about the constitution. One for the nerds, possibly.

It will also be interesting to see whether Democratic Party can attract more actual real-life politicians on to the show (in episode one we got Tim Wilson). And with The Weekly coming to an end soon, perhaps this is where attention-seeking pollies can go instead of Hard Chat. On second thoughts, let’s hope not. As The Chaser demonstrated repeatedly, having actual really-life politicians on a comedy show is only funny if they’re the butt of a very pointed joke. Anything else just makes them look like good sports for playing along with the gags. And what kind of satire program wants to be seen to do that?

Australian Tumbleweeds is Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.
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