Australian Tumbleweeds
Vale Luke Warm Sex
Here’s an idea for a TV show: find a comedian who – by his own admission – knows next to nothing about sex. Then have him wander around talking to expert after expert, but in a shock twist they all give him rubbish or ludicrous advice and because of his lack of experience he takes it all at face value. Oh wait, that might actually be funny: forget we said anything.
What exactly did we learn from three hours of Luke Warm Sex? For one thing, maybe don’t get the documentary department to make a comedy series? Come on, the only joke on offer here was “ha ha, an awkward guy is going to be put in awkward situations” – even the worst “awkward” comedy series knew to at least vary the build up to that kind of joke, but here it was just “oh look, now Luke’s in a bondage dungeon. Now he’s looking at people in full-body suits demonstrating sexual positions. Now he’s licking a fruit”. And it all led up to what? “Hey guys, I’m way more comfortable about sex now”? ORGY OR GTFO.
[just back to our first idea for a moment: done right, it’d be a great way to point out just how funny real sex actually is. C’mon, most of the antics involved in real sex are totally mental – how could purposefully stupid sex advice be more funny than the real thing? Oh wait, that’s probably what the makers of Luke Warm Sex thought]
Yeah, it was informative: who watches television for information? Even the nightly news knows it has to tell a compelling story or people will tune out. This was a show that figured its audience would be so obsessed with sex they simply wouldn’t give a shit that everything else going on in a seemingly endless succession of late-Victorian front rooms was as boring as, to coin a phrase, fuck. Okay, we know: when it comes to sex on television, it’s either instructional or pornographic with nothing in between. But couldn’t they try a little? “Sexy” is actually a big part of “sex” last time we checked.
This show was a failure, and not just in the ratings sense (though dropping down to 303,000 viewers in prime time is not a good look); we predicted pretty much everything wrong with this show in our original review and lo, it came to pass:
You can’t make fun of sex in 2016 because only uncool creeps have hang-ups about sex. In fact, the entire point of this show is meant to be that McGregor wants to get rid of his hang-ups about sex; if they’d made this show with an unrepentant prude as the host then all the comedy would come from sexperts mocking his or her foolish inhibitions. And you can’t make fun of a guy wanting to educate himself about sex because that would just be straight-up cruel. So the only possible source of comedy here comes from having an awkward guy put in an awkward situation and then realising he’s got nothing to be awkward about. Awww. Wait, this goes for three hours?
But the one thing we have learned from all this is to never under-estimate the ingenuity of Australia’s TV critics. Sure, you can just come right out and say a show is crap:
McGregor’s goofy boy-next-door personality couldn’t possibly cater for that sort of edge, and nor should he have to. His style is deliberately meek, a milquetoast we can all to some extent relate to.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but great television it does not make – at least not in this form. Padded out into six derivative episodes (the central conceit, that he wants to get great at sex, is in no way realised), Luke Warm Sex has as much kick to it as a joint with oregano substituted for weed. The ABC are broadcasting it at 9pm; that time slot feels off by at least a handful of hours.
But where’s the fun in that? You won’t score an invite to the ABC Xmas party with that approach. Better to follow the lead of a far more experienced critic:
Hopefully if someone as nervous and gormless as this young man can get better at sex, defined in the show as any activity undertaken for pleasure between two or more consenting adults, then everyone can. (School, he tells us, taught him that sex was something that happened only between a man and a woman and at some point involved a banana and a condom.)
The style of the show is what’s known as docu-comedy, a charming example of how TV genres these days play with each other and how so much factual programming is based on multiple generic participation, the term reality TV simply a convenient container.
The first episode, directed with lots of cinematic invention by Hayden Guppy, is a disarming, idiosyncratic excursion into some painful truths for McGregor as he confronts his fear of being nude.
Notice how, while there’s a generally positive vibe to the article, there’s actually very little positive that’s being said? If the show helps people with their sex lives, that’s good; it’s “charming” the way today’s television mixes up genres; the show itself is “disarming” and “idiosyncratic” rather than, you know, “entertaining” or “funny”. It’s not damning with faint praise – even the praise has bugger-all to do with the show that’s supposedly being discussed.
There’s a real art to writing a positive review that doesn’t actually say anything positive. The author can’t be nailed down to any specific claims – saying McGregor “comically undertakes weekly challenges” doesn’t exactly promise laughs – yet gives the impression that the show being discussed is worth your while. If we were wearing a hat, we’d take it off in salute.
Luke Warm Sex was still a fucking huge waste of time, mind you.
Cash Rules Everything Around Me(me)
A few weeks ago the online comedy world was rocked by the news that someone was actually making money from online comedy. No, wait, we got it wrong: it was rocked by the news that someone was making money from their videos. Hang on – was it that it was rocked by the fact that videos can provide income? Someone was being paid? On the internet? Shit.
But for the crack team at Buzzfeed, it seemed worthwhile pointing out that Jordan Shanks – better known to many as Friendlyjordies – had been paid for a five minute viral video on the importance of voting. It gets worse:
BuzzFeed News can reveal the comedian regularly approaches progressive organisations with a pitch email to make branded video for them.
According to the man himself in a recent chat, it’s more a case of him first coming up with an idea and then pitching it to various organisations to see if anyone wants to sling some cash money his way. You know, like every other freelancer on the planet.
these sponsorships do not represent an uninterrupted income stream. Jordan says he maintains 100% editorial control and “because they believe in the cause and want to keep the channel going, they chip in money here or there. Essentially, it is a donation for what I was going to do anyway”. An email, written by necessity in the soulless style of a research grant, is sent out to left-wing organisations ahead of the release of a new video to solicit funding and keep the machine running.
To Jordan, his work is online activism, with his videos acting as “virtual protests of two hundred thousand people”. He sees satire as a “gateway drug” for political engagement.
That’s pretty bad news for those who thought satire was a way to make people laugh.
But let’s be honest: after fifteen billion years of Jon Stewart hosting The Daily Show, we’ve now had at least twenty-five generations of humans grow up thinking that political comedy is meant to be ruthlessly partisan first and funny somewhere further down the list. The old idea of political satire – that the audience should never have a clear idea of which side you’re on – is deader than Richard Nixon’s dog: these days people want their political comedy to go the enemy and go them hard.
So when Buzzfeed says:
It’ll also be interesting to see whether Shanks’s fiercely loyal audience is turned away from videos that are funded by different political organisations.
Who are they kidding? Friendlyjordies audience doesn’t care that he’s taking money, they only care that he’s not taking money from the chumps funding the other side. And what accusation is Buzzfeed throwing his way? That he’s “sold out”? What is this, 1993? Have fun enjoying the hilarious comedy stylings of Janeane Garofalo, slacker. Over here it’s 2016, and selling out – now known as finding a way to get paid to do something you love – is pretty much the whole entire point.
Look, once upon a time, not so long ago, this kind of thing actually would look pretty bad for a comedian. The laughs are meant to come first and foremost: if you’re being paid to shill a message, then by definition the message (and not the laughs) has to come first. If you think of a hilarious joke that’s not “on message”? Into the bin.
But this kind of “satire” isn’t that kind of comedy. Its purpose isn’t to make you laugh: it’s to sink the boot into the other side. It’s partisan cheerleading, not the kind of even-handed “satire” the ABC still aims for (and which increasingly looks bland and toothless by comparison).
[to be fair, Australian television in general has such a relatively small audience that its programs can’t afford to deliberately alienate even a single viewer. Which is why Australian television is doomed]
Obviously there are still plenty of ways it can look bad for a comedian to take money. If The Katering Show suddenly started talking up a particular brand of cheese, it’d run pretty firmly against what makes the show work. And if Friendlyjordies was selling itself as taking an even-handed look at the issues then accepting sacks of cash from shadowy lefties to push their cause would be something of a problem. But he’s all about the partisan rants sinking the boot into the right-wing types that run much of this country: when you’re already that compromised, you might as well make a few bucks out of it.
Katering for the Masses
The Katering Show was the comedy phenomenon of 2015, the YouTube series sending up cooking shows that quickly went viral all around the world. Now the series has been bought by the ABC, and is back for eight new episodes, released on iView today.
When she was asked last year about how she would feel about bringing the format to television, co-star and co-writer Kate McLennan told The Age:
There’s something really special about having this little concise seven-minute episode, and also, the freedom we have to say whatever we want, we’re not beholden to anyone
Quite. And the great news is that the new ABC-funded episodes have the same feel as the YouTube ones – like a show its creators really wanted to make, not something that’s been dicked-around-with by TV executives, worried about how it will play with key demographics, the government or the media. If anything, The Katering Show season 2 seems even more what it wants to be – acerbic, savage, weird, and really, really funny.
In one episode, beloved South Australian chef Maggie Beer cops a pasting from the pair, who dress up like her, present the show like her, and drizzle a Katering Show version of Beer’s ubiquitous verjuice over a Beer-inspired lamb dish. SPOILERS but things don’t exactly work out as they would had the actual Maggie Beer been running things, because Kate and Kate are two impoverished Gen-Xers living in inner-city Melbourne who can’t cook and don’t care. The fact that they’re presenting the show at all is presumably due to a desperate need for cash, or some kind of administrative error.
Speaking of which, one of the things that makes this show stand out above other cooking show parodies is that it isn’t just about taking the piss out of the cooking shows – they’d soon run of material if they did that – it’s about two women in their thirties on the edge of a breakdown. And yet the show’s so crammed full of great lines, well-timed slapstick, and background strangeness that you barely notice their descent into madness. It’s very much the Fawlty Towers approach to the mentally ill rather than the Please Like Me approach, with an emphasis on creating hyper-real-but-funny characters rather than going for realism.
But before you think we’re heading off down the “all this political correctness these days, you can’t even make a joke about the blacks/Asians/gays/women/mentally ill” path with the above paragraph, we’re not. We just point that worrying about realism when making a comedy is setting yourself on the path to Not Funny. You need to worry about getting laughs, in as many ways as you can. Something that The Katering Show does with the skill of a true master chef – layer upon carefully-applied layer of funny. We give it three Michelin stars.
This Town is Coming Like a Ghost Town
It’s been a bit of a theme here these last few weeks: where has all the Australian comedy television gone? With the ABC having diverted funding ever-so-slightly from long-running comedy panel shows – which were shit, but were still technically comedy – to long-running shows that just happen to feature comedians, we’ve entered an age where we can now expect long periods of the year to be pretty much comedy free. Those days when The Comedy Company was the highest-rating show on Australian television? Long gone.
And it’s not like there’s an awful lot coming up to get excited about either. Sure, Mad as Hell isn’t far off and thank Azathoth for that because if it wasn’t for Shaun Micallef (and yes, John Clarke & Brian Dawe too but once we bring them in we’ve a): basically summed up the quality end of the Australian Television Comedy Scene and b): they’re all old-ish guys who’ve been in the biz for twenty years or more, which is just a tad depressing) we’d have given this blog over to the real tumbleweeds years ago.
But what else is left to get us excited now that we’ve seen Here Come the Habibs? Of course there’s this:
Get ready to browse ABC TV’s Comedy Showroom
Six brand new comedy pilots…Tell us what you think!
Tuesday, March 29, 2016 — Starting Wednesday 27th April at 9pm, ABC TV’s Comedy Showroom launches six new comedy pilots made by some of Australia’s most exciting comedians, comedy writers, producers and directors. But viewers won’t have to wait each week for the latest pilot to be unleashed, with all of the pilots being made available to watch on ABC iview straight after the Comedy Showroom premiere.
Further to this, and in a network and Australian television first, we want our audience to tell us which pilots they think should come back as full TV series. Simply by clicking through from iview, our audience will have the opportunity to provide their feedback by answering a few quick questions or just by telling us what they like and don’t like.
No other network nurtures and supports Australian comedy like ABC TV.
So which pilots will our audience gravitate to? Which will they laugh at most? And which will they blast with criticism or want to see more of?
Will it be Ronny Chieng sharing his experiences as an International Student; Eddie Perfect’s absurd suburban life in The Future Is Expensive; The Katering Show’s Kate McLennan hitting rock bottom in life and love in her and Kate McCartney’s Bleak; Lawrence Mooney discovering what it takes for a 40-something-year-old man to finally grow up in Moonman; the desperate attempts of a deadbeat weed dealer to win his new neighbour’s affections in hot WA comedy team Mad Kids’ The Legend of Gavin Tanner; or Alison Bell’s struggles as a new mum in an oddball mothers’ group in The Letdown (produced by The Chaser’s Julian Morrow).
Ronny Chieng: International Student – tx: Wednesday April 27th at 9pm
The Letdown – tx: Wednesday May 4th at 9pm
The Legend of Gavin Tanner – tx: Wednesday May 11th at 9pm
The Future is Expensive – tx: Wednesday May 18th at 9pm
Bleak – tx: Wednesday May 25th at 9pm
Moonman – tx: Wednesday June 1st at 9pm
And all pilots are available on iview from Wednesday April 27th from 9.30pm.
All will be revealed when our best and brightest comedians invite you to join them in ABC TV’s Comedy Showroom.
A joint initiative with Screen Australia, made in association with Film Victoria, Screen NSW and ScreenWest. Executive Producer Head of Comedy Rick Kalowski.
But let’s be honest: this is the equivalent of one sitcom series, only every episode is a pilot so you don’t get any of the advantages of doing an actual series-length sitcom. Or the advantages of doing a regular sketch show. But hey, iView! The kids love that.
Let’s break it down: since time began, TV comedy has been largely divided into sketch comedy and sitcoms. If you have a whole lot of one-off jokes, you make a sketch comedy because that’s the best way to showcase those jokes, even if you plan to repeat those jokes in slightly different contexts each week to create reoccurring characters; if you’d rather mine humour from going in deep on a handful of characters, you create a sitcom where once the audience gets to know the characters you can get big laughs simply by placing them in various situations (hence the name “situation comedy”).
Comedy Showroom, while having the appeal of being a kind of talent search and we all know how much Aussies love that garbage, is the worst of both worlds: too long to work as a one-off sketch, too short to let us get to know the characters. And considering how most sketch comedy plays out today – the first episode is great, then the second episode rolls around and awww fuck, they’re doing the same jokes all over again because all those great one-off sketches are actually boring-arse reoccurring sketches – being served up the first episode of a sitcom like this is the worst possible guide to what the actual show is going to be like. Either it’s going to be exactly the same thing over and over (see: Utopia) and so one episode is all we’re really ever going to want to see, or it’s going to be completely different when it goes to series (see: every US sitcom ever) and so the pilot was really bugger-all use as a guide.
And what happens if the audience picks a show where all the good jokes went into the first episode? It’s not like the creators have any incentive to hold any quality material back for later in the series when they don’t even know if there’s going to be a series. Traditionally a pilot is part of a long-running process that includes convincing the people holding the purse strings that you actually have a series or two’s worth of ideas; is each episode of Comedy Showroom going to end with “and now here’s our proposed plots for the rest of the season” followed by five minutes of written notes?
(yes, we’re pretending that this series isn’t rigged, even though it seems likely that at least some of these pilots are, for whatever reason, less likely to go to series than others. Hey, whatever happened to the Fresh Blood pilots anyway? Oh right, Fancy Boy and Skit Box got the gig even though Aunty Donna was easily the popular and critical fave.)
And that’s only the first of our increasingly annoying questions. What happens if the audience picks the show the ABC head honchos like the least? What happens if it turns out one pilot is clearly head and shoulders above the rest? What if they’re all great? What if they’re all awful? What if there’s a tie? What if somehow the shit one is the one that gets the green light? Yeah, because that’s never happened at the ABC before.
For us, Comedy Showroom is a great idea – six new pilots to review! But from an audience point of view, it pretty much sucks. If the pilots are good, why are we only getting one episode? And if the pilots are shit, why are we even getting one episode? And if we’re the best judge of which shows are worth going to series, why aren’t we pulling down six figure salaries from the ABC?
Just don’t forget: “No other network nurtures and supports Australian comedy like ABC TV… by turning the commissioning process into a public competition.”
Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right
Ok, so tonight The Weekly continued on its merry way being a shithouse news program, but somewhere in there they decided to throw in some coverage of the media’s coverage of Waleed Aly’s Logie nomination. You know, this kind of rubbish:
5. Aly needs to be truly popular to win.
It would be great if Aly was popular, but his show isn’t yet the league of breakfast television juggernauts Today and Sunrise. As prosaic as those shows can be, there’s no arguing with their huge draw with audiences.
“The Logies are an embarrassment. It is a complete joke. What has Waleed ever done? Because he does an editorial slapping someone down every now and then, does that qualify him for a Gold Logie? And is The Project successful? No.”
(we’re guessing the journalist found that particular “well-placed TV insider” inside the Herald-Sun offices, as it’s remarkably similar to opinions publicly held by at least one of their regular TV writers)
And most importantly for the clumsy and ham-fisted point we’re about to make, this:
‘Where is Lisa Wilkinson’s Gold Logie?’ fellow Channel Nine star Ben Fordham inquired during the show, to which Karl eventually responded: ‘Lisa’s too white’.
Clearly there’s enough going on there* for a hard-hitting show like The Weekly to really sink their teeth into. So what jokes did they get around to making?
Well, it seems Charlie Pickering was the one who should be outraged, because he was on The Project for years and never got a nomination. “Was it because I’m white?” Pickering said, “who knows?”
Huh?
Obviously that joke wasn’t the same as the joke made on The Today Show. Totally different. Not at all similar. Not alike. Nup. Sure, The Weekly didn’t actually mention The Today Show‘s clumsy racism, but just because they made the exact same joke doesn’t mean… wait, what?
(rumors that we’ll be offering a prize to anyone who can actually tell Charlie Pickering and Karl Stefanovic apart are clearly untrue. We can’t afford to give away prizes)
Basically, if you felt like it’d be nice to have some more evidence around to point out how pissweak The Weekly actually is when it comes to anything remotely resembling a tough issue, then good news! Watching them confront a pretty gosh darn obvious case of entrenched racism in the Australian media and not only being unable to say the word “racism” but instead going with a recycled joke from The Today Show – before deciding that the best angle to take was “ha ha Charlie, Aly was nominated for doing your old job better than you did” – should get the job done pretty nicely.
Not that “ha ha Charlie, Aly was nominated for doing your old job better than you did” isn’t kind of funny.
*what actually seems to be going on is that this year’s Gold Logie’s field is so weak the winner (whoever it is) will be coming from a dud show, which looks bad for the awards and the industry as a whole. It was fine for Carrie Bickmore to win last year because she’s blonde and pretty and there’s the whole tragic dead partner backstory to justify her winning on a show no-one watches, but Aly is a lefty Muslim (and therefore supposedly not on-side to TV Week / News Corp readers) on that same low-rating show so now it’s time for “insiders” to sink the boots in.
You’re Back in A World of Shit
A long time ago one of us read an article that revealed the secret behind stage hypnotism: it’s all fake. Basically, when a stage hypnotist brought someone up out of the audience they’d whisper to them “play along”, then do a whole bunch of hand-waving “hypnotism” that had the grand effect of bugger-all. But because they’d now been given a free pass to act like a dickhead – and didn’t want to be the chump who ruined the night – almost all the participants were happy to act out whatever silly commands they were given.
And that’s just about all the serious thought we’re willing to give the soggy shit-filled bog that was 80-odd minutes of You’re Back in the Room. Who cares if it’s real or not when the result is just a hellish death march slog towards a vision of entertainment that never actually gets any closer like some kind of mirage with the Channel Nine logo in the corner? Just segment after segment featuring the same four people lurching around on the stage pretending to be riding wild horses or staggering though a maze or shitting themselves uncontrollably… oh wait, that was just us daydreaming about a more entertaining way to spend our evening.
Has anyone ever created a game show where all the contestants were stinking drunk? If not, why not? Surely getting hammered out of your skull can’t be any more dangerous than having some sleazebag stranger use his mental powers to turn you into his unwilling zombie slave? At least then with Ahhh What Ya Fukkin’ Lookin’ At: The Great Piss-Up Challenge we’d know the on-stage idiots really were doing shit beyond their conscious command. Plus projectile vomiting, one-punch fights and loss of bladder control are all acceptable reactions to finding yourself sharing a stage with Daryl Somers.
Ah Daryl, AKA the only reason this show even counts as “comedy” because fuck knows his career for the last twenty years sure has been a Daryl “Snowtown” Barrel of laughs. Here’s a tip for next weeks episode, and don’t try to pretend you won’t be tuning in because it’s already the only hit show Nine’s had all year: get up real close and take a good look in Daryl’s eyes every time there’s a close up. See the despair? See the desperation? See the way his eyes dart around as if looking for a way to escape?
If nothing else – and it’s not like a show based entirely on “pretend your testicles are hand grenades and someone’s just pulled the pin” has anything else to offer a sentient lifeform – this has confirmed that Daryl Somers is a one trick pony. Unfortunately for him, the vet shot that pony a few years back when his Hey Hey it’s Saturday revival died in the arse. He just can’t do anything else but host that one particular show, and no-one wants to see him do that any more.
But hey, ratings win! Daryl’s back! Hey Hey is “still on the table“! God is dead! Satan is real!
Our Annual Post About the Comedy Logies Nominations
In a week when the only comedy on TV has been the try-hard satire of The Weekly, the only-funny-if-you’re-the-sort-of-arsehole-who-laughs-at-the-inadequacy-of-others Luke Warm Sex, the brilliant-but-short Clarke & Dawe and You’re Back In The Room hosted by Daryl Somers, there’s only one way to cap things off: this year’s comedy Logies nominations.
Best Entertainment Program
- Family Feud (Network Ten)
- Gruen (ABC)
- Have You Been Paying Attention? (Network Ten)
- The Voice (Nine Network)
- The X Factor Australia (Channel Seven)
Most Outstanding Entertainment Program
- Gruen (ABC)
- Have You Been Paying Attention? (Network Ten)
- The Voice (Nine Network)
- The Weekly With Charlie Pickering (ABC)
- The X Factor Australia (Channel Seven)
Most Outstanding Comedy Program
- No Activity (Stan)
- Open Slather (Foxtel – The Comedy Channel)
- Please Like Me (ABC)
- Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell (ABC)
- Utopia (ABC)
Could have been worse, we suppose.
Although, just as you realise that at least Gruen probably won’t win because either The Voice or The X Factor will, you also realise that Mad As Hell also probably won’t win because the kind of comedy shows that comedy fans like almost never do. (We’re predicting a win for Utopia in the Most Outstanding Comedy category.)
We do question whether the result of the Logies is something anyone cares about in 2016, though. Once, the teen vote was important to the Logies and teens bought extra copies TV Week so they could get the coupon to vote for their favourite soap stars. Now, teens are absorbed by online media providers like Snapchat and YouTube, and probably don’t know the Logies exists. As for adults, they’re still watching TV but the buzz is around American dramas on streaming services like Netflix. It’s great that the Logies is now recognising locally-made streamed shows (hence the nomination for No Activity) but does anyone care about them, let alone who wins the Logies?
Remember that old gag about network publicity chiefs rigging the Logies results by getting their minions to vote multiple times? Now we’re wondering if they’re the only ones interested in the entire ceremony. That’s the best explanation we can come up with for the nomination for Open Slather.
Katering Show Delivers for iView
Press release time!
ABC iview set to cook up a storm with The Katering Show
Hit series coming to iview.
Friday, April 1, 2016 — ABC iview is thrilled to announce that from Friday April 15th, food intolerant Kate McCartney and her intolerably smug foodie co-host Kate McLennan, launch exclusively on iview with a fresh picked season of The Katering Show.
In this new series, McCartney and McLennan take a Sassy Swipe™ at the over-hyped food trend of Ramen; they take the term “Yummy Mummy” way too literally; they sample a tablet that counteracts lactose intolerance in an episode dubiously cleverly titled It Gets Feta; they subject themselves and a special guest to the latest weight loss torture regimes of Paleo, Raw Food and The 5:2 Diet; and they dedicate an episode to their culinary hero and spirit bosom, Maggie Beer, where they peddle their own noxious version of verjuice.
But The Kates are aiming to give back too; to use their position as attractive celebrity chefs and trained actors to change the world. First, they’ll use their no talent to address the important issue of marriage equality. McLennan will then check her white privilege by generously inviting The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng into the kitchen in an episode that highlights both McLennan’s sunny bigotry and her lack of star power.
And finally The Kates will solve climate change – and the cracks in their relationship – by cooking with kitchen scraps from the series in their celebratory End of Days farewell.
Of course, the entire flirty little series is peppered with references to The Kates’ crumbling personal situations; including, but not limited to, McCartney’s rat piss soaked rental property and McLennan’s endless bouts of ‘in-knicker’ infections.
As The Katering Show has been one of the rare bright spots in Australian comedy over the last few years, this is news we can firmly get behind. It’s nice to be able to laugh at an ABC comedy release instead of just laughing at the idea of an ABC comedy release, that’s for sure.
It’s a Death Row Pardon Two Minutes Late
Here’s a thought: does it mean anything that the Melbourne International Comedy Festival – supposedly one of the world’s greatest live comedy festivals, at least according to their own publicity – is happening at a point in time when there is literally no long-form Australian comedy being shown on mainstream television?
Sure, there are a handful of shows that the ABC brands as comedy, but come on: The Weekly is a news-slash-interview show with sarcasm, Luke Warm Sex is a documentary, Home Delivery is an interview show, The Last Leg isn’t even Australian and The (forthcoming) Checkout is consumer affairs. There isn’t even a shitty panel show on at the moment: sitcoms and sketch comedy are now special treats only doled out a handful of times a year.
And yet Australia has provided comedy fans with “the best comedian in the world“. That would be Sam Simmons:
Last year’s winning show made clear that there is nothing random about Simmons’ comedy. Spaghetti for Breakfast featured much of the kinds of tomfoolery for which he is known, from snorting breakfast cereal to wearing a lettuce leaf as a wig, from delivering thundering tirades against people who don’t remove their bike helmets in shops to singing jingles about Laurence Fishburne. But just when things were approaching peak madcap, Simmons opened a tiny window onto his childhood that left people in tears.
All the best comedians leave their audience in tears, of course.
So what does it say about the level of interest in putting comedy on our televisions when we have “the best comedian in the world“ right here and yet none of our networks can be arsed putting comedy to air? Are they really so out of touch that they’re ignoring the huge mass of talent on their doorstep? Or is television comedy simply something now that only other countries do?
Of course, part of the problem with that argument is that Australian television – well, the ABC – has been extremely supportive of Simmons’ career pretty much from the outset, giving him regular work on both Triple J and jTV before airing his two television series, The Urban Monkey and Problems. Unfortunately, despite this support, Simmons never really caught on with a wider audience here and has spent much of the last few years honing his career overseas… while occasionally mentioning the lack of support he felt he was given in his home country.
But now a man “who works harder than most to eradicate being beige and full of cynicism,” and who had to move overseas to find “an enthusiastic audience for his journeys into bread shoes, taco kits, slap-and-run (the worst game ever) and disco broccoli” (remember: there is nothing random about Simmons comedy) is “the best comedian in the world”. What then does it say about Australia that he couldn’t make a go of a television career here – and that, going by the current television listings, pretty much no-one else can either?
To return to Simmons’ career, he won the awards that made him “the best comedian in the world” for an act that involved him snorting breakfast cereal and wearing a lettuce leaf as a wig: is it possible that his material, while extremely effective in a live setting, may not transfer well to television? And that by being the standard bearer for quality live comedy in this country – hello, he’s “the best comedian in the world” – with a brand of live comedy that has a relatively niche appeal, his supporters are sending out a message to non-comedy buffs that perhaps stand-up comedy isn’t for them?
Simmons isn’t up there with Dave Hughes or Wil Anderson, but he’s hardly an unknown either. He’s been a semi-regular on various panel shows in recent years, especially Dirty Laundry Live; he had his own episode of Home Delivery last year. So when the press says he’s “the best comedian in the world”, its not just heaping praise on him, its telling readers about what comedy actually is. You know that guy you saw getting surreal with Lawrence Mooney? The one who told Julia Zemiro about his troubled childhood? He’s “the best comedian in the world”.
So if you don’t find him funny – if you read an article telling you he became “the best comedian in the world” for balancing a chocolate bar on top of his skull and saying “I’ve got a Bounty on my head” and you think “eh, whatever” – then this kind of praise for Simmons is telling you that, well, you know that comedy thing? Maybe it isn’t for you. What Sam Simmons does is the best comedy in the world; if you don’t find it funny, then maybe comedy is something you’d best avoid.
Clearly this is totally insane. Nobody is going to avoid an entire genre of entertainment simply on the basis of one line in one article printed in a Sunday newspaper. Whether you find him hilariously funny or not, Simmons is just one man: anyone could refute in a second the idea that he symbolises the entirety of Australian comedy, as there’s just so many other different examples of Australian comedy available to watch out there on the… uh… oh yeah, right.
Shit.
Oh dear God is The Weekly still on the air?
Yes. Yes it is.
So we figured we’d give The Weekly yet another shot on the off chance that it had somehow improved.
It has not. Oh, how it has not.
Ok, that last bit about thinking The Weekly might have improved was bullshit: we knew it hadn’t improved because it’s been going for what, close to thirty episodes now – that’s roughly as long as Shaun Micallef’s Newstopia, AKA the best Australian news satire of the 21st century until Mad as Hell started up – and it’s been exactly the same level of meh since day one. What we didn’t expect was that it would have somehow figured out a way to get worse.
To wit: this week Kitty Flanagan did a consumer watch segment about product placement and awww shit shots fired ’cause The Checkout is back in a few weeks and they don’t like people stepping on their turf so it’s on like Donkey Kong hitting a bong while playing pong. As part of this bit, she cracked one of her typically above par for The Weekly jokes and they cut to Charlie Pickering. Laughing at it.
Now yes, it’s true that Pickering’s entire career since at least Talkin’ ’bout Your Generation has largely been based on his ability to laugh at other people’s jokes. We’re sure that in the eyes of many television production executives, this ability is something to be prized and nurtured. But for fucks sake: it’s bad enough when Gruen cuts away to the audience seemingly enjoying a shitty joke when for all we know they’re laughing at something entirely different that happened two hours earlier. When you have to cut away to your host laughing at a joke – and not a surprising joke from a guest mind you, because spontaneous laughter actually is charming and fun to see, but one from a fellow cast member where presumably the joke’s at least been through rehearsals – you are making a bad show.
Blah blah blah covering up an edit blah blah. Pickering’s got one of the fakest laughs on Australian television: do you really want to deploy that to make your show look like a bunch of people amusing themselves? Do you really think that’s going to result in a funnier, more entertaining show?
Oh wait, this is The Weekly we’re talking about. Forget we even mentioned it.