Australian Tumbleweeds
Hey Hey It’s An Enormous Tsunami Of Complete Bullshit
One of the first things they’re meant to teach you at journalism school (yeah, like there’s any of them still open – ed) is: CONSIDER YOUR SOURCE. If someone is telling you something, you should stop and ask yourself “why are they telling me this? Is it possible they might have an ulterior motive? Could they be a self-promoting egotistical looney spouting demented fantasies the media only report in a desperate attempt to stir up shit? Worse, could you be speaking to Daryl Somers?”
Seriously, how else to explain this “story” in the Daily Telegraph:
RUSSELL Gilbert is on the road to recovery and is poised to make his TV comeback on a rebooted Hey Hey It’s Saturday later this year.
Wow! Whadda Scoop!
“He’s on the mend,” Gilbert’s friend said.
“But it’s too soon to say if he will ever be the same.”
Oh. But the Hey Hey stuff is true, right?
Somers, who has just finished filming his new series You’re Back in the Room for Channel 9, said he’s been in continuing talks with the network about how best to bring Hey Hey back to the small screen in 2016.
“I understand Russell is feeling much better,” Somers said.
“I’d love him to be part of Hey Hey when we do it. Molly (Meldrum) too, but that could prove more difficult.”
Wait, that’s it? “Continuing talks”? That could just be Somers whining “pleeeeeease let me do Hey Hey again” under the programming chief’s door. And considering what a massive fucking flop Hey Hey turned out to be last time it came back, we’re thinking he’d be lucky to get that far even if he wasn’t telling everyone his comeback would revolve around a crack team of medically knackered nostalgia cases.
But why let the facts – which are as follows: Daryl is the ONLY person talking about bringing Hey Hey back and he’s probably doing that talking to an empty room – get in the way of a good story? Even the usually reputable TV Tonight is flogging this particular dead horse, adding in this tidbit:
Meanwhile Jo Beth Taylor has been attracting new fans on TEN’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.
Which is good news for Jo Beth, though considering she suddenly quit Hey Hey (and television in general) without warning in 1997 (when she, according to wikipedia, “failed to show for work”) and only played a minor part in the 2010 version, it’s hard to see how her current success strengthens the case for a Hey Hey revival.
The last revival in 2010 did not sustain solid ratings, but the show is not considered to be cheap.
Somers’ new hynopsis game show is due to air in April.
And finally we get to some actual useful information. The host of an upcoming hypnotism-based game show is trying to revive a failed television show that “did not sustain solid ratings” and is “not considered to be cheap”. Though they left out “put a blackface act to air in 2010” and “is built around a cast of men well past retirement age”.
We’ve often said the only real way to put a version of Hey Hey on the air that people would watch would be to put together a tell-all telemovie. And by “tell-all” we mean lift the lid on the whole stinking, drawn-out, bloated mess.
For one thing, maybe we could finally find out why the show went through so many female co-hosts in the 90s…
Shut DAFUQ Up
“We’re like Vice, but with a bigger ballsack.” “And we’re not taking it butt-style from Rupert Murdoch.” Those lines come around 45 seconds into the first episode of the ABC’s iView-only comedy DAFUQ?, and they pretty much sum up the entire show: it’s like Vice, but more annoying, and the “satirical” stabs are about as obvious as you can get.
Still, making fun of dickheads and posers is pretty much always going to be a winner with us; it worked for Nathan Barley a decade ago, and it worked (some of the time) for The Bondi Hipsters a few years back, so DAFUQ‘s approach of having a bunch of pretentious wankers blundering around trying to make sure whatever story they report on is all about them is not a bad place to start a comedy show.
As you’d expect, the first sketch is the strongest, as vapid “whatever” hipster chick Pandora travels to Syria to make sure the legacy of a decapitated French journalist lives on (by making her famous). Bad news though, as discovers her long-time rival is covering the same story. So she promptly tries to get her rival killed – and then tries to get herself murdered so she can be on the front cover of Time.
That’s actually one of the more complex sketches: the one after it, where douchey hipster Lee D tries to get off his chops on an ancient drug only to instead be pranked by his Aboriginal guide, is pretty much just one joke drawn out (though seeing him shove a burning twig down the eye of his dick is somewhat memorable). So the fifteen minute episodes certainly don’t hurt, as there’s not really enough going on here for a full half hour show.
Watching Australian comedy can often be a bit of a trade-off: in exchange for watching something that’s not as good as the best overseas stuff, you’re hoping for something that takes aim at the kind of topics overseas comedy isn’t going to touch. There isn’t a lot of that here – the very concept is making fun of an international show – but when trendoid weenis Rift talks about his debut Aussie hip-hop album “Great Barrier Grief” (YouTube comment: “This is the worst piece of shit I have heard in my life. I hope you die”), it’s hard not to laugh. Because Aussie hip-hop is pretty much universally shithouse, and Australian comedy is pretty much the only place where anyone’s going to be pointing that out.
Still, that’s not enough to make a great sketch. Musicians forced into a life of crime because of low Spotify royalties is the kind of so-so idea that really needs to go over the top to get laughs – unfortunately for the front man of Eskimo Joe, dropping him into this sketch just isn’t enough. And too often with this show, the concepts for the sketches are where the laughs lie: reading a rundown of what’s in each episode will give you about 65% of the total comedy content.
DAFUQ? is pretty much firmly in the middle of the current crop of Aussie sketch comedy: decent ideas drawn out too long, sketches that start strong but don’t really build to a strong punchline (when there’s even a punchline at all) and performed by people who get the job done without creating especially memorable comedy characters. The secret to great sketch comedy isn’t coming up with that first idea – it’s coming up with three or four ideas after that. And going by this, they’ve still got a couple of ideas to go.
The Brothers Gonna Work It Out
Remember prank phone calls? A relic of the pre-caller ID era, they – in their “is your refrigerator running?” form – were the kind of prank comedy mostly performed by bored teens and idiots. Yes, some people managed to elevate them to something above the moronic norm (the “Red” calls, The Jerky Boys‘ early work), but that didn’t make the prank call a serious art form that anyone in their right mind would defend. Like all pranks, they walked a fine line between worthwhile comedy and mindless annoyance… which brings us to the work of Melbourne’s Jalal Brothers.
You’ve most likely seen one of the Jalals’ viral videos on your Facebook news feed. Grainy shots of night-time suburbia. Three men in Arab dress cruise slowly down the street in a 4WD. One lifts an AK-47 rifle and takes aim at a man and his young daughter using a payphone, causing them to flee. The sound of tinny gunshots echo through the car’s speakers.
The man bolts, leaving his terrified daughter in his wake. In earlier clips, a man in Arab dress and beard appears, toting a suspicious bag. He tosses it into donut shops, car windows, the open doors of a lift. He throws it over the door of a closed toilet cubicle. He throws it at basketballers, kids playing on wharves, tradies on a lunch break, at a man descending an escalator.
Then the Arab man runs. The result: animal fear. The tradie bounds into a lake, a basketballer flees in panic, kids plummet into the sea, drivers abandon their cars and run for their lives. And for the millions of us watching safely on our screens, it’s either darkly hilarious – or utterly thoughtless and cruel. How you respond is a good predictor of your age. The Jalals’ fans are overwhelmingly young – and their haters middle-aged or older.
So it’s a case of stuffy old farts versus “the kids”? Gee, we’re really going to miss Fairfax’s nuanced news coverage when they shut up shop in a year or two.
(We did laugh at “The result: animal fear”, but only because we read it in a Ted Maul voice.)
That said, it’s not difficult to understand why three youngsters who have no memory of the pre-9/11 world, and who have probably been the subject of a lifetime of racist abuse and stereotyping because of their Middle Eastern appearance, would find it funny to make videos of mock drive-by shootings, bombings, and other terrorist-style incidents.
While older, whiter Australians worry about the terrorists on their doorstep, younger, less white teenagers are finding a way to laugh at it. (Perhaps they’ve realised that the chances of actually being killed or injured by terrorism in Australia are so vanishingly low that ladders are more of a serious threat?)
As such, we find it hard to differentiate this urge/desire/whatever to make prank videos about terror-style incidents, from the way in which youngsters in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s shocked their parents by taking the piss out of the establishment (the church, politicians, the military), the prevailing social order of the day (heteronormativity, traditional gender roles), and the laws that tried to get them to stop it.
Famously, the editors of Oz Magazine went through two obscenity trials in two separate countries (one in 1964 in Australia and one in 1971 in the UK), both trying to shut them down. Now we see the Jalal Brothers being ordered to stop making their videos by the police, and facing a possible jail sentence.
From what we’ve seen of these videos, they’re hard to defend as comedy or art – which is where our prank call comparison finally makes sense. And unlike Oz magazine, there’s no real message behind what they’re up to, which makes them hard to defend as satire (unless you count “people are afraid of being shot in the street” as a satirical message). Which we guess leaves us with the right to free speech.
Part of the reason why this is such a big deal (well, it’s not really a big deal, but you know what we mean) is that Australia has next to no tradition of paying attention to young people unless they’re playing sport. Our arts scene, in general, is so small that anyone who does make it big tends to stick around for decades, blocking the path for those behind them. So Australian comedy, like the arts in general, tends to see anyone under 40 as “young”, so when the kinds of things actual teenagers find funny get wider attention it seems even more shocking because as a culture we’re not used to it.
Case in point: Julian Morrow says some of the videos made him wince. And fair enough too. For older generations, who remember 9/11 and are generally speaking scared of terrorism, they are shocking and hard to take.
Morrow argues, though, that you can defend these videos as satire even though they’re not making any obvious point, and that shutting down the Jalals is anti-free speech. Trouble is, the brothers haven’t been arrested for speaking; they’ve been arrested for possession of an illegal weapon, being a public nuisance and behaving offensively in a public space. None of which involve free speech. The whole free speech thing, and whether the videos they’ve made are acceptable or not, is the media’s angle and the public’s concern. The brothers are on trial for rather different reasons.
(Though yeah, we’re well aware that when society wants to shut someone up, it often finds a way that doesn’t involve attacking free speech directly – “behaving offensively in a public place” sounds like something that could be used to wipe out pretty much any outdoor prank-based comedy. And much as we weren’t fans of The Chaser’s pranks, they were the kind of comedy that most Australians would support.)
Whether or not the pranks were real or not doesn’t really matter to us either; if your comedy bit relies on seemingly pissing off or scaring real people to get laughs, it’s probably not going to be funny to us. Unless, of course, you’re pissing off someone with actual power in our society, and even then chances are they’re going to laugh along to show they’re “in on the joke” and whoops, you’ve accidentally improved the image of the person you were going after (which is what pretty much every Chaser show has done).
All we’re seeing in the case of the Jalals, is a couple of guys messing around and filming it, and people with no clue defending it because they say it’s satire or anti-free speech. Free speech we can run with, but here’s how Wikipedia defines satire – feel free to tell us how it relates to what the Jalals are doing.
Satire is a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government or society itself, into improvement.
It’s The Movies That Got Small
Usually we don’t delve too deep into the glamourous world of Hollywood, but we happened to catch the latest cinematic appearance by Australia’s number one comedy export – that would be Rebel Wilson (well, Barry Humphries has pretty much retired and it’s not like anyone wants to see anything from Chris Lilley ever again) – and we came out of the cinema feeling like we’d seen something of a milestone.
While we’re hardly the world’s biggest Wilson fans, one thing we have had to grudgingly accept is that she’s (for the most part) been well used in her feature film appearances. She has a distinct comedic persona that can be effective when used in small doses: there’s a reason why Pitch Perfect was the film that cemented her Hollywood status. Just so long as every now and again you cut to Wilson doing her thing (saying something “shocking” while making a “deal with it” facial expression pretty much sums it up) she can be an effective laugh-getter.
But that’s a pretty limited role to play, which is what makes her current work in How To Be Single so interesting. On the surface she’s basically doing more of the same, only a little bit more of it: she’s the high-energy stranger who latches onto our newly single lead (Dakota Johnson) and gives her tips on how to party hard. Cue at least two scenes where Wilson wakes up, doesn’t remember where she is but is relieved to find she at least had sex the night before. Comedy gold!
Initially this seems to be more of the same laugh-getting cameo stuff from Wilson. But no: she gets actual scenes where she holds conversations. And she can’t do it. Oh sure, she can say the lines and hit her marks and whatever. But given actual scenes in which to expand upon her “high energy laugh-getter” persona – basically, to be a female version of someone like Chris Farley, someone who can keep the comedy energy level up during the non-joke lines – there’s nothing there.
It turns out – in this film at least, though there’s no real reason to suspect things would be any different anywhere else considering how one-note her career has been – that while Wilson certainly has a lot of things going for her comedy-wise, charisma is not one of them. Again, she’s funny in context, popping-up mid scene to deliver a zinger; when the camera focuses on her for more than a handful of seconds, her vaguely awkward “I kinda can’t believe I’m saying this but hey, deal with it!” affect freezes.
We’re not saying she can’t do other things as an actress; her painful (in more ways than one) “I’m being really sincere now and you should feel bad for treating me as a joke rather than a human being” act gets another workout here too. But for the most part there are two kind of movie comedians: people you laugh with and people you laugh at. Wilson’s persona is too basic to be someone we can laugh at for more than a few seconds at a time – she gets a laugh then you cut away. And How To Be Single shows that she’s lacking the spark required to be someone that we can laugh with.
(what that spark is, we don’t know. Her acting definitely has a stilted quality that makes it hard to relax watching her – she always seems to be trying, which isn’t a good look)
Wilson will be appearing next month in The Brothers Grimsby, Sasha Baron Cohen’s latest film and one that – if the trailers are to be believed – seems to be set in a far broader comedy world. Chances are she’ll be given less to do, and much firmer parameters to work in, so she may even get a few laughs.
Just don’t expect her to be taking on a leading role any time soon.
Bringing It Home
We shouldn’t have to rely on our ex-pats (or fair-chunk-of-the-year-ex-pats) to “nail it” satire-wise, but here’s a comedy song you’re probably more than familiar with by now, and boy does much-of-the-year London resident Tim Minchin “nail it”.
It’s not just the sentiment of Come Home (Cardinal Pell) that we like, it’s that this delivers on pretty much everything you’d want from a song that’s campaigning for something:
- It’s catchy – you can sing along or clap along very easily
- It’s an ear-worm – damn you, Minchin, it’s been stuck in our heads for days!
- It’s clever, surprising and intriguing – you never quite know where the lyrics are going
- It’s funny – which makes it and its message highly likely to be shared
- It’s popular – and with it now heading for more than million views on YouTube it’s presumably making lots of money for the Send the Ballarat Survivors to Rome fund
All in all, a winner of a song. And even more impressive…
It was written in 1 day
recorded, filmed & mixed in 1 day
and edited & mastered in 1 day
Which makes us wonder a bit about our locally-based satirists, and where they’re going wrong. People say they’re nailing it, but are they?
Feel free to tell us how this made a contribution. Seriously, this is one of the bigger news stories of the moment, and one with a clear bad guy who deserves a kicking – c’mon, even if you think he’s 100% innocent, as the boss of the local branch at the time when some of his priests were molesting children he really does owe the victims of his organisation a face-to-face appearance – and yet the best The Weekly can do is few half-arsed gags about Pell having a drag name, a dodgy doctor, and how the older folks enjoy cruises and don’t get how to use Skype. More like Cardinal SMELL, amirite?
Oh, and that amazing final metaphor about how we should let him tell his story as this (uh, what “this”?) will be with him for the rest of his life. Yeah, that spoke truth to Catholic power. NAILED IT!!!!
This News Ain’t News
Wow, how about that segment on The Weekly about dodgy campaign donations! Shocking! Scandalous! Hilarious! … oh wait, no it wasn’t. It was a bland intro-level current affairs story of the kind 7.30 wouldn’t touch because there’s no story there. Well, there is, but the story is so big and unfocused – “political donations: we don’t know where a lot of them are coming from” – that it’s about as newsworthy as “roads: good or bad?”.
Obviously one segment isn’t enough to indict The Weekly, especially after much of the press surrounding its return for 2016 has been lukewarm at best. Fortunately, tonight’s opening segment was so astoundingly pissweak all right-thinking viewers have no option but to boot up and form a conga line to give Australian television’s smuggest show a good kicking.
Seriously, how does any show air a five minute report on a segment on Seven’s notoriously idiotic morning program Sunrise and expect anyone to still be watching four minutes in? Especially when, as has been the way with news since, oh, 1790, it stopped being an actual news story the day after it happened? “It”, by the way, being a Sex and the City star having an awkward time thanks to dim bulb breakfast show hosts wanting to giggle at sex rather than talk about the charity work she was there to promote.
That’s right: “B-list actress has bad time on crap breakfast show” was the subject of the opening five minutes of The Weekly. For fuck’s sake.
We could go on about all the big promises made before The Weekly first aired that this was going to be a show that actually “went there” as far as tackling issues. We could go on about the slightly less plausible promises that the show was going to be funny. But why revisit that haunted house of bullshit and lies? This show was never going to be good: the only thing that’s surprising about it now is just how bad it’s turned out to be.
Week in week out it turns up late to whatever story the internet’s been making hay with and adds nothing to the conversation. Then it provides a bad social studies lecture on some systemic fault in our political system – you know, the kind of thing that looks bad but can’t actually be blamed on anyone with the power to affect the ABC’s funding – or rants about some non issue that makes the kind of people who sit in the audience for Gruen nod sagely. Bung on an interview, Tom Gleeson does something unfunny, roll credits.
Oh sure, the usual online sites still love it:
Charlie Pickering Blows The Fkn Lid Off Match Fixing In ‘The Weekly’ Return
Charlie Pickering is very angry about toys. And you should be too.
Charlie Pickering Unpacks The Corruption Ruining Your Favourite Sports In The First ‘Weekly’ Of 2016
And why shouldn’t they? They get free content, the show gets free advertising, everyone wins! Unless you actually watch the clips, in which case… well, you get what you pay for.
We’ve said it a billion times before: television comedy is a zero sum game in Australia. Because The Weekly is on, some other comedy show is not. And much as we do like to go in for hyperbole here, it’s currently very fucking hard indeed to think of a show that could do a worse job of what The Weekly is doing than The Weekly.
We went in hard last year because last year you could still find people who thought The Weekly was something more than a pathetic waste of time. Not any more; having re-defined the bottom rung of “satire” – seriously, The Weekly is now easily the worst news comedy show the ABC has aired this century; even The Chaser at their laziest put more effort into producing entertaining television – it’s now painfully clear that The Weekly is a show that deliberately chooses easy targets then goes out of its way to have as little to say about them as possible.
It’s shit. We’re done.
Full Moon Fever
Okay, so over the weekend this happened:
COMEDIAN Lawrence Mooney has launched an extraordinary tirade against a journalist after an unfavourable review for his show in the Adelaide Fringe.
In a foul-mouthed rant that went on for several hours on Twitter last night, Mooney attacked The Advertiser’s Isabella Fowler, calling her a “deads**t”, “amateur,” and an “idiot” and accusing her of having “a tiny mind” after she reviewed his stand-up show, Moonman, at the Rhino Room.
Cue the media going nuts.
This kind of story is nothing new. Sadly, it’s become an accepted part of the fabric of the Australian comedy scene. You don’t have to spend much time at all talking with those who work in the industry before you’ll hear example after example of the same kind of behavior. Nobody likes it, but no-one working at the coal face seems to be willing to stand up and say that this kind of thing is unacceptable and that the media needs to pull its head in and…
Wait, you thought we were talking about Mooney’s public foul-mouthed tirades? Oh sure, Mooney has prior form in this field: anyone on twitter when Dirty Laundry Live launched will remember Mooney taking repeated swings at his critics. Heck, even his defenders say this kind of thing is par for the course:
Mooney was not being a sexist, FFS. He was simply being Lawrence Mooney. You call Norman Mailer a vacuous liberal, and you’ll find yourself pinned on the ground. You call Lawrence Mooney “not a comedian”, and you’d better expect he’ll Google you, find out you’re on loan from the lifestyle and property sections and tell you to “enjoy your next cup cake and your open inspection you knob”.
Good to know.
But our eyebrow-raising isn’t at his rant, as that kind of thing is nothing new: no, we’re more surprised that he’s surprised at what has been a pretty bog-standard state of affairs review-wise for the last few years now. Heck, we wrote about it four years ago and it was old news then:
for a bunch of people who are professional funny buggers and want to spend their lives telling edgy gags – gags which out of context can sound like personal attacks and which are liable to be controversialised by newspapers like the Herald-Sun – comedians have a remarkably thin skin and a staggering lack of insight.
Whoops, wrong quote again. We meant to say this:
It could equally be the result of inexperienced reviewers. The Herald-Sun is not exactly noted for its arts coverage, nor is there any major publication in this country which has a dedicated live comedy reviewer.
After all, remember this:
MELBOURNE comedians yesterday launched a defiant defence of female comics after a reviewer said “very few female comedians can pull off funny”.
Twitter went into meltdown as incensed comedians and fans vented over the sexist wording in a Herald Sun review of British comedian Jen Brister.
So it’s no secret that many of Australia’s newspapers – especially the Murdoch press – figure that the local comedy festival is little more than a chance for all the in-house journos to score some free tickets so long as they’re willing to write up what they saw. Yet despite what he repeatedly informs his twitter followers is 22 years experience in being a comedian, this state of affairs doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet for Mooney.
(it’s also interesting to read the comments here, which suggest that the review, while badly put, may have been close to the mark as far as the show’s quality was concerned)
To be fair (let’s not make a habit of this – ed), what seems to have set Mooney off is the suggestion that he’s not a comedian – just a funny guy. Even to us, that seems a bit harsh. But on the other hand, the body of the review makes it clear that what the reviewer is trying to say is that Mooney is a performer whose material might not always be the strongest but that he makes up for it with his on-stage persona, which certainly seems to us to be a valid criticism of any number of popular Australian comedians.
It’s hardly an insult to point out that one of the more reliable paths to popularity when it comes to Australian comedy is to be an amicable fellow who “tells it like it is” in a manner not unlike a likable bloke having a yarn around the barbie. It’s made Hughsie a millionaire; Carl Barron doesn’t seem short of a quid either.
And if much of your current success comes from your work in the media – if, for example, you’ve spent the last few years being the high-profile host of a weekly panel show – then it’s not exactly an insult to suggest that your persona (which is clearly something you’ve worked on just as much as your scripted material) is what people have warmed to rather than your material.
Then again, if your persona involves publicly heaping shit on a woman half your age because you didn’t like one line in a newspaper review that was seen (before you drew attention to it) by less people than would attend your show on a good night…
Well, some people warm to that kind of behaviour too.
Back to Black
What made the first series of Black Comedy refreshing wasn’t that it was an “all black” or “mostly Aboriginal” show (although because that kinda thing is still so rare in this country, it’s not hard to see why a bunch of people got hung up on it). What made Black Comedy refreshing was that it was a traditional sketch show. You know, TV parodies, film parodies, social satire, regular characters…the least revolutionary type of sketch comedy in the world, but one that can still be a very good way to get laughs.
On the down side, some of the regular characters and broad satire of series 1 weren’t great, so it was fun to see series 2 start with a serialised sketch about Ray, a new writer on the show (played by new cast member Adam Briggs) who was unimpressed with past efforts. While the rest of the Writers’ Room howled with laughter at a series of fairly average sketch suggestions (“lamb rights”, being one), Ray, a former prisoner with mental health problems, whose counsellors says he’s funny, stares at the group in stoney, seething silence before revealing his idea: a sketch where he smashes peoples’ heads in with bricks. Well, it made us laugh.
As the episode continued, we saw the writers and production team start to freeze Ray out, leaving him to roam around the ABC studios, gatecrashing recordings of Play School and Gardening Australia, and hooning around the yard in a golf cart. It wasn’t quite as funny, but it did remind us of the times when Shaun Micallef or The Late Show team would pop up behind-the-scenes of other TV shows or takeover small businesses, causing hilarious chaos. Even in 2016, it seems, the idea of some moron bursting in to an otherwise serious environment is still funny. Who knew?
The second episode of Black Comedy (which aired last Wednesday) featured another serialised sketch, a parody of The Godfather about two women who both wanted the rights to perform the Welcome To Country in a part of inner-city Melbourne. Again, this sketch had some good moments, and was a nice way to break-up the shorter sketches featuring new and returning characters.
Of the new sketches, the tracker helping shoppers in a hardware megastore was pretty good. And of the returning ones, Blakforce, the crack squad of black policemen who ensure Aboriginals don’t slip into whitefella ways (i.e. not incinerating meat at a barbeque), was also pretty solid. And a good framework on which to hang a bunch of jokes about trends such as eating kale and trying to cook like Masterchef.
Also back are Tiddas, the passive-aggressive, but mainly aggressive, gay couple who keep saying “What’s this then, slut?”, although the team have wisely limited their appearances to once per episode.
On the downside, there are some new recurring characters who are already outstaying their welcome. Which reminds us…occasionally this year we’ll be naming and shaming those comedians who go out of their way to make comedy that really pushes the boundaries of what comedy is. By making sketches that aren’t comedy. We not-so-proudly present…Is This A Sketch?
A FATHER AND SON SIT ON A BEACH, STARING OUT TO SEA.
SON: Dad?
FATHER: Yes, son.
SON: Do you reckon if white people didn’t come to Australia us Aboriginals would have invented Facebook?
FATHER: Yeah. And it would have been better.
SON NODS.
FATHER: Yeah. Yeah.
Is that a sketch? Really?
Resisting the Rebellion
So we decided to give Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery another shot, even though the producers are clearly continuing their new policy of not featuring comedians by interviewing Rebel Wilson. Zing! Actually, we only tuned in to see how a show so firmly focused on the guest’s childhood and early years would deal with Wilson’s flexible approach to her own age. Her grandparents let slip she graduated in Law in 2009 – quick, does that fit into the official timeline? Oh no, she mentioned filming a year 12 video in 1997! Wow, it’s almost as if the producers went out of their way to use footage to lock in her real age.
Which then explains why Zemiro actually straight up asks Wilson about her age (she just stopped mentioning it) and her name (she used her middle name in high school). Controversy defused! She’s back in our hearts! Apart from that time she said that Australia celebrates “mediocre people”, but clearly she was joking there because here she is getting an entire half hour show on Australian television celebrating her.
Age aside, this is… well, around ten minutes in Zemiro asks a question that wakes us up: “Comedy influences, Rebel?” Ooh, this should be interesting… hang on a second, Wilson basically says “I never paid attention to comedy growing up”, lists no influences whatsoever and then tells a story about how a shitting dog inspired her career. So Rebel Wilson has no influences as far as comedy goes? That explains a lot.
“Somehow I got in the cool group, in the very first day”, “I liked to get 100% in maths, and I usually did”, “I got 99.3 in my HSC”, “Sometimes they say if you have a very high IQ you have a low EQ”, “And then I became known as a bit of a cheeky character”, “I’m proud to announce I was the school basketball captain”. A picture’s certainly being painted here, and the lack of modesty is actually kind of refreshing.
“Did you always think you were going to be successful?”
“Yes, yes I did… for some reason I had the right combination of factors that made me successful in an area where the percentage of making it is like… one in a hundred million.”
Yeah, okay, that’s enough now.
When Wilson says that DVDs of Bogan Pride were “passed around amongst high level comedians in America… they were saying ‘this girl’s got something'”, it’s… well look, that might be how it happened, right? However she made it big in the US is going to be at least as unlikely as that story, isn’t it?
And again, when Wilson blames the network for the failure of Super Fun Night, maybe that actually is what happened and not, you know, exactly what you’d expect from giving the creator of Bogan Pride another television show. “Writer-performers…” says Wilson, “it’s very difficult for them to succeed”. Examples to the contrary on the back of a postcard.
Even when she pointedly says “Australia does really good dramas”, thus underlining how she feels about the Australian comedy scene that gave her shot (Pizza) after shot (Thank God You’re Here) after shot (Bogan Pride) after shot (Monster House) after shot (The Wedge), it’s like “well, she’s not wrong”.
But when she says “The Australian media are very harsh towards Australians”, that’s where we have to draw the line. C’mon guys, where’s the proof to back that up?
Race War
Pretty much from the first moment we heard about Here Come the Habibs, the big question was “is this going to be the sitcom that destroys Australia”? Ha ha no fuck off with that slow news week crap: the real question was “how is this going to be any different from any other comedy show from Jungle?”
Jungle – formerly Jungleboys – are an advertising production company that have quickly (well, quickly by the pace of Australian television) become major players in the world of comedy thanks to shows like The Moodys, No Activity and, uh, The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting. Phil Lloyd, the long-time Home & Away writer best known for playing Myles Barlow in Review with Myles Barlow, is a core member of Jungle and is the head writer on Habibs, so it seemed likely that what we were going to get would be something of a known quantity.
And so it has proved to be. The general tone here is along the lines of a less-edgy Moodys: character-heavy family stuff where the jokes are rarely big laughs. The basic set-up doesn’t help much: in case you somehow missed the waves of outrage sweeping the nation, the plot here is that the Habibs, a relatively-non-caricatured-for-a-broad-ethnic-comedy Lebanese family, have won $22 million in the lottery and presumably used that as partial deposit on a Sydney harbourside mansion because that place looks a steal at anything under $30 million. Unfortunately the racist-without-saying-any-of-the-bad-words snooty neighbours want them gone. Culture clash!
Jungle have been around this block before so the general vibe is one of competence. A lot of the time what the characters say isn’t all that funny, but at least this knows the difference between lines that are meant to be funny because someone’s making a joke, and lines that are meant to be funny because of what the character is trying to achieve. You might think “how droll, the husband of the snooty next door neighbour is nervous because he thinks Fou Fou, the head of the Habib family, might be a terrorist”, but there have been a lot of critically acclaimed Australian comedies where all the dialogue has been nothing but people trading supposed witticisms so even a basic level of characterisation is not to be scoffed at.
But who cares if it’s funny – is it racist? It sure is… AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE WHAAAAT? Oh right, racism is an entrenched cultural construction built up over centuries to skew society for the benefit of white people and therefore the very idea that such a thing as “reverse racism” exists is malarkey. And also the “racism” against white people is showing them to be either snooty or nervous around Lebanese people, so put down that phone because talkback radio doesn’t need to hear from you just yet.
(unless you want to comment about the slightly odd fact that as of Feb 10th all the Anglo cast have their own wikipedia pages while none of the Lebanese cast do)
“But isn’t there a joke about how Fou Fou makes a living from cash-in-hand carport building and dodgy compo claims while not paying tax?” Well shit, if you’re going to raise an eyebrow over that we might as well just declare open race war here and now. Fou Fou is a small businessman in a sitcom; it’d be more cause for concern if he wasn’t maximising his profits.
Channel Nine is not in the market for any kind of even mildly subversive or controversial comedy: that’s why they took on a show from Jungle, a comedy team who are yet to create a show with any more impact than a mild bath. That’s also why the basic set-up – poor but good-hearted folk move to the fancy part of town to the chagrin of the fancy folks – stopped being cutting edge well before The Beverly Hillbillies. Are there jokes about these salt-of-the-earth folks spending their new fortune in extravagant ways? You know there are; that’s why you make this kind of show.
That’s not to say this is completely without merit. Not everyone here is a walking cartoon character, which puts it a step above the various Moody series. Everyone in the big cast seems to have their own clearly-defined subplot – something a show like Upper Middle Bogan doesn’t always manage – and while none of them are particularly exciting (star-crossed lovers! The spouses become friends while their partners are bitter enemies!) there’s enough of them to hold out the promise of a fair bit happening over the course of the first six episodes.
The trouble is, none of this is all that funny. Some have already said that’s because this has to take the time to set up the situation and characters; if anyone seriously thinks a show on Channel Nine is going to get funnier over time they haven’t been watching television for the past thirty years. It’s the drama that’s going to be ramped up here, not the laughs – they’re pretty much all coming from the premise anyway and that’s not going to get any funnier.
If this series was running longer than six weeks we’d bet that the comedy angle would be quietly ditched entirely a few episodes in – remember when House Husbands was meant to be a comedy? – to allow the show to become yet another bland dramedy where the comedy gets shunted into the ‘C’ plot where the supporting cast can have a bit of a wacky adventure to break up the dashes to hospital or the relationship problems or whatever the hell else those shows put on to distract the audience from the inevitable nature of their eventual demise.
(oh wait, when scenes end on “dramatic notes” like keying a cheating boyfriend’s car, we’re already firmly in dramedy territory)
Maybe that’s the only way a show like this could air on an Australian commercial network in 2016. Rather than a comedy that pokes fun at the state of race relations – and by doing so pointed out a few uncomfortable truths – we get a mild dramedy that lets us know that deep down we’re all really just decent folks wanting to do the best by our families.
Personally, we’d prefer a serious comedy that told us we’re all nasty pieces of work.