Question Everything made its triumphant return to the ABC for a third season this week. A third season? Of a show that still can’t figure out how to make its core concept – fake news but comedy! – work? Good thing it’s not our tax dollars paying for this crap oh wait.
Having it back for more than the ABC’s traditional “bare minimum” two seasons suggests that either a): the ABC has decided to make it a regular Wednesday night feature – yes folks, this is the Mad as Hell replacement you’ve been waiting for, or b): the ABC needed a last minute replacement for the supposedly debuting this year Stories From Oz. Where is Stories From Oz anyway?
Sadly, Question Everything is not about that kind of news. Instead, it’s a news-ish panel show where ABC “personalities” and actual funny people get to occasionally make jokes – racists like monster trucks! – in between endless cutaways to the audience or to wide shots or to Jan Fran and Wil Anderson or to anything else that could drag things out.
To be fair, when the second joke of the show is pretty much “democracy… yeah, it’s not working is it?”, you can understand why they might want a bit less comedy and a bit more anything else. Why can’t we just have a strong leader who’ll make all the right decisions for the nation? Can’t see how that could possibly go wrong.
So the format is basically they show a clip, then Anderson picks a panelist to do a scripted bit based on the first half of the clip, then they show the rest of the clip and Jan Fran says something boring. It’s the platonic ideal of a pointless ABC “comedy” series, right down to the part where the panel… answers random questions? Didn’t we just have a show that did that? Is this now going to be a part of every ABC series going forward? Because we’ve got a bunch of questions we’d like the Gruen team to answer on-air.
Like all panel shows, a decent line-up can make the world of difference. Nath Valvo is always good value, so having him on? Good move. And yet, it’s still pointless shit, the kind of nothing timewasting trash that everyone alive today has better things to do than watch.
You’d think that maybe thirty years ago – back when Australia had five TV channels and no functional internet – this kind of show had a place. But you’d be wrong. Even back then this kind of crap didn’t cut it; if you wanted to be funny on TV, you did sketches, wrote a sitcom, or tried to keep variety alive. Panel chat? Leave that to the sports shows.
So what does the ABC have against comedy? Seriously, just look at the “comedy” output from them over the last few months. Mother and Son was a dramedy about a thirtysomething loser who happened to have a wacky mum somewhere in the background. WTFAQ was an answer to the question “what if you wanted to do a sketch show but didn’t want to write any sketches?”. And now Question Everything, which is pretty much Gruen Panel Show with bonus pointless asides about the news.
On the one hand, technically these are all considered comedies in 2023. On the other, they all have big Get Out Of Jail Free cards handy if you were to suggest they weren’t actually funny. Dramedy doesn’t have to be funny! Answering viewer questions is meant to be informative! Question Everything is promoting media literacy! Only not too much, otherwise the viewers might realise it’s shithouse.
None of these shows are cheap to make. Which means the ABC made a conscious decision to spend serious money, not on making actual funny shows, but on this half-baked garbage (the worst kind of garbage – ed). Remember Mad as Hell? Remember how it was funny? People like funny: just look at the way the ABC press department makes sure to call pretty much everything a comedy. And yet the ABC has shown no desire whatsoever to provide audiences with even a half-hearted attempt at following up on Mad as Hell.
Instead we get Question Everything, a show so bad it has Dickie Knee on – but doesn’t let him speak:
Earlier this week this not-exactly-news-type-news was announced: the days of Daryl Somers hosting Seven’s Dancing with the Stars are no more:
“Seven let me know recently that they have signed Chris Brown to the network full-time and amongst his commitments he will be hosting DWTS.”
Not only was it a case of “you know that new guy we hired? Yeah, we hired him to do your job”, but everyone knew about it months earlier:
Industry rumours have been rife for several months that Brown might take to the dance floor alongside Kruger, particularly after both hosted the Logie Awards red carpet.
As we’re of the view that a week old stick of celery would be a better host of anything than Somers, big congrats to Chris Brown for scoring a gig we’ll never watch.
So why mention this? As Daryl himself makes sure to let everyone know:
“I’d like to publicly thank Andrew Backwell and Angus Ross at Seven for their ongoing support and for commissioning Hey Hey It’s 50 Years! in 2021, and the five primetime specials that followed.”
One of the ways television works is (sigh) synergy. Once you’ve landed one high profile gig, it’s a lot easier to get the network to agree to your other projects, because if nothing else they’ll work as cross promotion for that high profile gig we mentioned earlier.
Long story short, Daryl being the face of one of Seven’s local hits meant Seven was a lot more likely to listen when he started ranting on about bringing Hey Hey it’s Saturday back (in clip show form).
And now he’s not, and they don’t have to.
“While I shall miss the fun of working with my Gold Logie buddy Sonia, the quick-witted Todd McKenney and Mark Wilson ‘On The End’, I am now unencumbered to pursue the projects I put on hold during Covid and shall have some exciting news on that score early next year.”
Mother and Son is a great sitcom premise. A single guy in his 30s, in precarious employment – and an even more precarious state when it comes to his love life – is forced to live with his elderly mother, and deal with her stubbornness, erratic moods and encroaching dementia. He can’t leave because who’d look after his mother, and despite her behaviour towards him she doesn’t want him to go. Drop these two characters into any number of situations and the interpersonal tension between these two forced-together people should result in comedy gold.
That’s should result in comedy gold. And we stress the word should because the biggest single problem with this reboot of the classic 80s/90s ABC sitcom Mother and Son is that so much about the way it’s been made seems to be working against it being comedy gold.
Everything about the show looks gorgeous – the sunny weather, the cool local eateries and shops in the on-the-verge-of-being-hip suburb the show’s set in – yet making things feel optimistic and aspirational isn’t how you get laughs. The comedy of Mother and Son comes from the bleak reality of Mother Maggie and Son Arthur’s situation, and the original series, starring Ruth Cracknell and Garry McDonald, with its old-fashioned studio set, and its old-timey musical title sequence, set the tone a lot better.
Also, what was supposed to be funny (or enlightening? Or anything?) about the scene where Maggie (Denise Scott) has a dementia moment, and the audience experiences her brain fuzz and confusion? We know she has dementia, that’s already obvious, and it doesn’t make the show funnier to include this scene, so why is it there? Indeed, lots of the scenes weren’t meant to be funny – the ones which touched on a social issue or built on the romance subplot, say – so why were they there? What’s with the idea in modern sitcoms that tugging at the audiences’ heartstrings is a better thing to do than make the audience laugh?
Sure, Mother and Son did include some decent comic ideas – like Maggie and Arthur (Matt Okine) getting caught up in a racist conspiracy protest, or Maggie’s brief romance with a cactus fanatic – but that didn’t quite make up for the show’s lack of commitment to comedy otherwise.
Only Denise Scott, and Jean Kittson as Maggie’s old nursing friend Heather, brought the big laughs. But then, you’d expect comedy performers of their experience to know how to play a script for maximum laughs. Okine was an okay Arthur, but Scott, when she was given a chance to be funny, was every bit as good as Ruth Cracknell – and that’s not easy.
Had the makers of Mother and Son spent more time coming up with jokes and situations where Maggie could be funny, or even just more sight-gags involving questionable cacti, they might have had a winner on their hands. What we have instead is yet another show that either won’t commit to comedy, or wasn’t funny enough as a comedy to start with. We assume given it’s 2023 it’s the former, but the quality of the comedy that was attempted suggests there was a generous dose of the latter too!
For some reason or another the ABC is currently running ads featuring Dr Karl. You know, the guy who answers all your science questions? Only if you actually listen to his answers, he often doesn’t answer your questions – he just throws out a bunch of quirky facts that are kind of adjacent to whatever question was put to him. Which often makes him useless if you really do want to know something and hello, did someone mention WTFAQ?
Of course not. Nobody is talking about WTFAQ, because for all the care and effort that’s clearly gone into it – plus they named a presenter’s baby Methamphetamine Rules – it’s barely even a television program. What kind of a hook for a series is “people answer viewer questions”? It’s a nothing idea that has resulted in a nothing show. No wonder the ABC is set to do it all over again with the return of Question Everything in a fortnight.
Meanwhile, here’s a real question: what happened to Stories From Oz? We were promised it’d be turning up – finally – some time in 2023. The year is now 4/5ths over, with zero sign of its musical hilarity. From now on, every time some random garbage ABC format is fished out of the bin to fill a hole in the timeslot, we should be asking “where’s Stories From Oz?”. So here goes:
“Where’s Stories From Oz?”
Anyway. At least with Question Everything, you can see a point to maybe half the show… if you squint really hard and they have some decent panelists on that week. Not a great point, not a funny point, but y’know: its a current affairs panel show featuring comedians. It’s a real format.
WTFAQ doesn’t even have that. You know what else it doesn’t have? Comedy. It’s a show that needs to be really funny to justify its existence because otherwise it’s just answering viewer questions. And we all know “answering viewer questions” is utter bullshit because either they’re getting zero questions (so they just make them up) or they’re getting so many questions about everything they can find one to justify any segment they like (so they might as well just make them up). These aren’t questions anyone is really asking about anything: they’re just an excuse to do stuff.
So why aren’t they doing funny stuff? You could argue that being too funny would get in the way of informing people that (checks notes) fish can remember things, holding a gun sideways ruins your aim and a swinging pole in a playground is for swinging on, but you’ve got a whole half hour to fill and we just summarised half the show in ten seconds.
And it’s not like they can’t be funny if they wanted to. Mitch McTaggart from The Back Side of Television was a guest reporter a couple of weeks ago, answering a question we’re not entirely convinced anyone who watches the ABC asked, “Where is Summer Bay supposed to be?”. McTaggart’s answer – well “answer” – was pretty funny. And his reasoning was packed with the sort of obsessive research, mad leaps of logic, and all-round commitment to being as funny as possible as you’d expect from Mitch McTaggart.
If this was a pitch for a series of The Back Side of Television made for the ABC, BRING. IT. ON. Or if this was seeing if the audience likes the odd non-serious questions/non-serious answer segment on WTFAQ then good. But even that poses the question: why make a show that continually treats questions like “what is this weird pole in my local playground for?” seriously? Who is in the production office thinking comedy isn’t the way to go with this material?
It wouldn’t even be hard to do. Giving the hosts actual comedy characters beyond “sulky idiot” or “world-weary adult” would be a start. Coming up with weird tangents or funny angles so the answers went somewhere surprising* wouldn’t hurt. Take things too far!
Sure, at this stage we’re just describing a slightly more realistic Review with Myles Barlow. But that’s still a pretty good pitch for a show in 2023.
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*they kind of did that with the “why can only middle eastern people smell lingering odors on washed plates?” story, which is why that was the most interesting (but not funny) segment this week
Stan’s new comedy C*A*U*G*H*T is the sort of show no one expected in 2023. It’s not a dramedy with depressing subplots about death and mental illness, it’s a pure comedy which just wants to make you laugh. Think big comedy performances, with digs at celebrity culture, action films, social media, and contemporary politics. Plus dick jokes. There are lots of dick jokes.
“I really wanted to make this in the vein of Australian classics like Priscilla, Crocodile Dundee, and Muriel’s Wedding,” creator and star Kick Gurry told the Sydney Morning Herald recently. Maybe, but C*A*U*G*H*T feels more like an Ozploitation film meets Hot Shots! or Team America: World Police. With maybe a dash of the British TV series/films The Comic Strip and (here’s a deep cut) Whoops Apocalypse.
Either way, when four unlikely (read idiotic) soldiers are sent on a mission to delete compromising material from the mobile phone of the Princess of Behati-Prinsloo, a (fictional) war-torn island in the South China Sea, and the compromising material turns out to be a dick pic sent by the Australia Defence Minister (Erik Thomson as the gloriously self-obsessed Colonel Bishop), you know this show isn’t aiming to be a serious drama.
What follows is a complicated, and sometimes scattershot, romp in which the four soldiers (Ben O’Toole, Kick Gurry, Lincoln Younes and Alexander England) and some Americans who happen to be in the area, are captured by local freedom fighters (Mel Jarnson, Dorian Nkono and Fayssal Bazzi), and in a desperate attempt to stay alive, collude with the fighters by creating hostage videos and other social media content which will further both their causes. The videos are picked up by various media, including Nine’s Today and A Current Affair (look out for cameos from Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon), British journalist Penny Primberhurst (Tuppence Middleton) and disgraced Today co-host, now independent live-streamer Josie Justice (Rebecca Breeds).
Josie, following a tip-off from her sister Jemima Justice (Bella Heathcote), who just happens to work for Colonel Bishop, heads off to Behati-Prinsloo to get an interview with the freedom fighters and find out what’s happened to the soldiers. Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Warren Whistle (Bryan Brown) and US Secretary of State Alaska Adams (Susan Sarandon) get involved in the crisis, as does Hollywood actor Sean Penn (Sean Penn), who’s recently embarrassed himself on Today whilst trying to promote his charity and wants redemption.
In fact, almost all the characters want redemption, or fame, or simply to stop foreigners from taking their land and destroying the local environment to build luxury golf courses. And in 2023, redemption, fame and fighting for your cause means one thing: telling your story on social media. Indeed C*A*U*G*H*T gets a fair bit of comic mileage out of various characters’ self-obsessions, particularly those that involve online mediums. There are also lots of gags about the art of acting and the Australian film and television industry, thanks to one of the soldiers being a failed former actor. And a few digs at politics too, with Prime Minister Whistle (an unholy mash-up of Bob Hawke and John Howard) getting into a Scott Morrison versus Johnny Depp-type battle with Sean Penn.
To say there’s a lot going on in C*A*U*G*H*T is an understatement. Maybe there’s too much going on, because at times the plot is disjointed and hard to follow, and it feels like a few scenes which might have made things clearer hit the cutting room, perhaps to shorten the run time. (Seriously, what was the deal with Colonel Bishop sending a dick pic to the Princess? They must have shot a short scene explaining that one.)
But while C*A*U*G*H*T is a bit of a mess, it’s an extremely watchable and mostly funny mess, packed with enjoyable performances, sharp lines, well-realised slapstick, and on-the-button parodies. To say Australia doesn’t make enough shows like this is an understatement. With Mad As Hellno longer on the air, we really lack shows which have things to say and want to make us laugh. It would probably be difficult to make a sequel to C*A*U*G*H*T, but more programs with the same sensibility would be very welcome.
We can’t blame Working Dog for taking an “if it ain’t broke” approach to their revival of Thank God You’re Here. The original run was much loved and fondly remembered… though not by us, which is why fans of the show might want to skip what comes next. Glad you enjoyed it, it’ll probably be back next year, kthxbyeee.
Okay, now that nobody’s reading this, what was the point of all that? The central gimmick of the show has always been to throw comedians into tricky situations and watch them flail. This year, even with a limited number of returning guests, the novelty factor dropped off fast. Maybe the idea was the the situations themselves would do the heavy lifting. With a lot of variations on “you are an important person put into a situation where you have to explain things you don’t understand”, that wasn’t happening either.
And while there were a lot of one-off appearances – some of whom did pretty well (always nice to see Hamish Blake having to be funny) – it didn’t feel like a show with a whole lot of variety on offer. Partly that’s the fault of Australian comedy. These days there’s only a few lanes where you can really make a go of it, so while the names changed each week the performances often didn’t.
It’s not that people were funnier back when the show first debuted in 2006. It’s that Australian television had more room for people to be different kinds of funny. Hamish Blake, Julia Zemiro and Fifi Box appeared in the 2006 and 2023 seasons. The 2006 version also had Angus Sampson, Shaun Micallef, Frank Woodley, Akmal Saleh, Bob Franklin, Robyn Butler and Alan Brough.
Not only could those performers give big performances, but they were the kind of comedy performer who would take charge of a scene. Too often this year the guard rails were obvious, the performers hemmed in. Give a hopefully funny answer, wait for the next set-up. No wonder one of the series’ big highlights was Aaron Chen being asked what his “new wave” ventriloquist act was.
“More racist”.
A joke that made the follow up – “Can you give an example?” – a rare example of a TGYH line that actually built on a laugh instead of cutting it off dead.
Thank God You’re Here was a product of a time when Working Dog seemed to be more about coming up with new formats (that could be sold overseas) than focusing on being funny. Which is why it was a little strange to see it return. The 2023 version of Working Dog are all about taking fairly generic formats and making them work by making them as funny as possible.
TGYH isn’t designed to be funny. It’s designed to make theatresports more attractive to established comedy performers. People who have a career to lose if they flail around unsupported and unfunny for five minutes doing traditional improv theatre. Yes, there were laughs each week; with the level of talent involved, it’d be astonishing if there wasn’t. But considering how funny pretty much everyone involved is – sometimes on Have You Been Paying Attention? just a few nights earlier – this should have been hilarious. Reader, it was not.
Clearly we’ve had to search hard to find a downside to Ten airing new Australian comedy three nights a week in prime time. Its not like TGYH was the worst format Working Dog could have revived. The only reason people still think fondly of The Panel is because it’s almost impossible now to watch complete episodes.
All we’re saying to Working Dog is, next time Ten calls up saying they’ve got a timeslot to fill, maybe consider reviving Audrey’s Kitchen instead.
The opportunities for Australian comedians on local television have been shrinking for the last [insert depressingly long stretch of time here]. After a while, it becomes a vicious circle: no jobs for comedians means less comedians means less comedy on television means no jobs for comedians. Want proof? Time to open the blue door to the current revival of Thank God You’re Here.
Thank God You’re Here is a pretty limited show in a lot of ways. The details change with every skit, the format does not. So when you’re doing roughly the same thing – comedian is thrust into a comedy sketch, has to come up with snappy replies to lines they don’t see coming – five times an episode, you need to inject as much variety into proceedings as possible.
One of the big ways the original run of the show managed this was with the contestants. Back in the early 00s, comedians were thick on the ground. A lot of the time audiences had even heard of them. Above and beyond the mainstream types keen for a bit of exposure, you had more established figures who actually had comedy personas to work with – Bob Franklin being the obvious example, but even someone like (shudder) Rebel Wilson brought an act with them. You even had people who weren’t an obvious fit but were willing to give it a go (enter Shaun Micallef).
In 2023, that is no longer the case. In fact, going by the 2023 version of Thank God You’re Here, the Australian comedy scene is basically just people who’ve appeared on Have You Been Playing Attention? Some episodes, every contestant has been a HYBPA? regular. Considering HYBPA? is also currently on air, at times it’s been an exciting chance to see the same comedians twice in one week. And then again a few weeks later.
The fact that production company Working Dog is behind both shows (and The Cheap Seats) goes some way towards explaining things. The fact that this is the first (new) series of TGYH, a format that really didn’t start pulling in big names the first time around until it became a ratings smash*, also plays a part. But the result is the same: much like HYBPA?, it feels like it’s pulling from a very limited talent pool**, burning through people who possibly could use a bit more of a gap between appearances.
(it’s notable that even Working Dog have a line they won’t cross: HYBPA? regulars Sam Pang and Ed Kavalee haven’t made an appearance, even though Ed was one of the regular cast on the original run. Cheap Seats co-hosts? They’re fair game)
The thing with TGYH is that once you have a roster of regular guests, you might as well just make a regular sketch comedy show. The show’s appeal comes from being surprised by what the famous-ish comedy types deliver. And yes, there have been performers this season with firm comedy personas. Aaron Chen for one, Ray O’Leary for another. No surprise their appearances have been highlights of this run.
In contrast, you’d think that Rhys Nicholson would be a prime example of what we’ve been calling for: a comedian with an established comedy persona the show could work with. But being a flamboyant performer good at off-the-cuff comments is exactly the kind of performer this show rewards. There’s no tension as we wait to see how they perform, because this is the kind of thing they do well.
Of course, TGYH needs performers like that as well. There’s got to be people up on stage who are going to deliver the goods. But for the show to be anything more than a very sloppy sketch show, it needs a steady stream of guests where the fun is coming from wondering if they’re going to mess up – and how funny that mess up is going to be.
And at the moment, it looks like Australian comedy just doesn’t have enough comedians to make it happen.
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*Angus Sampson appeared six times in the first ten episodes of the initial run
**Seeing Mel Tracina (The Cheap Seats’ entertainment reporter) on HYBPA? last week was a surprise – she did well, but it did feel like a sign the talent pool was starting to dry up
There’s a lot of reasons why remakes and revivals and adaptations take place [you mean beyond money? – ed.]. The celebrity driven ones – where someone famous says “I want to do this” and they’re famous enough to make it happen – aren’t always the worst, but they’re rarely the best. The problem is that they almost always end up turning the original material into something that suits them rather than coming up with a faithful or authentic adaptation: it’s just more of whatever it is they do, only now they’re wearing the skin of what we came to see.
When we first heard that the ABC was remaking Mother and Son, we figured they’d finally hit rock bottom. Make no mistake, it made sense for today’s ABC. A project that skewed old and promised a hefty dose of nostalgia? Shut up and take my 8.30pm Wednesday timeslot.
But the more we see of the actual finished project, the more we’re inclined to believe the press claiming that it was all Matt Okine’s idea (“imagine if we redid Mother and Son“). Because what we’re getting – in the Okine-scripted episodes at least – is less Mother and Son and more Son and his Love Life and is that his Mother over There?
Take this week’s episode. The opening scene? Arthur and his ex tidying up her house before she moves to Canberra. Aside from the mention of a nude cleaning crew? Comedy-free and intentionally so. Maybe, at a stretch, you could say the point was that Arthur could maybe get back with his ex if he didn’t have to help out with his mum. But really, it was just your typical lightweight, two people just hanging out dramedy scene.
If this was an entirely different series, then fine: be shit. But this is a reworking of one of Australia’s classic sitcoms. Who thinks the way to bring a sitcom into the 21st century is by deliberately making it less funny oh wait every single Australian television producer sorry we asked.
The rest of the episode sounds like traditional sitcom fare – a possibly dodgy overseas student is roped in to look after Maggie, Maggie decides to set up a weekend food stall like the old days and oh no, it’s the same day Arthur’s booked in to help his ex – but beyond that the laughs are thin on the ground.
Let’s cut Okine (who wrote this episode) some slack. Mother and Son is tricky to write, because the main dynamic is that Arthur is a whiny bitch – but with good reason. The idea is that to everyone else he looks like he’s overreacting, but because we get to see him with Maggie we know that he really does have a point. Only in this version, he doesn’t?
In 2023 all the rough edges have been sanded off both Maggie and Arthur. One’s slightly quirky, the other’s a little daggy. Which is not in any way how the original worked. So why ruin a classic formula? Is it a near-fatal desire to keep everyone “likable” and “relatable”? Yeah, let’s go with that. And what do you get when everyone is likable? It’s not comedy, that’s for sure.
With no deeper reason to hang around, we keep being told Arthur needs to be there to keep an eye on his mum to keep her safe. Honestly, he’s doing a pretty shit job of it. So shit, in fact, this episode begins with him coming home to find a complete stranger has moved in with his mother.
We thought the joke was going to be that Arthur thought his mum was trying to replace him but no, that would require some kind of serious emotional involvement: Arthur just thinks he’s a scammer. Which isn’t an entirely comedy-free scenario, but it’s yet another reminder that the big problem with this version of Mother and Son is that it often feels more like Old Lady and Distantly Related Carer*.
In the 2023 version, there’s no hidden depths to the relationship between mother and son. What you see is what you get, and what you get is a relationship that’s all surface. Forget any lurking resentments, or buried frustrations, or toxic co-dependency: it’s all out there in the open, and there’s not a lot of it to take in.
The same goes for Okine’s Arthur. He’s a failure, but in a kind of low stakes, not really important, he’s hardy even trying way. There’s no sense of him being seriously downtrodden or oppressed by his situation. His mum says embarrassing things: oh no. His sister doesn’t respect him: big deal. The grocer woman seems into him: why? He doesn’t need to escape his plight, he just needs some alone time on the Playstation.
Which makes him basically the same character Okine plays in everything he does. It’s also the same character he wrote about in his memoir, because “lovable self-aware loser” is the Matt Okine brand. Mother and Son is just the latest Matt Okine Project Starring Matt Okine [enough of the fake titles – ed.].
He’s not a Chris Lilley-level egotist by any means – as we always stress, Denise Scott is this version’s saving grace. But having him play Arthur as just another Okine stand-in kills off a lot of the comedy. He’s not a comedy character; he’s just some guy we’re meant to find relatable.
Unfortunately, he’s also just some guy who now has a track record when it comes to reboots. Give it a few years and he’ll be redoing Kath & Kim. Can’t wait for an all-new version of Fountian Lakes where Kim plays video games and hangs around the house claiming to have writers block while some much funnier actor plays Kath, getting half the screen time and twice the laughs.
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*A large chunk of the episode is just Arthur hearing second-hand what his mother is doing. Why can’t we see her activities? They’ve got to be funnier than following Arthur around
Lorin Clarke’s Would that be funny? Growing up with John Clarke is a book about growing up with John Clarke as your father. Let’s get the suspense over with: having Clarke as a dad seems to have been exactly as awesome as you’d expect. The portrait of him here is the kind of thing you’d think was too good to be true if it wasn’t exactly how he came across in pretty much everything he did in the public eye*.
Lorin herself is an author of no little renown, and so one of the many themes running through this book – again, to get the suspense over with, it’s great and you should purchase a copy immediately – is how growing up with a master storyteller helped guide her to her current career.
And why wouldn’t it? John Clarke made telling stories and being actively engaged in the world and all it’s silliness seem like the most magical thing there is. Clarke was a man who got authentically excited about floorboards and nails: you’d be a fool not to want to get in on that action.
Beyond Clarke himself, it’s a picture of a family, complete with in jokes and references you had to be there to get. Only you don’t have to have been there, as there are plenty of short chapters that are basically listicles running through things like “Expressions we stole” and “Things at which my parents are stratospherically bad at”.
There’s also plenty of anecdotes, excerpts from Lorin Clarke’s own Fitzroy Diaries series, the backstory behind jokes from Clarke & Dawe interviews, voicemail transcripts / poetry, and so on. It’s the best kind of grab-bag.
The family portrait thing goes both ways in time, as Lorin grows up, changes schools, reinvents herself, discovers the joy of writing, studies politics in Boston and has a family of her own. We also learn about John Clarke’s own, somewhat less happy childhood and youth (don’t worry, it all works out in the end). Lorin is at pains to point out that her father shied away from reductive explanations as far as what drove him to write and perform; a “sad clown” he was not.
We could go on. There’s a lot happening here – we haven’t even mentioned Lorin’s mother, a well-known academic who wrote a book about eroticism in art, or Lorin’s sister Lucia – and if you’re even remotely interested in writing, making television, the work habits of one of Australia and New Zealand’s greatest comedy talents, being thoroughly entertained or just cosy memoirs about family life then once again it’s time to say this is great and you should purchase a copy immediately.
Because you’re here, we’re going to assume your main interest in this book is John Clarke, writer and sometime performer. You’ll be pleased to learn this is a vivid and insightful look at a very funny man, one that somehow manages to make the most likable person on Australian television – okay, not a high bar to clear, but still – even more charming and funny.
And yes, for comedy nerds there’s loads of gold here. Peter Cook gave John Clarke the idea to do the Clarke & Dawe interviews on television! That’s reason enough to buy the book right there, and that’s just something we chose at random. Throw in his influences, dealing with the ABC, snippets of his unpublished writings, the way he priced the Fred Dagg album at half the usual price because he knew a lot of his fans were kids, and this is a well worthwhile deep dive into the work of one of this region’s comedy greats.
(also, this isn’t a book that starts at the start and works it’s way through to the finish. Chapters about John Clarke’s school days are still turning up towards the end; don’t think you can just find the single solitary section on comedy and put the rest aside)
More importantly, this provides a vivid sense of what John Clarke was like as a person. The man in these pages is chatty (an understatement), fond of poking fun, caring, loyal, interested in people, not someone who tolerated fools behind the wheel, a man who once almost mailed his address book (which, as you can imagine, was a book with a lot of private contact details) to Frankston by mistake and a person whose commitment to being casual and relaxed occasionally went a little too far.
And yes, in between the consistently evocative writing and the sharply observed family portraits – there’s at least three generations under the microscope here, with marriages ranging from acrimonious to deeply loving – there’s something of an origin story here for the John Clarke that entertained the antipodes for decades.
With a sense of humor shaped by friends and family (especially, and surprisingly, his parents-in-law), and often uncertain of his abilities early on but surrounded by support, Clarke life is presented here as (amongst many, many other things) a reminder that often it’s the people around an artist who bring forth the art.
Would that be Funny? is both adoring and authentic, the kind of clear-eyed, open-hearted writing that’s a privilege to read. Whether you’re a lifelong fan of John Clarke or couldn’t pick him out of a line up, this book is a delight.
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*well, maybe not the evil property developer he played in Crackerjack
ABC is the undisputed home of exciting, new, original Australian comedy, with millions of viewers flocking to ABC and ABC iview for a fix of home-grown laughs.
In exciting news, Season 5 of Utopia has catapulted to the top of the charts to become ABC iview’s #1 non-kids program this year, as viewers lap up the exploits of the Nation Building Authority’s crack team of bureaucrats, headed up by Tony Woodford (Rob Sitch).
Season 2 of Kitty Flanagan’s award-winning comedy Fisk, available exclusively on ABC iview, was ABC’s most-watched comedy in 2022, and in 2023 it remains one of the most popular shows on iview, as the probate lawyer in the brown suit, Helen Tudor-Fisk, continues to garner a legion of fans across the country.
While launching last week, the feel-good comedy Mother and Son, starring audience favourites Denise Scott and Matt Okine, is proving an early hit, picking up a new generation of fans and notching up a total audience of over 1.2 million people watching the first episode*.
ABC Head of Screen Content Jennifer Collins says “The ABC has a long and proud history of supporting Australian comedy and nurturing comedic talent both on screen and behind the scenes. We’re thrilled to see our audiences enjoying our first-class, diverse comedy offering.”
ABC Head of Comedy Todd Abbott says “It’s always great to see home-grown comedy kicking goals, and we’re super proud that laughs are leading the way in showing people the on-demand delights of ABC iview.”
From the hilarious wild times in Gold Diggers and the madcap comedy of Aunty Donna’s Coffee Café, to the beautifully executed comedy-drama In Limbo, ABC is the home of Australian comedy.
Let’s just take a moment to let that sink in. “ABC is the undisputed home of exciting, new, original Australian comedy”. New? Original? Exciting? Maybe not words we’d use to describe Utopia, a show now into its fifth season. Maybe they mean the reboot of Mother and Son? Referring to In Limbo as a comedy is definitely new.
We’re not going to go to town on this. Nit-picking gets dull fast – though it is interesting that the ABC Head of Content would rather refer to comedy in an official press release as “diverse” over “funny” – and after the last few years any kind of recognition that ABC audiences want to watch comedy is a good thing.
But if a line-up that we’d definitely call “mid” (two winners in Fisk and Comedy Cafe, one solid mainstay in Utopia, and two fizzles in Gold Diggers and In Limbo) can pull in “millions of viewers”, imagine how well they’d do with a line up that was legitimately crowd-pleasing?
It’s not a secret that audiences love local comedy. The only time in recent memory the ABC was able to field an evening’s entertainment that could seriously challenge the commercial networks – that’d be Wednesday nights, though the glory days there are well over a decade ago – it was based on comedy. Not news or current affairs, not sport, not “hard-hitting local drama”. Comedy.
And yet for a generation at least, the ABC has treated comedy like an annoying obligation. It’s a big steaming pile of vegetables they’ve had to eat before they can get to the part where they take home a bunch of awards for a grim drama nobody watched and a news expose nobody gives a shit about. They’re serious broadcasters: comedy is just that little bit beneath them.
Of course, the justification for all that boring crap is that the ABC is meant to be filling the gaps left by the commercial networks. Fun fact: the commercial networks (10 aside) aren’t making comedy, and nobody’s making sitcoms. Making comedy is what the ABC should be doing. A bunch of reboots and revivals and “beautifully executed comedy-dramas” is a dereliction of duty.
After all, they really seem to like it when comedy brings in the viewers.
