Australian Tumbleweeds

Australia's most opinionated blog about comedy.

On the Turps

It’s been a fairly quiet week in comedy – well, Greg Fleet is back in trouble for drug-related hijinks, but that’s not really news as such – so we figured hey, what better time to get caught up on something we missed first time around. Which would be the second series of Plonk, as recently seen on streaming service Stan.

Unfortunately for the profitability of Australia’s streaming services, we continue to be too stingy to actually pay to watch them. Fortunately for our tight-arse approach, the makers of Plonk are currently putting series two up on YouTube here. Watching television for free? Who would have thunk it?

And “free” is pretty much the price you’ll be wanting to pay for Plonk, because while it’s a step up from the first series it’s still the kind of show that gets smirks rather than laughs. It looks good, and being filmed at actual wineries – oh right, it’s a behind-the-scenes look at a shoddy wine infotainment show (fronted by The Chaser’s Chris Taylor as “Chris Taylor”, a presumably slightly more wanky version of himself) where they travel to various wineries and promptly make dicks of themselves – makes a nice change from the limited locations of most Australian comedies. But when you’re talking about how the locations are a strength it’s a pretty big sign it’s not classic comedy.

(also, those South Australian “filmed with the assistance of” logos? Yeah, there’s tourism money involved)

Interestingly, as we noted in our review of series one, being cut into shorter segments does mean it’s pacey enough to avoid a lot of the endless pauses that drag a lot of local comedy (is Please Like Me still airing before midnight?) into the mire. It seems they bolted three segments together to form tv-length episodes for Stan, but online the 7-10 minute segment length seems about right as far as viewer tolerance goes.

Still, it does have jokes, the wine stuff is mildly informative, and the central trio have – again, let us stress, for an Australian comedy – an actual comedy dynamic that works in a generic sitcom fashion: for online content we can safely commit to saying that it’s worth a look. Also in episode one, a Greg Fleet cameo! Nice how that all tied in together.

Seriously, can you Please Like Me?

Welcome to a post in which we do two things we know you love:

  1. Quote extensively from a news story and get all annoyed about it.
  2. Slag off Josh Thomas.

From TV Tonight…

ABC’s mixed messages on Please Like Me

ABC has bumped Please Like Me to a later timeslot after just one episode of its third season.

To be fair, it did debut with ratings of 129,000. But wait, it’s not Please Like Me’s fault…

ABC is replacing UK series The Musketeers at 8:30pm with a Sherlock replay, which pushes the local comedy to 10pm.

Last week The Musketeers drew 320,000 viewers, while Please Like Me averaged just 129,000 viewers. Despite being a critical hit, the Josh Thomas comedy is yet to attract a popular audience.

But then how can it, when ABC has never given it a decent timeslot across its three seasons?

TV Tonight goes on to talk about how Please Like Me started on ABC2 where it rated badly, but then how after it got lots of awards it got a run on ABC, albeit not in an established comedy slot…

ABC finally moved it to the primary channel ….in a week where it was over-crowded with new comedies The Ex-PM and Sammy J and Randy in Rickett’s Lane. That left Please Like Me to run Thursdays, but not in the 8:30 slot that had previously been allocated to Upper Middle Bogan.

Upper Middle Bogan? That ended, what, almost year ago?

As for this new comedy glut we’re experiencing right now, maybe audiences voted with their feet and didn’t watch Please Like Me? Kinda like how they did watch when comedies they liked moved timeslot (The Chaser’s War on Everything, Mad As Hell)…except the opposite of that.

Put it this way, in TV history there have been plenty of examples of shows getting a boost from airing directly after very popular shows (The D-Generation airing after The Young Ones, for example), but there are also examples where the reverse is true. And when it comes to Please Like Me, Australian audiences just don’t like it, despite everything the critics and the people who decide who to give awards to keep telling them.

But back to TV Tonight…

Why didn’t ABC wait until it had a Wednesday night slot for the show? The answer may lie in producer deals with US cable network Pivot, with ABC necessarily hitched to its US playout whether it liked it or not.

Oh yeah, that. This is a show being made with American cash, so it kinda doesn’t matter that no one in this country likes it, as long as US cable viewers do.

But let’s end this blog with a laugh. You remember laughs, they’re not a feature of Please Like Me…

An ABC spokesperson said, “We hope the broad appeal of Sherlock will provide a strong lead in, and that the new time slot appeals to the target audience. We remain immensely and steadfastly proud of Please Like Me, a truly wonderful series.”

Oh ABC spokesperson, you crack us up!

Footsteps on the Dancefloor

Remember the days when any news about Chris Lilley was, well, news? The Huffington Post sure does:

Only one favourite? Aww.

Having watched the clip in question, pretty much all we need to do is note its existence and move on. The one-time Master of Disguise provides zero surprises as he presents his now-standard “I’m a girl!” and “I’m a boofhead!” characters, and when he turns into a rapping turtle the make-up is doing all the hard work there. It’s not even like getting comedians to appear in your music video is anything new: everyone from Bob Odenkirk and David Cross to Mark Heap has been there and done that.

No, your real comedy pick of the day is Helen Razer’s latest insights into comedy:

There is and there can be no artistic valour in “saying what everyone’s thinking”.

It is the great comic’s work to say what no one is thinking.

And sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

Please Like (looking at) Me.

For a show that’s just jam-packed with bubbly hipster fun like wandering through mazes, or running down a well-manicured suburban street with a stolen trolley, or cracking jokes in cool inner-city eateries, or putting a chicken on your head, the one word that comes to mind when thinking about Josh Thomas’ sitcom Please Like Me best is inert. No, the word we’re thinking of isn’t actually inert, we’re thinking of the word “inert”… let’s start again.

Usually any halfway decent sitcom has as many plots and subplots going as it can manage – it’s far from unusual for a show to have an A, B and C plot on the go in a 22 minute episode. Please Like Me series three episode one has one plot: “will Josh* get to fuck an attractive yet annoyingly erratic and sometimes distant young man.” Maybe if this plot was “will Josh fuck off”, we’d be interested, because even Two and a Half Men isn’t this fixated on giving its lead opportunities to make out with attractive people.

But look! They’re playing with cute little chicks in the opening credits! Surely aggressive and consistent quirkiness counts for something, right? Not when your sitcom has nothing else to offer. Perhaps if you’re a long-time viewer watching this for the “will they or won’t they” soapie angle then you might care about whether Arnold and Josh get together; going by the way this provides zero back story to either Josh or Arnold (Josh has no back story anyway; Arnold’s stay in the mental hospital would at least explain how they met) they’re not expecting too many new viewers anyway.

To restate our case: this is an episode about a somewhat annoying young man (Thomas is still young, right?) trying to have sex with a more attractive man. Fortunately, the more attractive man is somehow even more annoying than Josh, so it’s almost plausible that they might get together. That’s “fortunately” in a “fortunately this boring plot is at least plausible”, not “fortunately” as in “fortunately there’s a sliver of amusement to be found in their antics”

And then they fuck and for a heartbeat it’s like “oh well, guess they’ll have to make the episode about something else now” BUT NO because then it shifts to scenes of Josh fondling and groping and in one case literally rolling around under his lover while his lover talks about all the ways no-one will like him. Call us sour old bastards, but it seems that having two characters being intentionally massively annoying in distinctly different ways that only amplify each other’s worst traits is just a touch excessive. And if the ratings are any guide, it’s not the kind of thing anyone wants to watch either:

But it was bad news for Please Like Me. While 129,000 improves on its ABC2 outings, the show is yet to overcome its place as being a critical hit but not a popular one.

 

We’re going to be controversial here, but is it just possible that a comedy – or even a dramedy – can be really good as far as giving marginalised groups representation on Australian television yet somehow also be dull as fuck to watch? This episode is focused entirely on charting a relationship between two unlikable characters, which has proven to be ripe comedic grounds since time began. And yet there’s what feels like a deliberate attempt to avoid anything funny past the occasional dump of banter. If you think having funny things happen in a sitcom is unrealistic, why not make a drama? Oh wait, no-one would watch a drama where nothing happened; if you call it a comedy you can at least pretend people aren’t seeing the humour.

So maybe the comedy here isn’t for us. Where are the insights into relationships then? You’re telling us that if you relentlessly pursue someone you might a): get them but b): not always like what you get oh wait c): it all ends happily because… it just does? What about, oh, going into why Josh wants to fuck Arnold so badly? If it’s just because he’s hot – and we’re not really given any other reasons in this episode – why are we spending 24 minutes on this story?

We’d love to go on to talk about something else, but there is literally nothing else going on in Please Like Me. Thomas’ show is often compared to Girls, but Girls has (at least) four central characters who each get their own subplots – plus loads of guest stars in those subplots – and usually at least half of those subplots are about things other than relationships. Episode one of series three of Please Like Me is focused entirely on Josh; sure, it re-introduces the cast, but every scene they’re in is a scene about how they relate to Josh. Is anything interesting going to happen to any of them over the course of this series? Fucked if we know, and for a series opener it certainly doesn’t give us any reason to care.

“Sometimes my feelings need to be thought of” Josh says during the big dramatic climax. Looked at a certain way it’s the funniest line here, because the whole episode is about nothing but his feelings. Everyone is constantly talking about him; he’s always talking about himself. Yes, Arnold is being a bit of a dick in this scene because he’s a dick in every scene he’s in: there’s a case to be made that he’s intentionally a callback to the way Josh was in series one to show how Josh has matured. But as Josh is still totally self-absorbed, what’s the point? It’s holding a mirror up to an arsehole. Pardon us if we don’t like the view.

 

 

 

*”Josh” is the character; Thomas is the performer writing and staring in Please Like Me.

Australian Media Eager to Please

Back when the ABC was running promos for Please Like Me and The Ex-PM pretty much back-to-back, we noticed something a little unusual: while the commercials for Micallef’s show focused on people actually saying and doing funny things, the Please Like Me spot only showed one thing, over and over – people laughing. Maybe we’re a little off-base, but when you’ve made a show that’s actually funny, usually you have funny things to show people; having your cast laughing uproariously at nothing suggests that there’s nothing to laugh uproariously about.

But the promotion for Please Like Me was testing the limits of words like “shrill” and “desperate” long before that. Take this interview with star Josh Thomas in last week’s Fairfax press:

His hard-to-classify show offers a deft counterpoint between the simple pleasures of life – cooking, sharing meals, raising chickens, running along a jetty – and its tougher and more complex challenges: dealing with death, depression and marital breakdown. Like a number of contemporary productions – Girls, Louie, Transparent, Togetherness – Please Like Me doesn’t sit comfortably in a conventional comedy category.

And yet, unlike a number of contemporary productions – seriously, you’re comparing it to Louie? – it isn’t very funny. Even if you’d never seen the show and could only imagine how unfunny it is, that description alone would tell you that hey, this isn’t going to be funny. It features both cooking AND sharing meals? Plus running along a jetty? Wow, that’ll totally balance out all the death and depression.

Then there’s this bit:

Here, though, screening on ABC2, it hasn’t won the audience or the acclaim it deserves.

So we searched for “Please Like Me” on the Fairfax website: 140 results

Then we searched for another Australian comedy show based around a local comedian and which aired on a secondary free-to-air channel for two seasons: 31 results for Kinne.

So yeah, no shortage of acclaim there.

And yet the ratings have been in the toilet pretty much since week one of series one. Could it possibly be that “the best show you’re not watching” is in fact “yet another show audiences don’t like the look of”?

Loving up Thomas isn’t the sole province of Fairfax, mind you – though the fact his twee inner-city antics overlap pretty solidly with what they seem to believe is their core readership (and how’s that working out for you sales-wise guys?) does mean Fairfax is your home of Thomas gush – because oh look, the crack team at DeciderTV have decided to take a swing at talking him up. And also putting his twitter handle in the headline, which is taking “hey look at us!” to a whole new level.

Created, written and starring comedian Josh Thomas, Please Like Me has developed into becoming the most entertaining and surprising comedy on Australian Television.

“Developed into becoming”?

On one level Please Like Me takes on the role of a Generation-Y coming-of-age comedy similar to HBO’s Girls series in the US. However this programs ability to confront issues such as depression, aging, and mental disorder with such brutal honesty and humour makes it a far more compelling and sophisticated program than Lena Dunham could ever hope to create.

Because Girls never tackled depression and mental disorder. Also “HBO’s Girls series in the US”?

The episode includes an honest, raw, and at times confronting sex-scenes between the two men, but it also includes some outstanding dialogue that is both blunt and highly amusing

“an honest, raw, and at times confronting sex-scenes”. Why have we got the lyric “we are one, but we are many” running through our heads?

Okay, we could pick on their stilted prose all day – seriously, take a look at their site if you don’t believe us – but that’s not the point. No doubt there’s plenty to praise about various aspects of Please Like Me; it looks good, the cast are plausible in their roles, it focuses on areas Australian comedy often ignores (a gay dude dating, not death and mental illness). But it’s better than Girls? It’s the most entertaining and surprising comedy on Australian television? It goes its own way, shaped by the vision of a distinctive creative talent?

Wow. Guess they’re going to get a shock when our review goes to print.

The unlikely Ex-PM

It’s hard to believe that Andrew Dugdale was ever put in charge of anything, let alone this country, but that’s the premise of The Ex-PM, the new ABC sitcom written by and starring Shaun Micallef. Once upon a time Andrew Dugdale (Micallef) had a popularity rating of 76%, which saw him win four elections and become Australia’s third-longest serving Prime Minister. Now he’s been voted out and has had to move back in to his suburban home and deal with more mundane matters, like repairing the house after it was let to Wolfmother, and dealing with his daughter Carol (Kate Jenkinson) who’s still a bit raw after breaking up with her husband. Oh, and he’s got an autobiography to write.

Dugdale’s business manager Henry (John Clarke), only ever present by video conference as he’s under house arrest following an ASIC investigation, has negotiated a large advance, but the book isn’t written. Enter 24 year old politics graduate Ellen (Lucy Honigan), who has a month to cobble something together about this rather uncooperative subject.

Vague, easily-distracted and clearly not wanting his story told, Dugdale leads Ellen on a weird and wild goose-chase ‘round his property and life, revealing little beyond that he’s given to wearing Australia tracksuit tops, collects antique clocks, thinks of himself as “fiscally conservative”, and once appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone looking over his sunglasses ala Paul Keating.

Dugdale is every political leader and none, down to the last clichéd statement. But more generally, he’s a relatively straight character stuck on the middle of a Ray Cooney farce of a life, where there’s an idiot minor character around every corner, and his wife’s trying to shag his closest confidante in the billiard room. It’s partly this that makes it hard to buy Micallef as a former Prime Minister – he’s genuinely, physically funny with brilliant timing throughout – something almost no politicians are.

But on the other hand, there’s awful lot to enjoy in the broad peripheral characters – Francis Greenslade as Curtis, an ex-Comcar driver with a metal plate in his head, Jackson Tozer as Miles, an overzealous idiot Federal Policeman who’s waiting in vain for a gig in Counter Terrorism, and Ming-Zhu Hii as housekeeper Rita, in the country on a 457 visa and once Gaddafi’s cook – and there’ll probably be some good laughs to be had when all is revealed about Dugdale’s night with Condoleezza Rice, so yeah, we could just kick back and enjoy it.

This first episode is a little bumpy (much like Micallef’s last stab at a sitcom, Welcher & Welcher, which is one of the funniest shows made in this country once you get used to its rhythms). At times Dugdale just doesn’t seem to fit the wacky world he’s dropped in, while Ellen seems a little too abrasive for someone who’s agreed to such a stressful gig… but that kind of quibble is self-defeating when a comedy has this much potential.

And actually, we’re pretty excited about what we’ve read about the upcoming episodes of this series on ABC website. Does it matter that it’s hard to buy Shaun Micallef an ex-politician? Probably not. Let’s face it, would anyone looking at John Howard imagine he got beyond a junior position in a very boring law firm?

Fresh Blood pt 4: Donna Good Job

Okay, so we kinda sorta knew Aunty Donna’s pilot was going to be the pick of the Fresh Blood bunch. For one thing, their previous efforts have been funny; for another, they’re an actual comedy team who’ve been working together for years. How often do you see one of them these days?

So their pilot was a cut above the rest; in fact, it was pretty much the only one of the five that we reckon could go to series as is. BedHead and Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am need a lot of work; The Record was 50% gold, but that’s not really enough to get the thumbs up; Fancy Boy was a solid sketch show, but does anyone think they’re going to get all the big names back for minor roles if it goes to series?

So yep, it’s not a contest… but if it was, they win. The opening musical intro alone is a stand-out, the plot – the handsome, popular member of their sketch comedy team has bailed, leaving the remaining three with no chance of actually becoming funny before the big gig that night – is a solid framework for a bunch of sketch-like events leading to a big climax, and unlike a lot of people trying the “manic” school of comedy they stick enough funny moments in there to stay on the right side of annoying. Like we said up front, it’s the pick of the Fresh Blood bunch. We all knew that going in. So wait, why are they even part of this talent quest?

What Aunty Donna’s presence here tells us is that something is not quite right in the ABC’s commissioning process when it comes to scripted comedy. These guys shouldn’t be jumping through these very public hoops: they’ve done enough good work to be on the ABC’s radar as part of their regular program-making process.

But of course, there is now a very, very big gap between the people who can get shows on the air and the people who should be getting a shot at getting shows on the air. The days when the ABC was a breeding ground for comedy talent that would then go on to the commercial networks are long gone; now commercial no-talents are welcomed at the ABC with open arms in the desperate hope that some of their audience will follow (Charlie Pickering, Josh Thomas).

With nowhere for even the quality ABC acts to go and ABC2 no longer running new programming, we now have a comedy logjam. We may not have been fans of a lot of the ABC’s scripted comedy output in recent years – we’re not calling for the return of The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife-Fighting, fuck that – but the guys behind The Moodys probably should have got another shot at a sitcom. Where’s the next series from Gristmill? The Twentysomething team? Where’s John Safran? Where’s Tony Martin? Oh wait, we’re back on the old guys again.

It’s a year ago this month that the Bondi Hipster’s TV series Soul Mates aired. It wasn’t perfect, but it showed promise. So where’s their follow-up? Okay, those guys scored a Screen Australia grant and so don’t need to work – uh, are “developing ideas” – for the time being. But the list of equally mildly promising Australian comedies from the last few years is reasonably long (no, not The Strange Calls); why is the ABC even holding public pilots when they aren’t giving the people who’ve already made a series for them another shot?

Could it be that they have no real interest in encouraging new comedy? Could these pilots really be as good as it’s going to get? Are guys like Aunty Donna going to be stuck waiting for a rope ladder that’s never going to be thrown down? Is the real joke behind all this the idea that these pilots are ever going to lead anywhere?

Utopia is a sitcom that’s funny

The second season of Utopia saw it evolve from a sitcom which was mainly about how difficult it is to build infrastructure in this country, to a sitcom about an office in which people find it difficult to build infrastructure in this country…hey check out that subplot about the overzealous plant hire guy!

This change of emphasis has been a largely positive move as far as we’re concerned because, well, the infrastructure project management woes have always been the least funny parts of this show. But plots about how an office becomes Chaos Central when someone tries to fix the air-con, or when it’s Heart Week? We can all laugh at that.

(By series three [we’re assuming there’ll be one] Utopia may well be what was once the Holy Grail of Australian sitcom: a local version of The Office. A show where it doesn’t matter what business the characters are supposed to be engaged in, it’s all about how the characters inter-relate and the stupid things that happen to them.)

With this narrower focus, watching Utopia has felt a bit repetitive – every week Tony will try to get something happening and fail, Rhonda and Jim will put up barriers or move the goal posts to make Tony’s job even harder, Nat will be dealing with something annoying that isn’t related to the project, and Amy will be ring-leading some initiative that distracts everyone who isn’t already distracted from the task at hand – but that hasn’t stopped it from being funny. Far from it.

On the one hand this is great – laughs is often something Australian sitcoms fail to raise – but it is kind of a shame that the political satire elements of the series are taking more of a backseat. There probably is a reasonable amount of funny you can get from infrastructure, but only if you’re John Clarke. He’s really good at picking apart ridiculous political situations; Working Dog, less so. They’re more about everyday characters and the minutiae of situations, so it makes sense for them to get their laughs out of subplots about coffee machines.

But if there is another series we’re going to need more from this show. We’re going to need a reason for the characters’ tales to be told. A denouement, perhaps? Where the National Building Authority or Nation Building Australia, or whatever they’re called this week, pull off a project successfully? Now that really would be hilarious!

Fresh Blood pt 3: Record Scratch & Fancy That

And the Fresh Blood juggernaut rolls on! Not that there’s a lot to say about The Record, aside from “it’s good”, which is a bit of a relief after our first two reviews. And it’s not just the brief run time that made it a relief – though at just over 17 minutes, it’s easily the shortest of the Fresh Blood entrants – it’s a comedy that starts out with a funny idea then builds on it, continually finding humour in a series of logical developments. Hurrah!

Well… okay, it doesn’t do that all the time: the premise of The Record is a show about people trying to break records, with two stories running side-by-side (we’re assuming there was a third that was cut, thus the short run time). One, about an elderly couple trying to get the record for the world’s fastest homing pigeon, is a bit of a mess. The central concept isn’t that great, the plot twists don’t really build on that concept, and while the performances are fine it’s hardly memorable stuff.

It’s the other story, about a couple trying to set the record for most naturally conceived children (they currently have 69 boys), that’s comedy gold. The ways how they cope with their huge family (names! washing! bedtime stories!) all gets a laugh; the gradually revealed relationship between the couple (she wants more kids; he’s looking worn out) is just as funny. Even the set design is perfect; the shabby 70s-esque decor and clothing only adds to the seedy, run down vibe.

For once, we’re going to give this the benefit of the doubt: sure, the pigeon stuff is pretty much par for the firmly average course of Fresh Blood pilots, but the big family is a decent idea executed in a way that makes it even funnier. A show that was consistently that funny would be cause for celebration; as it stands, The Record is the first Fresh Blood pilot we can actually recommend.

*

Fancy Boy opens with Luke McGregor walking into a kitchen to find a man with his pants around his ankles sitting in his sink taking a shit. If you kind of feel like you don’t need to know any more to pass judgement, welcome to the club. Fortunately, the sketch turns out to be more about having a dickhead flatmate who wants to argue their way out of the obvious. It’s not even that someone taking a shit in a sink can’t be funny; it’s when that’s the opening image of your show that the alarm bells start ringing.

To Fancy Boy‘s credit, sketches that start out one way then develop in a more interesting fashion seem to be the goal here: the “Backyard Business” sketch starts out as a firmly average parody of gardening shows, only to become more interesting when the cameras are turned off. Okay, hiring a sex slave online to clean the house largely works thanks to Celia Pacquola’s horrified expressions. And the “albinos vs witch doctors” sketch is pretty predictable (though the bizarrely plausible set-up makes it work). And the Mark David Chapman sketch is a one-joke idea that pretty much runs on rails. Wait, weren’t we saying this was an okay show?

Thing is, when you’re doing a sketch show that’s largely just weaving in and out of extended sketches, you really need to make sure that every time you come back to a sketch you’re either building on what’s come before or taking a new angle on it. For example, with the sex slave sketch, the intro is “oh no, you hired a sex slave to clean our house because he’ll work for free, eww”; the first callback is “oh no, I hired a sex slave to clean our house and now my girlfriend is really getting into punishing him”, then we get “oh no, we’re exploiting him but not in the sexy way he wanted (“I want to be treated like shit, but not like this”)”. Same set-up, (slightly) different jokes.

So while this isn’t always kicking goals, it’s doing a decent job of serving up fresh jokes even when it keeps returning to various set-ups. We’d still rather that some – most – of the sketches were one-offs (having the shit-in-the-sink set-up turn into one of those “exasperated lead is the only person who can see the obvious” sketches so beloved of The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting was a big let down, even for a sketch that started out with someone shitting in a sink), but if you have to keep going back to sketches this is the way to do it.

That said, having not one but two montages of all the various storylines while music plays might have worked in Magnolia, but a half hour sketch show is not an overwrought three hour long late-90s arthouse flick even if your DP is “Roderick Th’ng”. Full star off for pretentiousness there.

 

Fresh Blood pt 2: Wham Bam Flim Flam

We’re assured by the ABC PR department that Wham Bam Thank You Ma’am is “a rapid fast-flowing comedy with an uniquely female perspective.” “Uniquely female”, you say? Are we supposed to read this as saying “it has an unique perspective that also happens to be female”, or – as seems way more likely – “this perspective is unique because it’s female”?

If it’s the latter then a): nice one chumps, as comedy is one of the few areas of Australian cultural life where women get a semi-reasonable shake and do we really need to bring up Judith Lucy, Kath & Kim, Kylie Mole, Wendy Harmer and the list goes on and on, and also b): US comedian Amy Schumer is doing the exact same thing right now and it’s not a comparison that’s flattering to the Skit Box team behind this show.

Yes, we know outright comparisons are both unfair and extremely lazy criticism. But at the moment, and especially online, Schumer is the current owner of the “raunchy and insightful female-focused sketch comedy” title. That obviously doesn’t mean that other people can’t also do it: it does mean that someone else is already doing a really good job of it so you’d better bring your A-game because people are going to be making comparisons.

So when your opening is a girly slumber-party pillow fight that turns vicious… and that’s it… then you’re not really putting your best foot forward. Taking things TOO FAR is very well-worn territory now that you can pretty much show anything you like on television (or at least, anything that’s going to get across the TOO FAR point, such as the ear-biting here), and while there might be a deeper point to be made here – maybe about reality versus fantasy – this bit isn’t making it.

Then it’s time for the seemingly traditional one-upsmanship bit where two people try to outdo each other with… oh, just go watch Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch instead, that pretty much put the capper on this kind of thing 40 years ago. Still, “I’m having a seizure on top of all this from the miscarriage of my autism AIDS baby” was a pretty funny line.

Hey, help us out here: is this a comedy sketch:

WOMAN: “Do you want sushi for dinner?”

MAN: “Didn’t we have sushi for lunch?”

WOMAN: “Yeah”

[Freeze-frame, caption BITCHES BE CRAY]

Yeah, we didn’t think so either. Don’t worry, this kind of thing doesn’t get funnier with repetition.

Like we always seem to be saying with these Fresh Blood pilots, there are bits here that work – usually the shorter the better. The all-junkie version of Friends complete with fake laff track is not a good idea, but the junkie version of the theme song (“it’s like you’re always shooting up someone’s gear”) is good; the animated toilet sign joke works; ‘Old-Fashioned Dating’ contains one “swipe left” laugh but it’s short enough to get away with it. And then it turns out to be a series of sketches and… yeah. Repetition.

The trouble with having an unique perspective on anything is that it telegraphs a lot of your jokes ahead of time. Hey look, it’s a workplace full of women and the new hire is a guy; wonder where this is going? No, no we don’t, because it’s going down the corridor marked “what if sexism worked the other way”. That doesn’t mean it’s not a decent sketch – the points the women made were funny because they were valid beyond the usual clichés – but when your punches are so clearly telegraphed ‘decent’ is really the bare minimum required to get a laugh.

(and then they bring the sketch back and you know what? If you have a long sketch that gets more and more crazy, cutting away in the middle to something else then coming back to it doesn’t make it funnier – it ruins the momentum you’ve built up and makes the whole idea seem drawn-out. This kind of thing worked when Fast Forward did it because they were doing (relatively) short sketches and could cut between three or four at a time across an hour-long show; when you’ve got 22 minutes, if a sketch feels too long to deliver in one go, cut it down until it fits)

And everything else was firmly in the “everything else” category. Ha ha, being murdered by a serial killer is like sex! What, no “I scared him off” punchline? And then it’s reprising old sketches until the end credits roll. When you only have what, five sketch ideas in 22 minutes, it’s not really the best advertisement for being given an entire series, especially when a decent script editor would cut that run time down to a core funny five minutes. It’s a good five minutes, mind you, and this does show a fair amount of promise. Would we watch it as a series? Yeah, we’ll get back to you on that.

It’s been a very long time since Australia was up there with the world’s best in sketch comedy. The UK may have given up on the format but the USA is really doubling down on it and as a result the days of getting laughs with half-finished ideas, sketches that don’t really say anything about anything beyond “what if X was like Y”, and banging a concept into the ground with repetition is… well, obviously not “over” because that would be wishful thinking. But if you want to make good sketch comedy, you now have a lot of current examples of how it should be done.

So that running bit where the punchline to each wacky request was always “ugh, you’re just like my dad”? Not really the way to go.

 

 

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