Generic Antipodean comedy thread

[Ron Superior]

Yeah, I know what you mean. It feels like something they could get right for future shows. Just the scene where the girls find the body and it's pretty real and grizzly and then one of them drops a fag butt on his cock and the other one pukes on him is a perfect bit of successfully marrying 2 different styles (hard hitting murder drama and comedy) that hasn't really been done but totally could do if handled properly. And a lot of the elements that were obvious or clichéd felt like either they were either forced to add in, or maybe didn't trust themselves yet to do it as they'd like. And there's always the hope that there's a reason why Eddie is how she is and there's a big payoff for it but there's really no way it'd be worth putting up with having to watch that character for any longer.

I hope it does well for them and I'll be interested to see what they do next, but I can't see me bothering to watch any more of this unfortunately.

[famethrowa]

It's not comedy, well it kind of is, anyway I listened to TISM's Hot Dogma album after a gap of 20+ years and it's fantastic still. I got proper emotional at the end of Life Kills. The band themselves don't think much of the record (what a surprise) but it's my favourite.

[13 schoolyards]

TISM are one of the great unsung (well, maybe not unsung) geniuses of Australian comedy. It's no surprise Tony Martin is constantly doing bits & pieces with one of their members

[famethrowa]

Agreed, they just hit this sweet spot of high art and low humour, Melbourne localism, intellectual and historical references with poo jokes. Nothing like it anywhere else.

[samadriel]

Australians, we all once rejoiced in our shared commonwealth
But now if you're Australian... help your fucking self

[samadriel]

Just bought tickets to Guy Montgomery's show, "My Brain Is Blowing Me Crazy" in Brisbane in a few weeks. Lucky me!

[SteveDave]

Anyone want two free tickets to see Paul Williams tonight at the Soho Theatre? Totally forgot it was happening. Starts at 9:15. I can email you the tickets.

[The Lurker]

Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee has got a second series. Lovely stuff.

[Shaky]

Deadloch feels a bit like something that got away from them. Doing a straightforward murder mystery show but with comedy characters isn't a bad idea, but the two halves don't fit. The prestige drama side is well done and atmospheric, but then there are these fuckwit comedy characters walking around that belong in a shit 90s sitcom and Eddie is way more painful than she needed to be if the idea was to be a contrast to the other (much better) cop.

There's a few interesting ideas in there - by the end of the third episode they seem to have staked out what the murders are "about", which won't come as a huge surprise to anyone paying attention to Get Krack!n - but it almost feels like they wanted to make a straight diatribe and the comedy was just thrown in there in a half-hearted fashion.

But I guess if it does even moderately well they'll be able to forge a career writing prestige mystery series, which is a lot more lucrative than maybe getting an Australian comedy series every five years

It grew on me by the end but yeah, it doesn't hold together very well. The jarring nature of the project is right there with the two main cops and it's a risky gamble the show can't really pull off - the more reserved, sensible one is fine but Eddie is the most insane piece of overacting I've seen in years. Takes you completely out of the thing, although she calms down a bit as it goes on.

Back to new stuff, I watched the first episode of gold rush comedy Gold Diggers - dreadful in a "Who the hell thought this was good enough?" way.

[13 schoolyards]

Gold Diggers gets a little better once it settles down and they figure out exactly what the show is about, but yeah, that first episode feels like they turned up at an historical park with some costumes and a few notes and tried to improv the whole thing.

They even had a decent basic structure for an episode - they're on the run, they plan to hide out with their old mate who's struck it rich, the mate won't have a bar of them (because they'll give away her game) so they're stuck on the streets trying to figure out a plan B. But they buried it under hammy performances and a script that never bothered to actually set out any kind of stakes or clarify what the leads were up to. I guess there wasn't enough money in the budget for a second draft

[Ron Superior]

So, Tom Walker had to do his recent Twitch stream from a streaming room of a local gaming café rather than at home and his audience got to vote what he did on the stream. The choice was he just had to stand and smile and thank new subscribers for 3 hours.

Basically, a few things happened throughout the stream that made life very uncomfortable for Tom

Spoiler alert

starting with the fact that the streaming room was actually just separated from the rest of the cafe by large, non soundproof windows, which considering he had to keep changing costumes to things like Marge Simpson and bisexual Austin Powers wasn't ideal. And it somehow managed to get worse for him but it's worth watching for that because it's glorious

[close]

Things start going really wrong for him about 2 hours in and there's just a steady stream of new lows for him after that. His breaking character around 2hrs30 in to ask a very important question, and his food delivery about 2hrs45 in are the icing on the cake. Compelling viewing.

Love Tom.

https://www.twitch.tv/tomwalker/v/1876628409?sr=a&t=90s

[Ron Superior]

My wife was enjoying Deadloch so kept watching it. While still being incredibly annoying and off-putting, Eddie did tone it down a bit over the season, and the show did really get going around halfway through and the mystery got gripping and there were plenty of characters in the show that were really funny. I ended up really enjoying it which, considering I had absolutely written it off after episode 2, is amazing.

[13 schoolyards]

I wonder how many people stuck with it. For a show that launched with a lot of hype and goodwill, the discussion seemed to drop off fairly quickly (and honestly, those first few episodes were a big hurdle)

[Ron Superior]

Yeah, a MASSIVE fucking hurdle. Like I said, I was absolutely done with it after 2 episodes and I'm a huge fan of the Kates and really wanted to support them. I do wonder just how annoying she was supposed to be.

[13 schoolyards]

Initially I thought the idea was "hey, it's an annoying blokey cop - but it's a woman!" and so any comments about how annoying she was could be dismissed with a "but plenty of male characters act that way". But no, she was a massively annoying character no matter what the gender. Just really badly misjudged.

[Famous Mortimer]

I was looking forward to Deadloch but shall temper my expectations accordingly.

Listening to the Ash and Ed podcast, it solidified a feeling about Ed Kavalee I've had for some time. He was mocking the owners of a dog who had a weird contraption to allow their dog to eat, not in a funny way, just calling them idiots and saying it was to seem cool. It's a real medical condition, of course, so he just sounded like a cruel prick for no reason.

Is he bad at roast-style comedy or does he actually dislike the other, funnier, comedians on HYBPA? He's always trying to stick the boot into Guy Montgomery, for example. He's fine most of the time, I suppose, but I think with a comedian of his style, likeability is important and I'm not sure he's that likeable.

[13 schoolyards]

I don't know about him being unlikable, but I think he's got more obstacles in his way as far as successfully being likable - he's a self-promoting hustler who can laugh at himself but it takes him just a little bit too long to do so for it to be really convincing. I think in Guy's case Kavalee recognises there's a pretty obvious comedy dynamic there - Guy is a bit nerdy and offbeat, Ed is a big meathead who works in commercial radio - and tries to exploit it but it doesn't always come off.

HYBPA often walks a very fine line when the panelists have a go at each other. Sam Pang was taking a few big swings at Kitty Flanagan this week and while it's obviously all in good fun, it doesn't take much at all for the mood to sour. Everyone should just stick to having a go at Tom Gleisner for being an old pervert

[Famous Mortimer]

I know that Sam and Kitty are friends, though (he interviewed her when she was touring her book), which certainly helps - Sam is also great at knowing when someone's cracked a really good joke about him and not pushing it any further. Agree about your first line, certainly.

I presume the NZ version of HYBPA has been cancelled? I've looked around for information on it, but nothing is really showing up. Perhaps for the best, as Urzila is too busy and Vaughn is a very poor man's version of Sam.

[13 schoolyards]

Was it on earlier this year? Maybe it's finished its run

[Famous Mortimer]

Weird - Wikipedia lists 5 episodes for season 3, but I don't think I ever saw them pop up on any of the streaming services or torrent sites I normally use. I suppose for stuff like this, when you're relying on one person to capture the episode and they don't, that's pretty much it.

[13 schoolyards]

It's a very fragile ecosystem, especially now that a fair amount of Australian stuff is on streaming services almost nobody has. The (excellent) new season of The Back Side of Television seems to have only been partly uploaded (there's six episodes, only three available last time I looked), which is a real shame

[Famous Mortimer]

The Back Side of Television

I found its entire run on one of those FTP server things, and shall check it out. Or at least what looks like its entire run, you're relying on people labelling it correctly.

I see that both "The Cheap Seats" and "Have You Been Paying Attention?" won at the Logies last night. I really like Sam Pang, so is it worth watching? Or should I hope that someone does a ten-minute best of?

[13 schoolyards]

I watched his opening speech afterwards, as it was supposedly the highlight - it was pretty good for a Logies intro but that's a very low bar

[The Lurker]

Just went to see Tom Cashman at the Comedy Store. It was being filmed but I have no idea for which platform. Or even when it's going to be broadcast. Either way, great show. Very Dave Gorman-esque with the PowerPoint. Also quite a dry and self-depreciating show if that's your thing - it is mine, anyway.

[Famous Mortimer]

"The Late Show" was a specialist subject on "Hard Quiz" this week, so I decided to watch one of the highlight packages on Youtube.

It's curious. Great swathes of it were cultural references that would have been a mystery to me at the time and are incomprehensible to me now, then there was blackface in the first five minutes and vox pops that were really trying to be funny, but weren't. But, Judith Lucy hadn't developed that annoying cadence yet, Martin and Molloy were great, and some of the sketches were fun. But I was left stoney-faced much more often than I'd expected, especially as I'd seen the full DVD set when it first came out and remembered loving it.

Maybe I just need to approach it in a better mood. Or drunk.

[chrispmartha]

Just finished the 2 series of Fisk on itvX, I thought it was brilliant with a really sweet ending.

[13 schoolyards]

Fisk really has been a highlight of Australian comedy over the last few years, fingers crossed they do a third series but there's been no word as yet (so probably not).

As for The Late Show, it's very much a show that got by on a handful (well, more than a handful) of great moments. So many of the vox pops go nowhere, but then you have the guy who says out of the blue that Australia needs a new flag that's a bum with a fist coming out of it. Some of the more involved sketches in s2 like The Last Aussie Auteur and this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn1FP6Rtf7Y pretty much justify the rest of the series on their own.

The DVD set is a very tightly edited (by Tony Martin) highlights package - often an entire sketch will be cut down to one joke - which really does maximise the comedy value but doesn't give you much idea at all of what the show was like to watch at the time. Truth be told it's probably the better way to watch it now, but most of the fanbase are driven by pure nostalgia these days so they're always going to claim watching hour long episodes with maybe ten minutes of decent material is the way to go

[Beloved of Jo]

I was only young but the Late Show at its time was great evening entertainment compared the alternatives on the commercial networks. Fast Forward and Full Frontal would too often flog the dead horse of a joke that was weak to begin with. Although I'd argue that's how Kath and Kim was born.

The tragedy of watching The Late Show today is looking back at Mick Molloy before he started fully cultivating his bogan everyman persona.

_{Judith Lucy is my aging goals and I'll hear nothing more bad about her.}

[famethrowa]

I still have goodwill for Mick Molloy, I'd rather see him get that sweet radio DJ coin than any of the other braying morning zoos around the land. He was the essential foil to Tony Martin, to rein in Tone's high-falutin concepts about classic cinema and art. Ed Kavalee sucks.

We were a little suspicious of Judith Lucy when she first popped up, being not of the original D-gen crew, but she won us over almost straight away, really had a good original style. She's become like a crazy old aunt that keeps visiting now and then.

Can't be doing with Fisk, I've tried and it's bloody awful. Constant use of "that voice" comedy, jokes about young people and their crazy ways, not funny enough... etc etc.

[famethrowa]

flog the dead horse of a joke that was weak to begin with. Although I'd argue that's how Kath and Kim was born.

K & K can flog that horse all they want, I love em. No kiss no coach. Watching the reruns I'm strangely aroused by Kim's too-revealing bogan fashions, Gina Riley is a hornbag national treasure.

Watch Kath's speech at the end of Kath & Kimderella, it's packed full of every K&Kism from the show's run and it's a perfect sendoff.