Positive Developments in the Land of Comedy

Which reminds me that Morley's Web 2.0 rise to comic stardom seems to have abandoned its net dependancy which I always found questionable as a dependancy anyway.

Just check out how many obscure facebook friends (and even legitimate facebook friends) band gigs I've ever attended.

Anyway back to today's feature presentation...

Bogan Pride, poorly sold by SBS I checked it out because in a way I know Rebel Wilson by 2 degrees of seperation, and it followed on from Southpark or Top Gear.
Basically this show suffers from only one thing and perhaps its a good commentary on what Australian comedy suffers from across the board - "The musical" where you take anything at all and just tack "the musical" on the end and suddenly it's a comic masterpiece.

In the past decade this has actually only been true of "Paul Keating...........the musical" and nothing else.

And it's certainly not true of bogan pride. But I have to say overall it does remind me of Father Ted in the use of obvious set ups and surprising punch lines. The two episodes I've seen were truly excellent in terms of casting, extras and ridiculousness.

Example from memory:

RW: Why would you use an abreviation when you have to spend more time explaining it to people?

Skank: Why would you go on living when your the fugliest girl in school?

RW: I'm not the fugliest girl in school, hello Joe Bloggs? [can't remember actual name]

Skank: ha! Joe Bloggs killed herself over summer.

That taunting exchange won me over. The show is high quality in terms of dialogue driven humour. It picks on christians which everybody is doing but well, they deserve it they believe stupid stuff.

Furthermore what I surprisingly like a lot is that the ensemble cast plays as strong a part as the lead and contribute equally, and the only male characters are one line extras.

But it's subtle, it's not one of those nauseating affirmitive action female comedy fests that is packaged and sold on its femininity. Partially like Kath & Kim you simply don't notice that gender plays a role in the construction of the show. It just is. That's what comedy needs to be. The traditional male comic profession isn't conscious of the fact that they are male adn they play to a broad audience.

The next one is ABC2 program Review with Miles Barlow. It's a beautifully clever show. I didn't know about its first season but it's the most original and clever fucking program the ABC has produced in memory.

Sure spicks and specks and the glass house and Good News Week by any other name have their large audiences, but I think the ABC would do better to adopt a contrarian strategy and just say 'let's try and lose this BBC satire loving, world war II romantacizing, new inventors watching audience we are embedded'

Review is just bizarre, psychotic and just fucking clever. It has wreckage, it's really clever and quite adult without again one being conscious of the fact. Yes, I've only seen one episode but in it he reviewed Murder and Divorce.

It was just fucking hilarious. That's all that needs to be said. Hopefully between Review and Bogan pride we can actually see some evolution in Australian comedy that has been badly stalling since Working Dog and GNW last emerged.

Clever interesting comedians aren't a once in 40 year production, they must exist in almost every year level graduating. It's a fucking bell curve people.