As Long as I Live I Just Won't Understand Chris Lilley's Appeal

Ever feel like the world has gone mad? Like the crushing last chapters of Catch-22 when Yossarian walks through a destroyed Rome, "The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must have been!"

The worlds gone mad, mad for Chris Lilley. I remember going round to Bryce's and he and some other dude sat down to watch Summer Heights High like it was some kind of event. After watching mildly amusing character based comedy for what seemed a very long hour, this other dude cried out 'More! MORE!!' like he had some insatiable hunger for it.

I remember another friend turning around at some social function and asking a friend if they were taping Summer Heights High, almost as if one could not predict exactly what would play out on the show that night.

I remember waking up to Syn.fm talking about how some schools had had to ban 'Slap the butcher' or people complimenting eachother for drawing the 'dictation' joke on facebook as if they had somehow made their own funny.

I understand the appeal of the show, it's a mildly amusing character based comedy in the spirit of 'Little Britain' and furthermore it's made in Australia which means standards are lower for just what constitutes an 'achievement' or even 'ambitious'. Thus like Kath & Kim, Two and a Half Men, The Nanny etc I understand how television shows from mediocrastan can have huge followings, even huger followings than TV shows from extremastan like Deadwood, The Wire, Garth Merenghis Dark Place and shit that are most often described as 'cult' TV shows.

What I don't understand is why people I really respect and think of as intelligent seem to think Chris Lilley is somehow brilliant for portraying characters I had always assumed were from Stage Comedy 101, the bitchy slut, the bitchy drama teacher, the gangsta that isn't convincingly gangster, the miss Bucket, the computer geek etc ad nauseum.

They are not I feel in the league of say Ricky Gervais' characters in terms of emotional complexity or believability. They aren't in the league of Sacha Baron Cohen who along with Will Farrel is the only person I can forgive for doing appearing in character for an interview, because of his sheer commitment to being that character in situations deliberately chosen to escalate the danger to his person. They are probably slightly superior to the Little Britain characters, but would you describe them as geniuses? They are catch phrase comedy that follows a predictable formula. The only difference being that when you watch the first episode it is actually really funny. That 'computer says no' chick had me in stitches the first time. But grew tired immeadiately.

To me it's kind of like Models, like everybody goes Gaga for the latest Hollywood starlet, yet Hollywood doesn't actually need to scour the earth to find the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica Alba wasn't found on account of Tibetan Monks scouring small villages in the backwoods of Croatia until they found a child the could believe would be the next incarnation of Sophia Lauren. They found her in a line of 40 actresses auditioning for the lead role in 'Dark Angel'. Success compounds all that shit.

In my high-school I would have said that there might be between 3-5 girls that if they wanted could have become full time fashion models, except they won't they were planning to become doctors or lawyers or some shit. Chris Lilley like a beautiful girl is just not one of those rare comic geniuses like Andy Kaufman, Larry David, Ricky Gervais etc. (I can't think of more ready examples because they are actually really rare) He seems to me to clearly be Harpo, not Groucho.

But I'm wrong, I'm the minority of 1 it seems, I think 2+2=4, HBO the gold standard of Television picks up Summer Heights High. How can I continue to respect HBO. I would have been more understanding if they picked up Salaam Cafe or even Talkin Bout Your Generation.

You know once I was sitting down and watching cricket and mentioned to my housemate 'you know I just don't understand cricket' and then my housemate said 'I kind of appreciate the mental battle between the bowler and the batsman trying to break eachother.' and I looked again and I saw it, and having had that explained to me I 'understood' cricket. It wasn't enough to get me into it, but I understood how someone could watch it or for that matter baseball and be into it.
NFL (or Grid Iron) I understand too, its gone from 'glorified human chess' to 'much more impressive than Rugby' in my estimation now that I understand it.

I don't understand why I'm supposed to think Chris Lilley is brilliant, or even, particularly brilliant. If someone would give me that key insight like 'watch his left hand doofus' and then I 'saw' it and could understand that vital thing that I'm missing I would feel very reassured. But as it stands, I have no fucking idea why I should go out of my way to watch a guy pick on homosexuals.