Source: The London Prat | Region: Commonwealth of Australia | Period: c.1788 to present
Australian humour is the comedy of a country that was founded as a prison, became a prosperous democracy, and has never entirely resolved the tension between these two facts — finding instead, with characteristic pragmatism, that the tension itself is extremely funny. It is egalitarian to a degree that occasionally tips into aggressive, anti-authoritarian to a degree that occasionally tips into anarchic, and self-deprecating in a way that is subtly different from British self-deprecation: where the British comedian deprecates himself to avoid appearing to try, the Australian comedian deprecates himself to avoid appearing to think he is better than anyone else, which is a different social offence and a different comic register.
The defining cultural concept is the tall poppy syndrome — the national tradition of cutting down anyone who gets too big for their boots, too successful, too grand, too obviously pleased with themselves — and its comic expression is the send-up: the joke that punctures pretension before it fully inflates, delivered with sufficient warmth that the target is expected to laugh along, and with sufficient edge that they understand the alternative. Australia is a country where the highest social compliment is "she'll be right" and the highest social crime is taking yourself too seriously. Both of these facts have produced a great deal of very good comedy.
The origins of Australian humour lie in two distinct but related traditions. The first is the convict culture of the early colonial settlements — the gallows wit of people who had been transported to the other side of the world for stealing a handkerchief, who had nothing to lose by laughing at authority, and who had developed, in the prisons and on the hulks of England, a culture of sardonic fatalism that served them perfectly in their new and equally hostile environment. The convict's relationship with the powerful is the relationship of a person who has already been punished as severely as punishment goes and has therefore lost their fear of it — which produces a very specific kind of comedy: the joke that cannot be taken away from you because you have nothing left to take.
The second tradition is the bush culture of the interior: the drovers, the shearers, the swagmen, and the selector farmers whose lives were defined by isolation, physical hardship, and a relationship with a landscape of such comprehensive indifference to human survival that finding it funny was one of the few available responses. The bush tradition gave Australian comedy its preference for the laconic: the understatement, the deadpan, the observation delivered in as few words as possible, on the principle that the landscape was already making enough noise and did not require supplementing.
These two traditions merged in the late 19th century in the pages of The Bulletin (founded Sydney, 1880), the weekly magazine that became the central cultural institution of nationalist Australia and the primary publisher of the bush ballads and comic sketches that established the Australian literary voice. Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson — whose competing visions of Australian rural life, conducted partly through the pages of The Bulletin, constitutes one of the great comic-literary debates in Australian cultural history — between them established the parameters of Australian comedy: Lawson's bleak, working-class realism versus Paterson's romantic, larrikin optimism, both of them funnier than straight readings of their work tend to suggest.
The central archetype of Australian comedy is the larrikin: a word of disputed etymology (possibly from Irish larakin, a rowdy youth; possibly from the name Lawrence; possibly from somewhere else entirely, which is itself a very larrikin situation) that describes a person of cheerful irreverence, instinctive anti-authoritarianism, and unpretentious sociability. The larrikin is not a criminal — or not necessarily — but a person whose relationship with rules is pragmatic rather than principled: rules that make sense are fine; rules that exist primarily to enforce hierarchy are not, and the larrikin says so, usually loudly, and usually while buying a round.
The larrikin tradition produces a specific comic mode: the send-up, in which the target is simultaneously mocked and included; the piss-take, which differs from the send-up in being less affectionate and more pointed; and the deadpan exaggeration, in which a claim so obviously false is delivered with such complete conviction that the audience must decide, sometimes for an uncomfortably long time, whether the speaker believes it. All three modes require the audience's active participation — the Australian joke frequently needs the audience to complete it, to supply the disbelief that the comedian is performing without — which is both a demand and a compliment.
The larrikin archetype appears in Australian comedy from Ned Kelly's armoured last stand (which Kelly himself apparently regarded as having some comic potential, given that he designed his own armour) through the characters of the television era: Barry McKenzie (the comic strip character created by Barry Humphries and Nicholas Garland in Private Eye from 1964, subsequently filmed as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie in 1972) is the larrikin taken to its satirical extreme — an oafish, beer-obsessed Australian tourist in Britain whose encounters with British snobbery consistently result in the British being the more ridiculous party, despite all appearances suggesting otherwise.
Barry Humphries (Melbourne, 1934-2023) is the most formally ambitious comedian Australia has produced, and one of the most formally ambitious comedians in the English-speaking world. His two principal characters — Dame Edna Everage, the Moonee Ponds housewife who became, over five decades, a global superstar of monstrous self-regard and lethal social observation, and Sir Les Patterson, the Australian Cultural Attaché whose relationship with sobriety, personal hygiene, and diplomatic protocol is, at best, theoretical — are not simply comic creations but extended satirical essays on Australian suburbia, on celebrity culture, on the performance of femininity, and on the gap between Australia's self-image and its reality.
Dame Edna is Humphries' masterpiece: a character who began in 1955 as a satire of Melbourne suburban housewife culture and evolved, over 68 years, into something far stranger and more interesting — a figure of such comprehensive self-delusion that the delusion became its own kind of grandeur, a woman whose condescension to her audiences was so complete and so warmly delivered that audiences competed for her condescension. Her celebrity interviews, her one-woman shows, her television programmes and her books constitute one of the most sustained character-comedy performances in the history of any medium. Humphries received the Order of Australia in 1982 and the Order of the British Empire in 2007, honours that Dame Edna regarded as recognitions of her own importance rather than his, which is correct.
Australian television comedy has produced several programmes of international significance and a great many of local significance that deserve more international attention than they have received. The Paul Hogan Show (Nine Network, 1973-84) launched Paul Hogan from the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge — where he worked as a rigger — to a national and then international audience, establishing the larrikin as a commercial television proposition and eventually producing Crocodile Dundee (1986), the highest-grossing Australian film in history at the time of its release and a film whose comedy is built on the proposition that a man who has wrestled crocodiles is, by the standards of New York City, the most socially competent person in the room.
The Norman Gunston Show (ABC, 1975-79, 1993) introduced Garry McDonald's character Norman Gunston — a hapless, plaster-stuck, small-town celebrity interviewer — to Australian audiences and, in the process, invented the cringe interview format subsequently associated with Ali G, Borat, and every subsequent comedy character who achieves comedy by interviewing real people under false pretences. Gunston preceded them all by two decades.
Kath and Kim (ABC, 2002-07; Jane Turner and Gina Riley) is the contemporary heir to the Barry Humphries tradition: a satire of Australian suburban aspiration — set in the fictional Melbourne suburb of Fountain Lakes, populated by women of comprehensive self-regard and limited self-awareness — that achieved the difficult feat of being simultaneously affectionate and devastating. Its catchphrases ("Look at moi, look at moi"; "It's noice, it's different, it's unusual") entered Australian vernacular use within its first series, which is the definitive test of a comedy's cultural penetration.
Utopia (ABC, 2014-22; Rob Sitch and Working Dog Productions) is Australian workplace comedy at its most forensically precise: a satire of the Nation Building Authority, a fictional government infrastructure body, that functions simultaneously as comedy and as a documentary about the specific madness of Australian bureaucratic optimism — the tendency to announce projects of enormous ambition at regular intervals and to adjust the definition of completion as required. Working Dog Productions (Rob Sitch, Tom Gleisner, Jane Kennedy, Santo Cilauro) have been the most consistently excellent comedy production company in Australian television for 30 years, responsible also for Frontline (1994-97), The Panel (1998-2004), and The Castle (1997), the latter being one of the great Australian comic films: a story about a working-class family's fight against compulsory acquisition of their home near Melbourne Airport whose comedy is built entirely on the specific Australian belief that a man's home is his castle, regardless of what it actually is.
Australian stand-up comedy has developed, since the late 1980s, a circuit of considerable robustness centred on Melbourne — whose Melbourne International Comedy Festival (founded 1987) is the third-largest comedy festival in the world after Edinburgh and Montreal — and Sydney. The Melbourne festival has launched or confirmed the careers of Hannah Gadsby (whose Nanette, recorded at the 2017 festival and released on Netflix in 2018, generated a global conversation about the structure of comedy itself that has not yet fully resolved), Wil Anderson, Carl Barron, Josh Thomas, Judith Lucy, Akmal Saleh, and dozens of others whose work represents the range and quality of contemporary Australian stand-up.
Hannah Gadsby (Smithton, Tasmania, 1978) deserves particular attention because Nanette — which is simultaneously a stand-up special, a critique of stand-up's structural conventions, and an act of considerable personal courage — provoked a debate about what comedy is for and what its obligations are that extended well beyond comedy criticism into mainstream cultural discourse. Whether you find Nanette a work of revolutionary formal innovation or an interesting experiment that somewhat oversells itself, it is impossible to deny that it changed the conversation, which is what the best comedy has always done.
Australian comedy is characterised by egalitarianism as comic principle: the assumption that nobody is above being laughed at, including and especially the person telling the joke. The Australian comedian who takes themselves seriously is committing the equivalent of the British comedian who tries too hard: a social offence that the audience will not quickly forgive. This produces a comedy of remarkable consistency at the level of tone — warm, direct, self-aware — and considerable variety at the level of content.
The rhetorical question as statement — "Fair dinkum?"; "You're having a laugh, aren't ya?"; "What are ya?" — is a specifically Australian comic instrument: questions that are not seeking information but making claims, and that require the audience to understand both the surface meaning and the implied one. Australian slang more broadly — arvo (afternoon), servo (petrol station), bottle-o (off-licence), brekkie (breakfast), the comprehensive system of abbreviation that makes Australian English sound like a language that has decided all words are about 30 per cent too long — is itself a form of comic compression: the reduction of the world to its essentials, delivered at speed, with the assumption that you are keeping up.
The Australian relationship with death in comedy is also distinctive: a country in which a significant proportion of the native fauna can kill you, in which the sun can kill you, in which the sea can kill you, and in which the interior can kill you through the simple expedient of being very large and very dry, develops a relationship with mortality that is both pragmatic and comic. "She'll be right" is not optimism; it is the specific confidence of a people who have decided that worrying about it takes more energy than dealing with it, and that if it is not right you will have been spared the anxiety of anticipation.
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Source: The London Prat | Cross-references: New South Wales; Victoria; Queensland; Western Australia; South Australia; Tasmania; Northern Territory.