 When it comes to entertainment, stand-up comedy is cheap. And in Australia you get exactly what you pay for.
Dave Hughes continues to wander through the stand-up scene, raking in huge amounts of cash with an act that consists almost entirely of a nasal whine. If someone ever figures out how to get a jet engine to tell jokes, he's out of a job. Wil Anderson's act has undergone a subtle shift over the last few years. Previously, he was the painfully hip guy with the cool haircut telling the kids what they wanted to hear - crap political gags against "the man" and observations Seinfeld flushed down the toilet a decade earlier. Now he's the not-that-hip guy with the try-too-hard haircut 30-somethings go to see to try and persuade themselves that they're still one of "the kids" while, back at home, a babysitter looks after "the kids" to earn enough money to go see Sam Simmons. Hateful as Wil Anderson is, at least he occasionally tries to tell jokes. Simmons just... blathers. The original idea behind quirky, random comedy was that performers who knew enough about how making people laugh actually works would use this knowledge to take shortcuts. To the untrained eye, these shortcuts look like random thoughts plucked out of nowhere. So, wannabe comedians figured, why bother actually trying to make people laugh with jokes that surprise or observations that contain insight when you can just say random words at random to randoms? These days everyone knows saying things at random is funny - they don't know why it's funny, but it's comedy, knowing anything about it just kills it, joke-killer. Just don't forget a silly costume, it was always funny when The Goodies wore those.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
