Most Over-Rated Comedy

All through 2009 you had to overhear conversations about how great The Chaser are, or try not to get sucked in to a horrific argument with a colleague who reckons Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation is the best thing that Shaun Micallef's ever been in. Still, at least you've got this category.

MOST OVER-RATED COMEDY
The Chaser's War on Everything - 50%
"What zany stunt will they come up with next?"
- Ontos
"Intellectual Jackass. I think they're infinitely smarter than they present themselves to be, and they're dumbing themselves down too much. Which can be a good thing - they'll certainly appeal to a wider audience this way - and I think that's their ultimate point, but it could be so much better."
- Shannon
"*sigh* what happened to the Chaser boys? I blame Andrew Hansen's hair. Everything went to shit as soon as he bought that first tub of gel."
- elvislemonade
NOMINEES
Spicks & Specks - 25%
Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation - 25%

Last year's winner:
Hamish & Andy

Hyped to buggery but under-performing comedy-wise for most of its run, it probably wasn't much of a surprise that even after a year-long break the final series of The Chaser's War on Everything was looking pretty tired. Not that their fans noticed, or that the media could be bothered to criticise them for anything other than whichever of their sketches they'd decided to condemn that week for no sane reason. So the team scraped more ideas from the bottom of an already well scraped the barrel, and even going overseas just seemed to result in more of the same (perhaps because they'd already been overseas - remember Charles Firth's segments from series 1?).

Even though it had been made clear from the start that this was their last series, there was still plenty of moan about. We won't bother to go through it all again, we blogged about it at the time, but 6 months on, now that "The War" is done and dusted, our feeling is still the same: it could have been so much better. Still, The Chaser are supposedly bringing us a scripted radio show this year - and there are rumours that Tony Martin's involved - so that at least should be interesting.

"Interesting" isn't something our voters would accuse Spicks & Specks of being; "mystifyingly popular" is probably a more accurate description of their general view. Do stereotypical ABC audiences know or care about popular music? Seemingly so. Perhaps it's because it's pretty much a straight quiz with the odd lightly amusing gag chucked in, rather than the overseas model for comedy quizzes: gags and plenty of them first, trivia a distant second. And it's not as if Spicks & Specks hasn't got comedy pretensions and comedian panellists, and marketing which suggests there's some comedy in it, so it's pretty disappointing for comedy fans to tune in and discover that it's basically a kinda dull music quiz.

Another panel show, Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation, was the surprise hit of 2009. It rated its pants off and saw Shaun Micallef get the kind of mainstream success he's deserved for a long time...so what's the problem here? Well, the fact that it's not Micallef doing what he really does best - surreal sketches and plenty of them - and that it's a half-hour show stretched out across a one hour timeslot, and that - like Spicks & Specks - it's more quiz than comedy, and that it contains Josh Thomas, Charlie Pickering and Amanda Keller ruining everything by taking up time Micallef could be using to actually be funny.

Sure, Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation gave Micallef the profile required to produce a comedy album, and without it that New Year's Eve special stuffed with his greatest hits wouldn't have made it to air, but when you get down to it, the Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation effect won't give comedy fans more of the Micallef they want (unless the New Year's Rave was some kind of pilot). Because every minute Micallef's asking Josh Thomas and partner to put six historical events in chronological order is a minute he isn't spending impersonating Christopher Walken or climbing aboard his high horse or doing something else really, really funny.

 The Robert Fidgeon Memorial AwardMost Over-Exposed Comedian