The Chaser’s only true sin is to be unfunny
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By the second season of that huge ratings success of the late 80s, The Comedy Company, Con the Fruiterer saying “How-are-you-today?” before spitting into a fruit and veggie bag for the 68th time, Kylie Mole playing with her chewy telling us that her best friend “she just goes, she just goes … she just went” AGAIN and Colin Carpenter misspelling his name at another job interview, had become pretty old hat. Well, two weeks into its latest series, it’s clear that The Chaser has reached its own “Coupla Days” fork in the road. They’re now officially in danger of collectively becoming a media manipulating one-trick pony. The one trick, of course, is to offend, with the manipulation coming from the fact that The Chaser’s offensive skits are clearly designed to get the conservative — and usually the bleedingly obvious — areas of the media hopping mad. Then the next wave of publicity comes from the apologists, who will tell you that the team is “holding up a mirror to society” and making satire of the media coverage of the delicate issues, rather than the delicate issues themselves. Whatever … personally, I sit in neither camp. I’m in what I suspect is the silent majority, parking my backside on the couch at 9pm on Wednesday night, hoping that a bunch of talented blokes can make me laugh. Last night they probably hit the mark with only one sketch — getting Americans to eat and drink hay after telling them that it was a guaranteed weight loss supplement — and woefully missed the mark with several more, with the main button pusher being the “Make-a-realistic-wish” sketch, as most would have seen and heard by now, set in a hospital ward full of terminally ill children. Predictably this then becomes great talkback fodder for the AM fuddy-duddies, who this morning have lined up the traditional ”they’ve gone too far,” “they’ve crossed the line now,” and “the ABC should be ashamed of themselves for letting this type of tripe go to air”. But just as those doing the criticising are guilty of being obvious, so is The Chaser. Pick a taboo subject, (terminally ill children, incest, padophilia in the priesthood, deceased celebrities, etc) and then take the piss out of it knowing the media coverage will follow. Well on the way up the totem pole, it’s actually not the worst strategy if you have the talent and the nerve to deal with it, as that crew has to date. The challenge for them now is that they’ve reached a stage where “everyone” watches them, so the product rather than the publicity is what will give them sustained success from here on in, and from what they delivered last night, they need to lift their game. Not because they “crossed the line” not because “they went too far”, but because it was nowhere near as funny as they’ve been in the past. I’ve seen all this before. Early in 1996 — my first year working on the notorious AFL Footy Show, the show’s third seasopn — Sam Newman “collapsed” on the set, just a couple of nights after then Today Tonight host Jill Singer had passed out, live to air. Without exaggeration the next day all three lines to the office did not stop ringing with viewers telling us they and of course “all their friends” would never watch the show again. The following week the ratings went from something like 600,000 to 750,000 viewers in Melbourne alone. Lesson learnt. Five years later when our ratings were dipping a bit, and then Melbourne Demons star David Schwarz suggested Sam really gets into his club for their ordinary performance the previous weekend this pie-in-the-face sketch was hatched. Yep. The phones rang, the columnists slammed our disgraceful act and the ratings went back to their dominant position. The point being that outrage needs to be your shock, rather than stock, position. With ours it was AFL news and discussion and with The Chaser it’s presumably comedy. That now has to be their only consideration. Not whether a topic is taboo, nor whether they shot a heap of footage overseas and need it to air to justify what would have been a seriously expensive exercise. They simply need to ask themselves one thing on each and every sketch and idea: “Is this funny?” “Racetrack” Ralphy Horowitz is a former producer at The Footy Show, Sunday Footy Show, SEN & 3AW. |
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18 Comments
Ralph, you are so right! Controversial does not equal funny and last night’s show only elicited one laugh from me - not a good result for a comedy show.
Let’s hope the guys can come up with some better material for future shows, otherwise I’ll be tuning out.
Ralph : yes you sure hit the nail on the head. But as a former footy show person you might have noted another flaw in the Chasers material. Taking the piss out of the less-articulate in the street is dated, tired and unfunny. It was pretty unfunny when practiced by Footy Show’s Sam, who had a smaller budget and only could go as far as Adelaide. Doing it in the US (aren’t we aussies SO much cleverer than yanks?) says the Chaser boys might have a good budget, but no good ideas.
As a professional Corporate Comedian & Hoax Speaker, I know how hard it is to come up with new material, and to ‘go one better’ than you did last time. Quite clearly the Chasers are continuing to push the envelope. And the easiest thing to do when you’re struggling for new material is to go for shock value.
The question the Chasers and the folk who pay them may wish to ask is, ‘How far is too far?’ Is it just ‘anything for a laugh’, regardless of who it offends, or should their be a limit? And I’m talking here about self-imposed limits, not external censorship.
We are all happy to laugh at an arrogant tall poppy being cut down to size, society’s double standards being exposed, or our own shortcomings being shown up, but every comedian needs to answer a basic question before running with a particular comic concept: What’s my aim here – to make people laugh and feel good, or to make them upset and angry?
If your audience is deeply upset by something you do, I don’t think it’s good enough for the comedian to just say, ‘Oh well, that’s YOUR problem; if you can’t see the funny side of it, then there’s something wrong with YOU.’ It seems to be very fashionable these days to ‘blame’ the audience or brand them as narrow minded when they don’t respond favourably to even the most tasteless concept.
While some of the great satirical work done by the Chasers can be seen as a continuation of the path laid down by Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl & George Carlin, etc, there’s a slight chance that even they would have though twice before running with the dying cancer kids sketch. If I went anyway near that type of ‘humour’ in my corporate comedy performances, I’d never work again.
Can you believe the ‘apology’ issued by the ABC: ‘The ABC and The Chaser did not intend to hurt those who have been affected by the terminal illness of a child.’ Do they think we came down in the last shower? They knew damn well it would hurt – they can’t be that out of touch with normal human sensibilities.
As a comedian myself, I think of so many issues and concepts that I could explore, but know that doing so in front of a blue chip client’s audience of VIP customers would soon have me lining up at CentreLink.
At the same time, I like to get close to the edge myself, but in a way that doesn’t get me pulled off stage. For example, if you listen to the Terrorism audio clip from the ‘Stuck in the Middle’ act on my website, you’ll hear a mocking of the 72 Virgins belief. It’s something people are happy to laugh about, but many other ‘terrorism’ topics would be no go areas, especially in a corporate environment.
It’ll be interesting to see how many corporate gigs the Chasers get in the coming months!
So, friendly memo to Chasers: It’s not all about you. We LIKE you, but we LOVE our kids. Especially when they’re about to leave us. Forever.
Nice article. Well researched and argued.
However:
“Last night they probably hit the mark with only one sketch — getting Americans to eat and drink hay after telling them that it was a guaranteed weight loss supplement — and woefully missed the mark with several more, with the main button pusher being the “Make-a-realistic-wish” sketch, as most would have seen and heard by now, set in a hospital ward full of terminally ill children.”
I didn’t think the hay segment was funny, but I thought the realistic wish segment was. This demonstrates that what is ‘funny’ is entirely subjective. Perhaps the segments that are controversial are incidentally controversial, perhaps the Chaser are just trying to be funny. Probably not, but it is possible.
I find them funny. You obviously don’t. I have never liked the footy show, but many do. So, to me, an opinion piece about something being ‘funny’ or ‘not funny’ is kind of redundant.
Of course, this is opinion as much as your own article!
The Chaser guys are not genuinely funny people. They do set-piece political stunts really well, and their chief strength is that they’re prepared to take their gags to extremes. But there is no strong comedic brain at the chaser core. there is no wit, no taste, no subtlety, no real creativity.
Their biggest stunt- the APEC infiltration- was amusing for it’s sheer brevity and scale, not for it’s wit. If you examine the comedic concept behind it- getting a guy dressed as bin laden into a world event with ridiculously tight security- you’ll find that it’s pretty basic. Sure it’s amusing as hell, but there’s no real wit there. It’s the sheer scale of the gag that makes it succeed. Dressing up as a terrorist and infiltrating the establishment is a pretty high-school kind of gag, not the cutting satire it’s sold to us as.
So Chaser boys, keep the big bold stunts coming, and we’ll keep watching. But don’t feed us insensitive dribble and label it ‘cutting satire’, because you don’t really understand what that is.
Ralph Horowitz suggests you ask “Is this funny?” before you run a gag. I suggest you outsource that question to someone with a genuine sense of humor. Denton doesn’t count.
The Chaser always played funnier than it was because they were ‘taking it to the man’ in a way most of the country wanted to. Like a politicocultural version of Jackass.
Times have changed and the easy stunts are over. Maybe completely over for these boys.
The old Chaser website which was sort of an Aussie version of The Onion was brilliant. CNNN was absolutely hilarious. But they have just not been nearly as funny since they started Chaser’s War on Everything. It’s more like Chaser’s War on Anything.
I’m not some particularly “upright” person who is offended by the topics they choose to tackle, I’m just a disappointed fan because I remember how incisive and witty the Chasers used to be and now… well I only got about 2/3 of the way through last week’s episode and didn’t even bother watching this one.
A definition of satire that I have seen is ” a biting wit to expose vice or folly”, many deserve to be satirized under this definition, not least politicians. But sick children? What I find extraordinary is not so much the program, anyone can have some sort of brain explosion and not understand how offensive this would be, but the fact that it did not occur to any member of this team, nor apparently to the production staff.
Thats, it!, this caper is beyond the pale, my tax is helping support these idiots and the so called “management” that condone their insensitive crap.
Everyone of them should be lining up at Centrelink tomorrow.
Unfunny & unlikely to last beyond this season if that’s the kind of witless pap they have left to
shock us with.
Pathethic.
I’ll never watch them again.
It’s all emperor’s new clothes down at Chaser central. The ABC (it seems) don’t have the nerve or the critical nous to take these guys on and suggest something is actually cruel, rather than sardonic, black, satirical, outrageous etc. Cruel is a bit different to insensitive. Nothing they do is going to outrage me; my reaction in this case was one of wincing irritation that they are still so oblivious to the fact that some things just aren’t funny. They’re not funny to start with and they’re not going to get any funnier if you take the piss.
Yes, you can go too far. The saddest thing about all this? I actually thought ACA and their dimbulb vox pops re the skit actually made a bit of sense.
Unfunny, yeah. Pretty weak. But offensive? Come on.
“Indignation is the soul’s defence against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognising indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics.” - Alan Bloom. Not that I am any great fan of his, but that makes sense to me.
What I find offensive is that they pretty much stole the whole idea from Mr Show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpMjWO3qHpk
too right ralphie
I dont know if i’m looking back through rose tinted glasses at the d-gen/working dog team but i have never got the chaser. occassionally brilliant but not enough. I wonder how long the best of the chaser dvd would be?
Children dying (slowly or otherwise ) is always tragic but it seemed to be happening before the Chaser skit and will probably continue irrespective of it. I don’t think they are the cause of it.
I wonder if the skit might have worked better with some little aborigine or immigrant kids and they weren’t dying of cancer but maybe malnutrition or petrol sniffing or maybe just getting blown up in some heroic war on terror.
Did all you people complaining actually care about these kids before yesterday and did you think that ‘Make-a Wish’ was such a great idea that you’ve donated to it before now?
Kid’s dying isn’t funny but neither is ignoring the fact it happens and then being offended when something draws our attention to it..
It must be turmoil at the ABC where broadcasting and management standards are at the toss of a coin. A few months back Stephen Crittenden was stood down for three months during an internal investigation into comments he made about Radio National programming. Yesterday a nation goes into uproar over the ABC’s Chasers skit as a fuming PM holds a press conference to slam material he says is ‘beyond the pale’. At the ABC MD Mark Scott says sorry for the breakdown in management practices under his watch but there was no rationalising of why these amusing editorial standards apply to staff but not to outsourced program makers such as Chaser. No doubt the PM will have sent off to ACMA a formal protest - or is that another smoke and mirrors set up.
Johnny Rotten does cheese ads and Pete Townshend didn’t die before he got old. The Chaser are part of the establishment now, their material is old and simply no longer funny. If their MO is now just to shock rather than amuse, they should consider applying for a job at 2UE when the parrot finally falls off his perch.
Kudos to James B for at least looking past the knee-jerk reaction. I’ve not always seen the Chaser’s brand of satire as necessarily funny, I don’t think it is always the point. I do find it often thought-provoking although this skit seems to been unable to provoke thought from many though the haze of moral outrage. I do think that the skit misfired and seemed to be aimed at the true victims here, the kids and their families, rather than the multi-million dollar charity industry and the corporations and celebrities that used them as publicity tools for their own PR ends. Maybe they are overextended, maybe they have lost their touch, maybe they will take the two week enforced holiday and come back to pick at some more scabs.