Razer: Anne Edmonds’ comedy is truly, madly, deeply Australian – and that’s why it works
For comedy to work, here in this country, it must be truly Australian. It must evoke the minutiae of a time and place, be unashamedly local.
Razer's Class Warfare
Apr 12, 2018
My father has physical need for uncontrolled laughter. This may be genetic, as I suffer the compulsion, too. Neither of us is especially funny, but we have long been especially committed to seek the funny out. It was Dad -- a man who claims to have acquired a hernia during a 1972 screening of The Adventures of Barry McKenzie -- who urged me to become a newspaper comedy critic about twenty years ago. “It’ll be good for your career,” he said, “It’s prestigious.”
There is, as you know, nothing prestigious about this low form of review. Nothing lucrative, either. Dad, who had always hoped I would become a union lawyer, was really just in it for the free tickets.
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OK. Talked me into it.
I love comedy and I think that I’d like your Dad too.
Cripes Helen, you’re a bottler! I wish I could see Anne Edmonds’ show but your piece is a worthy substitute. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is the perfect example of Australian humour and those who worked on it, and I’m one of them, will swell with pride at the news of your Dad’s hernia. Barry Humphries knows exactly how to enunciate our anxieties and desires. I offer one gorgeous example: “I’d crawl half a mile over broken glass just to hear that little sheila piss into an empty jam tin.” True love.
I haven’t see her standup but her segments on The Katering Show have had me in stitches! Hope she comes down to Tassie some day soon!
Truly an inspired whirlwind of absurdity that I almost literally pissed myself laughing at