The last seven days

This is just a quick update for you all on what I've been doing in the last week, so you can really sink your teeth into a whole bunch of me at once.

For example, if you want to read me in The Age on the subject of television, you can.

And if you want to read me in The Guardian on the subject of the Labor Party, you can. 

Or perhaps you'd like to check out my exclusive interview with Australia's Federal Racism Commissioner in the King's Tribune?  (and while you're there, subscribe FFS)

But maybe you'd rather read me on rugby union?

Or rugby league?

Probably you'll get the most satisfaction out of my piece on asbestos and how the government is using it to kill us, on New Matilda. (subscribe there too. Jesus)

Or you could just kick back and relax with my recap of the first episode of the new series of Masterchef.

Not that you need to, because my friend Dan Hall and I have covered all bases re: Masterchef's return in episode one of a brand new web series by GAMers Cam Smith and myself, MASTERCHAT. Check it out below, and stay tuned for next week's ep.







OK that's all for this week. There'll be some more stuff next week. Don't say that I never do anything for you people.

It's A Living

Alas it is true that from time to time I must use this blog not for higher purposes, but for grubby utilitarian self-promotion. And thus I'm just letting you know a few things I've been up to lately:

Firstly, please do not forget that my first book, Surveying The Wreckage, remains available for everyone to pay money for and laugh till their cheeks crack and bleed. Available at sophisticated bookshops, and also here.

Surveying the Wreckage of course is a collection of columns from New Matilda covering the years 2008-2010. For more recent satirical spewings, check out the site itself. In particular, my latest, about sluts and feminism and stuff. It made people angry!

Also my SECOND book (yes I know) is just about everywhere a book could want to be. This is just one place you could get it, but seriously there are HUNDREDS of places to buy it from. Also, I will soon elaborate on a competition I mentioned recently. A special Superchef competition for people who like Superchef, with a proper prize and everything! Stay tuned chefpions!

Also, if you like scholarly examinations of social mores and the role of comedy in our community, you probably didn't expect to find anything like that round here. But amazingly, I did one of those! For the latest edition of Meanjin magazine. You can subscribe online, or buy a hard copy from any of these fine establishments. I'm quite chuffed with this article, actually, it being unusual inasmuch as it is serious and makes me seem sort of clever and stuff.

Also! You can see me LIVE and UNCUT at The Bedroom Philosopher's High School Assembly at the Thornbury Theatre on June 24. I will be playing Principal to a motley assortment of juvenile delinquents including the BP himself, Tripod, Josh Earl, Damien Lawlor, Emilie Zoey Baker, the DC3, Anna Krien, and Sex On Toast. It will be HUGE! Get in quick, or you may MISS OUT probably.

Lastly, fans of Masterchef may or may not have noticed I've been writing the occasional recap of episodes. The first couple I did are below:

Here.


And here.

There'll be more of these, so watch out for them.

And that's all the plugging I'll be doing for today, I think. Lots going on, lots of fun! Thanks for reading, you're just wonderful. Here is a picture of a kitty.



UPDATE: The Meanjin article is now online for FREE here: http://meanjin.com.au/editions/volume-70-number-2-2011/article/offensive-comedy/

But still buy the magazine, it has other good stuff in it!

Bye Bye Sort Of

A somewhat sad blog post today, just a kind of public service announcement.

I urge you to go and read my latest weekly wrap for ABC's The Drum. Of course, I always like you to read my pieces, but this one is particularly special because it's my last weekly wrap; the Drum and I are parting ways.

No, this is not of my choosing. I loved writing for The Drum, and I will be forever grateful to my editor Jonathan Green for letting me ramble on the site, and likewise grateful to everyone who read my little jokings. I've enjoyed doing it for the past almost-a-year.

Sadly, though, the realities of tight budgets, tough decisions and the glorious uncertainty of being a freelance writer means I've been let go. That's life.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll still frequent The Drum, as it's a high-class site that deserves your eyeballs.

Of course I am not disappearing by any means. I'm still in the Age's A2 section writing about TV every Saturday, and of course the return of newmatilda.com has seen me stomp that old ground again. Check out my first for the new newmatilda.

And if you want to see newmatilda survive past the end of 2010, do throw some money their way - you'll be rewarded by continuing fine articles, including mine! Go here to find out how.

And I'm sure I'll be popping up elsewhere too - it's in my nature!

The weekly wrap's gone, but the caravan moves on.

Coming Soon

Hey read this! It's by me and stuff, from the weekend's Age.

But having thought so much about the shows we miss, I began thinking about the future of TV, and the part I have to play in it. I happen to know that most of this country's television executives read this blog religiously (on their knees, hands clasped, etc), and so I thought I would pitch:

BEN POBJIE'S TOP TEN SUREFIRE SMASH-HIT TV SHOW CONCEPTS:

1. Gene Pool - the zany shenanigans of three single men called Gene living in the same apartment, as they compete for the affections of the sexy female lion-tamer across the hall.

2. Easter - Over the course of one fateful Easter weekend, seventy-three very different people meet, fall in love, fight and kill each other a bit. Also it is set on a space station.

3. Hangdog - Can a dog in the big city make it as a professional hangman? Find out as we follow the wacky escapades of Lester the Executioner Dog, who's trying to juggle a demanding career, the strange ways of the city, and a turbulent romantic life. Lester is not a talking dog and possesses no particularly high level of intelligence. This only makes it harder.

4. Apples and Oranges - What happens when a racist greengrocer is ordered by a mentally-ill magistrate to share a mansion for a year with a Vietnamese confectioner? Well let's find out!

5. The Slippery Slope - This year's reality smash hit, in which fifteen hopeful contestants are placed on top of a mountain without food, clothing or shelter. Each week the contestants vote out their least favourite mountain-mate, who is then hurled down the mountain. It's a battle of wits/hypothermia!

6. Buried - The Series - If you enjoyed the new Ryan Reynolds film "Buried", you'll love this small-screen spin-off, starring Saved By The Bell heart-throb Mario Lopez in the role of Paul Conroy, a bumbling contractor who can't seem to stop getting buried alive every week! Also starring Dirk Benedict as the mysterious "Mr Elf".

7. Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Another reality crowd-pleaser, in which 12 teams of eight find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. The twist? The hard place is actually another rock!

8. Every Cloud - The hilarious adventures of a family of eight, indulging in wacky zaniness on an 1840s wagon train, where mom and dad find themselves completely out of touch with the younger generation and have to rely on Apax the robot butler to keep everything together!

9. Little Red Riding Hood - A cracking TV adaptation of the classic children's tale, with Red Riding Hood reimagined as a Mossad assassin, the wolf reimagined as a Somalian pirate lord, and Grandma reimagined as the United Nations Security Council. Throw in an alternative timeline in which the Boer War never happened and Nelson Mandela was born in Krakow, and you have a recipe for the wackiest five-minute stop-motion claymation show in years!

10. A Bird in the Hand - A harrowing in-depth look at the depraved world of professional ornithologists. Follow the lives, loves, lusts and hate-crimes of this twisted set of feather-fanciers as they wreak havoc on the mean streets of Hobart.

The More You Learn

So my first A2 column was up on Saturday. If you're in Melbourne or near a cosmopolitan newsagent, or even managed to find it online, hope you read it, and hope even more you enjoyed it.

Writing the column has, quite naturally, led to much thinking on the topic of TV. It's often said that TV is somehow a "deadening" medium, that watching it turns one into a zombie, staring blankly at the screen.

I defy this assertion. Nothing rouses the passions like TV. Nothing stirs the emotions like one's favourite show. No medium is its master in terms of provoking furious debates, declarations and defences. Standing up for the show you love, and lambasting the show you hate, put the lie to the "TV as neural deadener" interpretation.

I myself am passionate not only about the undeniable quality of the shows I like, and by extension the undeniable quality of my good taste, and not only about the undeniable awfulness of the shows I won't watch, and by extension the etc etc, but also about avoiding a certain kind of like-minded fan.

Because possibly the worst thing about being a TV fan is the other fans who claim to love the same show you do, but who are so bafflingly wrongheaded about them, so ignorant of basic facts, and so mind-bogglingly misguided about the motivations of characters and meanings of plotlines, that they drive you into a rope-chewing frenzy every time you log into their forum. A fellow fan with different views is far worse than a hater. Sometimes.

But really, the point is, television is an artform with just as much potential for provoking intense love, hatred and all emotions in between as any other. Although it is important to remember that when you and I disagree about the quality of a show, it is all just a matter of purely subjective opinion.

And your subjective opinion is wrong.

That said, here's a slice of my new possibly-regular blog segment, Thursday Classics:

The Power!

In the latest development in my efforts to a) take over the world, and b) make sarcastic comments about Rebecca Gibney, I am pleased to inform you I have taken on a new job. As of this Saturday, 18th September, I am the new television writer for the A2 section of Melbourne's Age.

This means that every Saturday from now on I will be writing poignant and heartwarming treatises on issues of import to lovers of the medium, and probably some stuff about Kim Kardashian too. I do hope you will grace my column with your eyeballs. I'll do my best to make it worth your while.

It is a shame though, that just as I receive such wonderful TV-related news, I also hear some equally distressing news in the same area. A moment's silence please, for beloved Golden Girls boyfriend and Mel Brooks villain Harold Gould, and for beloved bumbling Gestapo henchman and occasional Ripping Yarns South American John Louis Mansi. Goodbye Miles, von Smallhausen; well done, good and faithful servants.

For What It's Worth

I feel compelled to comment on the sacking of Catherine Deveny from The Age. Bear with me, or ignore it if you've no interest in my being serious - God knows I would understand that. There's plenty of good commentary about anyway, probably better than mine - from Daniel Burt, for example, or even over at Pure Poison - and anyone who reads PP regularly knows they are no fans of Deveny.

I am going to make no pretence to impartiality here. Catherine Deveny is a friend of mine, so I am by no means unbiased. She's not my friend because I agree with everything she says, but she is my friend and obviously I'm likely to take her side when she gets knocked about like this. So this isn't coming from an objective place and I know it.

BUT...

For what it's worth, I'm troubled by this. Getting sacked for a couple of posts on Twitter? Really? A couple of one-line jokes?

Now, there is no point arguing about whether the jokes were funny. That's purely subjective, and an argument without a point. It's also irrelevant. Were they offensive? Undoubtedly - they clearly offended a lot of people. But then, what comedian hasn't offended someone? What opinion writer hasn't offended someone? I'm regularly offended by right-wing columnists from all parts, and I've never believed my offence was grounds for their dismissal.

And here we are talking about being offended by actual, serious arguments being put forward in articles published in newspapers - not a couple of throwaway gags of 140 characters or less. So is offending people a sin worthy of dismissal? Clearly it's not. Not even at The Age itself - Catherine's been offending people in droves for years, and they haven't kicked her to the kerb.

Tasteless jokes are common among comedians, and even commoner on Twitter. It would seem a huge overreaction for The Age to take this action based on such minor, disposable comments.

But the thing is, they didn't. The Age didn't act on the tweets. The Age acted on the "controversy". The Herald Sun whipped it up, its readers fell into lockstep behind it, and The Age went along with it.

One can't imagine this working the other way. Were The Age to report on a "storm of criticism" being sparked off by Andrew Bolt's latest vicious slurs on refugees, or to denounce, say, his characterising of Kevin Rudd as a murderer who "fries" people in roofs, one doubts the Herald Sun would feel compelled to sack Bolt in response. Au contraire, they'd probably rub their hands with glee at the controversy.

I'm not denying The Age has a right to choose its own columnists. I was kicked off the radio for making bad-taste jokes, and I never claimed the station was engaging in "censorship" for making that kind of editorial decision. But that doesn't mean the decision is right either. The Age has been dictated to by the hysteria concocted by its rivals, and I think that's a shame. They've lost a distinctive voice that, no matter what sort of reaction she provoked, always provided something different in the paper, which could only have been a good thing. And I think that's a shame too.

And this isn't an issue of whether you like Deveny, or think she's funny or not, or approved of the jokes that got her in trouble. It's an issue of whether you think Twitter jokes should be elevated to a level of importance that will lose someone their job. And it's an issue of whether you think simply causing "offence" is a sin serious enough to warrant getting the boot. I think if being offensive is not allowed, it's a rather sad turn of events for the media.

I'm not going to boycott The Age. It will remain the best paper we've got here in Melbourne. I'm just disappointed, and I respectfully disagree. I hope at some point they might reconsider and welcome Deveny back. I would urge them to.

I'm Mad As Hell And Will Only Take It For A Little While Longer

OK, so The Chaser. Everyone knows about it. They'll be back next week, and hopefully the experience will not turn them tame and insipid in any way, but drive them on to more inspired feats of comedy.

Below is something I wrote in the aftermath of the infamous sketch, because every bit of commentary I saw seemed to miss the point by some distance. Some pieces made some good points - I agree with those sticking up for the Chaser's right to make bad-taste jokes, I agree with those who said it's the show's job to push boundaries and test the limits and so forth - but even those mostly missed the point of what the sketch was actually about. And as for those blasting the show for crossing lines, destroying lives, spitting in faces etc, I found it unbearable. Those who claimed the problem is that the show was no longer funny may or may not be right, but it was irrelevant to the issue at hand - which was the only good point contained in what I thought was one of the most ridiculously wrongheaded articles, by Shaun Carney and I'm not in the slightest bit interested in debating whether something's funny or not). And even now, two weeks later, all commentary continues to miss the point, to my mind.

Everyone must make up their own minds, but I honestly think the media hysteria has blinded people to what the sketch actually was, and I also think I'm at least as well-qualified to comment on it as the political analysts and shock jocks that have dominated the debate. And since the piece below was not wanted by a variety of media outlets, I'm having my say here. If you hate The Chaser and all it stands for and always will, you probably won't get much out of it. If not, do read on:



ON THE CHASER

Making fun of sick children? Disgusting. Outrageous. Disgraceful. Unacceptable. For doing such a revolting thing, those terrible Chaser boys should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. For mocking those poor kids, they should be sacked. Blackballed. The ABC should lose its funding. How could they do such a thing?

The only trouble, of course, is that they did no such thing. They never made fun of sick kids. Not in the slightest. And no reasonable person making up their mind based on the actual sketch – as opposed to having their mind made up for them by squawking tabloid headlines – would come to the conclusion that they had.

Now, I admit I do not know any Chaser members personally – as the 800 pound gorillas of Australian comedy to my pygmy shrew, we move in different circles – and so it is, I concede, possible that they sat down and thought, “Bloody sick kids, let’s take them down a peg or two”. However, I consider it susbtantially more likely they sat down and thought, “You know the Make A Wish Foundation? Wouldn’t it be funny if there was an organisation like that, but one that was really, really bad at its job?” I think this is more likey for the simple reason that that is precisely what they did in the sketch.

Contrary to those who saw it as a vicious attack on sick kids, or on the real Make A Wish Foundation, it wasn’t an attack on anyone. It was actually a conventional piece of sketch comedy based on the classic premise of taking a well-known character, situation or institution, and coming up with an absurd, grotesque or incompetent version. The Make A Realistic Wish Foundation is, in fact, nothing more than The Chaser’s version of Monty Python’s Silly Olympics, Saturday Night Live’s male, talentless synchronised swimmers, or even bumbling Maxwell Smart. The humour lies not in laughing at sick kids, but in the very fact that we know how appalling the “Make A Realistic Wish Foundation” is. The fictitious foundation itself is the butt of the joke – in essence, the point is not to mock the sick kids, but to side with them against the dreadful fools at their bedsides. To suggest that the fact that terrible fictional characters do terrible things to others means the creators are mocking the victims is just silly. The Chaser was no more mocking sick kids than John Cleese mocked Germans by making Basil fawlty a racist, or that Ricky Gervais mocked the disabled when his David Brent showed his utter insensivity to a wheelchair-bound colleague. Comedic characters are often terrible people – this is what makes them comedic. We’re laughing at them, not the innocent folk who have to suffer their obnoxiousness.

Please note, this is not in any way attempt to convince those who didn’t find the sketch funny that it was; comedy is utterly subjective, and to try to claim that one’s own opinion on what’s funny is in any way objective or definitive is ridiculous. That, of course, does not stop people trying, and a hundred comedic experts have sprung up since The Chaser aired to claimed that the “real problem” is that the sketch just wasn’t funny. Patently untrue – people don’t call for sackings and funding cuts just because things aren’t funny. Thousands of hours of unfunny material is broadcast every year without a furore. Commentators like to claim that unfunniness is the problem in order to dodge the quite accurate accusation that they are joining a herd of confected moral outrage and self-righteousness. The fact is, whether it was funny or not is completely irrelevant to the question of whether The Chaser was mocking sick kids. If they were, making every last person on earth bust a gut wouldn’t change the fact, and if they’re not, stony silence from every viewer does not give reason for moral condemnation.

I don’t doubt that some were upset by the sketch. That’s unfortunate, but as any comedian or comedy writer knows, if you want any hope of amusing people, you have to risk giving offence. I’ve seen comedy deal with subjects including racism, Nazism, incest, bestiality, sexual assault, domestic violence, murder, war, disease and famine. Any of these and a hundred other apparently tamer topics could cause distress – there’s practically no subject that has no chance of offending anyone. That’s the nature of comedy, and any comedian worth their salt takes that chance all the time. But the fact that a piece of work can strike a nerve with you doesn’t mean it was targeted at you, and the fact a TV show upset someone – however worthy and genuinely long-suffering that someone is – doesn’t mean that they are right and the makers of the show deserve to be cast into the outer darkness. Especially when, one suspects, much of the outrage and offence being expressed comes less from genuine spontaneous reaction and more from the efforts of media hypocrites desperate to whip up a new moral panic to reinforce their self-assumed position as guardians of the public good. After all, sketch show The Mansion did a similar gag last year. America’s The Onion and Australia’s Shaun Micallef have both in the past given their own spin to “make-a-wish comedy”. No howls of outrage there, because they weren’t The Chaser, the enemy that Murdoch papers and “current affairs” programmes alike are just itching to snipe at. The Chaser could act out verbatim re-enactments of Mother and Son, and the Herald Sun would scream about their tasteless assault on Alzheimer’s sufferers.

So it’s a shame if you were offended, especially if you have suffered the trauma of ill children. But be assured, The Chaser wasn’t having a go at you, or your kids, or anyone. And if you are the sensitive type, perhaps you shouldn’t be watching the show (and nor should children, sick or otherwise). Personally, I’m going to go on watching. Because even if it’s not perfect, I know that it’s comedy. If you don’t understand that, maybe you should go look for the remote.

Two Articles To Read Before You Die

If you were wondering what happened in the last year, you can catch up on it at my YEAR IN REVIEW at newmatilda.

Also of passing interest may be my take on Christmas in The Age. It's my first time in The Age, so I'm quite happy with that.