Thoughts on British/Australia Relations

I got asked to write something about British Australia Relations for a proper publication, and I figured you lovely beans might like a sneak preview of the first draft. X

I was in a backstage area last week, and heard some british comedians gossiping about how well Australian acts are represented in the nominations for British comedy festival awards. (Comedians have opinions about everything, and for many of them, cynical sniping is as much of a sacred calling as it is a professional asset.) But even as a representative of the maligned party (Australian, not award winning), I thought it was an interesting point. Why do Australian comedians do well in the U.K?

Here I feel an urge to emphasise that I’m not doing wildly well, but that’s probably just an extrusion of the Australian National Tall-Poppy-Syndrome - our beautiful, egalitarian and occasionally poisonous desire not to put ourselves above one another. I’m doing fine, actually. Better than I could at one point have imagined back when I was an underpaid and deeply unhappy law student-cum-intern in New York, listening to The Bugle Podcast (which I now regularly cohost) and Audible Audiobooks (on whose best seller list I surreally sit) but shhh, I don’t want to be American about it. I’m doing okay.

I mean, putting aside the obvious selection factor that you’re unlikely to travel to a foreign country to ply your craft unless you’re either good, ambitious or have burned a lot of bridges back home, we do tend to show up a lot on british stages and on british television. But why? They can’t just be fond of us because they’ve watched too many reruns of Home and Away and Neighbours, right?

Well, first of all, when Australian comedians do come to the U.K, and we can make the same jokes and get more or less the same laughs. It’s an interesting phenomenon, given how much of comedy tends to lean on recognisable references. Sure, sometimes you might have to relocate the mise-en-scène of your Priceline joke to a Boots, but your punchline will tend to hit a comedy club crowd with equal force. It feels like there’s some sort of bedrock sympathy of national identity between Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. that’s reflected in our humour.

Perhaps that’s because at least before the internet came along and internationalised our access to content, most of my generation grew up on british comedy classics; from The Goon Show to Monty Python; from Fawlty Towers to the Mighty Boosh, Blackadder, Fry and Laurie, Mitchell and Webb, Rohan Atkinson. Our taste was shaped as much by the British comedy classics as it was by The Footy Show.

Many of us saw those beautiful british bastions of absurdity and silliness when we were growing up and concluded that there was something special about the way comedy is done in the U.K. We thought perhaps there was something particularly fertilising about the soil of the comedy scene.

Coming over, of course, you realise the long running influence that class-based, out-of-Oxbridge-straight-into-the-BBC nepotism norms had in that taste-making. Though with a movement now in the national broadcaster towards increasing breadth of representation, that is being diminished, nonetheless it’s an interesting case study when you compare it with the barriers that weird sideways comedy comes up against in finding its footing on mainstream Australian screens.

I’ve written jokes for the television in both Australia and the U.K. as well as trying to make people laugh from the stage in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and outback Western Australia. I occasionally am asked what the differences are between working as a comedian in the U.K and working in Australia, and that’s hard to answer unless you want to talk in sweeping generalisations. Which I always do. Every comedy crowd is a unique and special creature, but if you perform in front of enough of them you can start to notice national characteristics.

For example, mainstream American crowds tend to prefer it if you signpost your punchlines; if you make it clear that now is the time for laughing. This is, I assume, because they are used to watching sitcoms with laugh tracks, and they’re a generally polite and sincere group of people in their day to day lives. My british friend Amy who is currently living and doing comedy in SAN Francisco, said “Americans don’t like punchlines, they like keywords”, which is a slightly mean and fairly accurate take on the willingness of American audiences to applaud a performer wildly when you tell them your age, marital status or home town.

British audiences, weaned on dark comedies with neither laugh track nor studio audience, like a sideways laugh, and they don’t mind a performer showing off a touch of linguistic cleverness. Australian mainstream audiences come down on a showing-off performer like a ton of bricks; our national ‘tall poppy’ syndrome kicks in to make us as an audience, very unwilling to encourage any pretension. As a result our comedians tend towards self-deprecation and emphasising our own relatable flaws.

More generalisations! My accent in Australia is definitely on the more educated, less ocker end of the spectrum. If I get up on stage in Australia, I’ve often felt like I need to counteract an automatic presumption that I will be pretentious and patronising (a difficult to counteract. I can’t help sounding pretentious, as I am actually pretty pretentious).

Australians tend to frame up any talk about class in terms of geography. We’ll characterise people by city or state, sometimes even suburb. Americans tend to bring up class differences in terms of race. The British talk about class in terms of class. I guess they perfected it so they’re allowed.

The average U.K. audience feels a little more open than Australia to unusual left field comedy, but perhaps that’s a very personal thing - my accent over here reads as more neutral, so I have less to apologise for, or because I’m foreign I get some leeway? But certainly I’ve felt more openness from british audiences than from Australians, from the long walk towards the microphone, where they get to see you but you can’t talk yet, to the getting away with a different kind of joke, and a feeling that I’m “allowed” to play higher status on stage.

It’s a bare fact that since I first came over to the U.K and began performing, I’ve spent more and more of each year here, because I do seem to do more and more interesting things here than back home. Much though I miss our sunburned country when I’m away, it’s undeniable from a professional level that even on a per-capita basis, Australia doesn’t like my comedy quite as much as the U.K. does.

I don’t know where that slightly more open feeling comes from. I like to think perhaps it’s because of the power of the BBC to broaden people’s art, independent from government politics, funded by television licenses, with a mandate to commission good stuff as a mainstream but non-commercial channel. Without having to play to advertising dollars, the BBC could beam surreal, absurd and extremely silly comedy straight into the homes of the nation.

Perhaps this is an outdated idea for the up and coming generations with the internet opening up channels of access to everything to everyone, and maybe my generation of comedians will be the last ones to really feel vast differences in national audience flavour as more people sort themselves into team affiliations that span national identity. Maybe both performers and audiences will homogenise around the world, or maybe with wildly unrestricted access to so much interesting and good art, every audience will be more welcoming to weird foreign and different acts when they trot onto the stage.

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