Class of ’07 creator Kacie Anning is ‘desperately craving’ laugh-out-loud comedy

So many comedies aren’t that funny – and they’re not even trying to be. We want a proper laugh-out-loud, goofy comedy series.

Class of ’07 is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. Picture: John Platt/Amazon Prime Video

Making things funny is “a fickle alchemy”, according to Kacie Anning, the writer and director of Australian comedy Class of ’07.

Perhaps more than any other genre, comedy is the most subjective. What one person finds hilarious another mind find cringe. The specificity of someone’s sense of humour isn’t going to vibe with everyone and sometimes the broader you go, the more it falls flat.

Class of ’07 is loose, a sometimes goofy and sometimes acerbic but almost always absurdist comedy that merges two dreaded experiences – the high school reunion and an apocalypse.

The premise is centred on a year reunion of a Catholic girls’ school where old resentments and unresolved feuds fester, made all the worse when the end of the world happens.

High school hell. Picture: John Platt/Amazon Prime Video

The last people you want to be stuck with at the end of days are a bunch of old classmates, including the alpha mean girl Saskia (Caitlin Stasey) whose then reign still traumatises women now in their late 20s.

There’s also the tension between former besties Zoe (Emily Browning) and Amelia (Megan Smart), and the incident that caused the schism in their once-deep friendship.

All that emotional regression, heightened drama and bid for survival makes for rich storytelling, especially when you throw into the combustible mix a range of personalities, plus a weird little possum. Class of ’07 is fun and frothy – and most importantly, funny.

Anning wanted it to be a proper laugh-out-loud comedy. The rhythm-driven filmmaker directed and wrote on series including The Other Guy and Diary of a Future President. And also worked with renowned US comedy writer Greg Daniels (The Office, The Simpsons) on his series, Upload.

As she worked on these projects, she was looking for her own brainchild.

Kacie Anning wrote and directed Class of ’07.

“I was looking for a high-concept comedy,” she told news.com.au. “The Good Place had come out and I was really stunned by what that show could achieve in terms of being a high-concept, broad ensemble comedy for a commercial network about philosophy.

“And it’s a very esoteric and cerebral show at the same time. How the hell did they straddle that? How did they pitch it?

“I like a high-concept, I want my themes to be hanging on something bigger.”

Like The Good Place and Upload, Class of ’07 is part of a stable of shows that are unabashedly flying the flag for high laughs-per-minute ratio after years when the trend was much more about slice-of-life, almost anthropological dramedies.

“Culturally, we had come through a decade of low stakes, human-facing comedy drama. I wanted to do something bigger and bolder than that.

“Cindy Williams from Laverne and Shirley died a few weeks ago, and I remember thinking, ‘Man, that was a comedy, they were comedy actors’. She and Penny Marshall were these incredible physical actors.

“What happened was, these really interesting voice-led shows, like Girls, came along 10 years ago. And then we had this proliferation of the Millennial comedy, such as Master of None, Atlanta and Shrill. All these comedies that were a bit more slice of life. And even Better Things.

“They’re beautiful but they did turn comedies into tone poems sometimes. And I have a place for them. I love all those shows. But equally, I go back to 30 Rock, and I go back to those big comedies. I think we’re desperately craving it.”

Picture: John Platt/Amazon Prime Video

That line between what is a drama and what is a comedy is still blurred. Earlier this year, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in the US, The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White won the gong for Actor in a Comedy Series for arguably a dramatic performance while The White Lotus’s Jennifer Coolidge won Actress in a Drama Series for a largely comedic performance.

But perhaps that’s the great thing about comedy, it doesn’t have to boxed in, whether it’s a laugh-out-loud physical comedy or a “tone poem”. And the cultural specificities of an Australian high school reunion of twenty-somethings will cross borders.

Anning cited the idiosyncratic Northern Irish comedy Derry Girls as an example of a show that smashes the tired adage that comedy doesn’t travel well.

Audiences at opposite ends of the world may have more in common in what they find funny than they do with their next-door neighbour. “I like we were leaning into our Australianness because why not?”

Emily Browning and Megan Smart as former besties Zoe and Amelia. Picture: John Platt/Amazon Prime Video

Anning hasn’t been to any of her high school reunions yet, but she landed on the idea partly because it was a set-up that allowed her to create something that could be equally absurd and heartfelt.

And the apocalypse part also plays into that innate fear of what our future looks like, a melding of existential threat and a throwback to a time in your life when everything felt possible.

“These friendships in adolescence are often some of the most important relationships in your life.

“When we were pitching the show, especially to young female executives, they were nodding and going, ‘there’s a person in my life that I’ve never quite shake off, and we don’t talk anymore, or we are still best friends, but it’s complicated’.

“These are the people that shape you at the time.”

There’s a complex friendship in Anning’s life that sparked what Class of ’07 became, and that lived experience permeates and grounds the series’ emotional weight in the middle of its wacky hijinks.

That alchemy, fickle or not, fulfils Anning’s ambition to “find the big picture and the small picture and make it relatable”.

Class of ’07 is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video

Originally published as Class of ’07 creator Kacie Anning is ‘desperately craving’ laugh-out-loud comedy