Tax-funded comedians no joke

There’s this comic who walks into a comedy festival audition and is thrown out because their set is not “respectful and kind”. Stop laughing, this is serious.

In Review, the director of the Melbourne Comedy Festival tells Rosemary Neill that this is an expectation for performers. It probably explains why the festival distanced itself from satirist Barry Humphries in 2019 when he failed the test with comments on transgender people.

As Thomas Jefferson might have said if he had a sense of humour, nations get the comedy they deserve. Niceness is now the norm in what passes for humour on Australian television, with cruel jokes confined to Coalition politicians. The humour about them is harder on social media, but the punchlines are always the same. Patriotism is racist; eating meat is wrong; and have you seen the price of real estate? Otherwise performers tell stories about their personal challenges we can all identify with, which everybody else in the world would consider problems in paradise.

If the point of comedy is to make a mockery of power, political and personal, Australia is as unfunny as you would expect from a country where the laugh track is set to hysterical for lines that are “respectful and kind”.

The US is different. As Neill reports, there is a comedic divide across the Pacific. In essence, it seems, establishment comics make fun of people in states that voted for Donald Trump twice, and comedians in those states point out the mess president Joe Biden left. It is a natural reaction from them to decades of jokes about people who live in the flyover states. That the last genuinely funny US president was Civil War leader Abraham Lincoln is not an optimistic omen.

If the state of the nation’s laughter is a guide, politically humourless Australia is the happier place to be. But after a generation of young people being taught at school and university that modern Australia is a settler society that should be ashamed of itself, our comedy self-censors.

But there is one darkly amusing line from the Melbourne Comedy Festival stage. It is short of the readies, in part because of “stagnant government funding”. There is nothing funny about the state of the nation when comedians want to be on the public payroll.