Charlie Pickering *is* Australian Comedy

tame laughs for tame minds.

Yesterday, ABC panel-jockey Charlie Pickering bagged out Grace Tame to lolcow/wifebasher/fascist, Avi Yemini, describing Tame’s criticism of Israel as problematic. Pickering, who is set to take over ABC Drive Melbourne, stopped to chat with Yemini outside ABC Melbourne, where Yemini was hosting the Rebel News' livestream of a rally against the broadcaster’s anti-Israel bias.

“As you understand, and as Jewish Australian there is a complete misunderstanding of a lot of the words that are said and what the true meaning of them are, and a lot of people are using words and phrases that have meaning well beyond what they think they do,” Pickering said.

“I think you could argue a lot of people that jump on protest bandwagons are ignorant a lot of the time.”

This is the funniest thing Charlie Pickering has ever said or done in his 30 year career. This is peak comedy. This is peak Australian comedy. Heck, dare I say it: Charlie Pickering is Australian comedy.

Let me explain…

Australia’s industrial comedy complex revolves around the ABC’s panelopticon and MICF, both play into each other in a reciprocal feedback loop that filters out anything of interest/intrigue until it produces a ‘perfect’ Australian comedian, the sort tailor made to host said panels or do McCain’s or SportsBet ads or what have you. This was especially true of the Gen-X comedians that came up in the early 2000s, back when a successful MICF gala slot could just about set you up for life. These people (well, the men) burrowed into the ABC like ticks, and have remained there, unmoving, for close to three decades.

Australian TV comedy, like all things Australian, is usually five to ten years behind American trends, which is why the entire business model pivoted to Daily Show knock-offs around 2008. Pickering — a private school boy/former lawyer — slotted into Australia/ABC’s ideal mould for what we’ll call ‘The Class Pseud’: a harmless pontificating ultra-centrist with the non-threatening intelligence and wit of a pedant in a Guardian column’s comment section. Pickering successfully answered two questions: what if Jon Stewart wasn’t smart and Stephen Colber(t) (Report era) wasn’t funny? Australian audiences lapped the answer up, or at least the audience that matters did (ABC execs).

They wanted Australia’s Bill Maher, and they got him.

[Side note: Like Maher, Pickering has fans. I challenge those fans to point to a favourite bit, joke, or gag — anything memorable at all — from Pickering’s long career. Give it a go! Surprise me!]

pose i hit when i’m looking at old sketches where Shaun Micallef does blackface.

Pickering is a business model which many Australian comedians seek to emulate. The political satirist without politics or jokes is an understandably appealing proposition: it extracts the need for talent, imagination, or charisma (incredibly rare quantities in Australia’s comedy scene) and replaces it with a required skillset closer to that of a tide-worn pebble — smooth, pocketable, and, most importantly, easily replaced.

Next to no Australian comedians touch politics in a way that might get them in trouble. My generation of comics make Clarke and Dawe look like Sacco and Vanzetti. The easiest way to get blacklisted by the ABC is to have an intelligent and honest (see: leftist) take on the state of things, so most aspiring comedians treat political satire that goes beyond middlebrow finger-wagging like the third rail that it is.

As it has in all the arts, Israel’s perpetual Holocaust in Gaza and beyond has highlighted the dyed in the wool hacks, with next to no comedians of significance touching on it in their act, and only a handful shyly posting the odd instagram tile slideshow to their story now and again. This is understandable as it doesn’t slot easy into the popular modes of Australian standup (anecdotes and observations), not does it sit well with the deeply reactionary and craven figures who make the major decisions in the business.

What exceptions there are to this rule are the freaks and outcasts (*cough*), the more successful of these being the ones who had already spun this into their brand, just by it being in their fundamentally unmarketable nature.

The lesson being: why risk it? Do so, and you’ll never host Trip J Morning, an ABC podcast, or a panel show again in your life. If you want to be the next Charlie Pickering, act accordingly.

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[A bit of disclosure: my show BAD BOY BUCKLEY was a dadaist nightmare goof-rathole about Gaza, specifically the ABC and the arts industries response to it, and my stage personae is basically a Partridge-ised Charlie Pickering x my life ruining bipolar mania/autism. I do not advise doing a complex multimedia Wonka tunnel show that’s a satire of ABC election night coverage with a deep fake Penny Wong, Annabel Crabb, and naked Paul Keating with his old man hog out if you want to have anything resembling a profitable comedy career in this country, but my audience knows what to expect of me and they and critics love it and I’m so sorry to that 9 year old boy who came and saw Penny Wong’s head get exploded in a fountain of gore/the Bandit Heeler on Epstein Island gag etc.]

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You will go crazy waiting for Australian comedians to show something resembling courage. This doesn’t just apply to material, but to form: a reason our comedy is so stylistically tame and uninventive (exceptions prove the rule) is because this industry enforced temerity is its bedrock. True daring — actual fucking jokes, even — could make the whole edifice come toppling down, and people would much rather make awkward small talk with people they genuinely loathe in greenrooms that faff about in the rubble following genuine artistic exploration.

This is why the Pickerings thrive.

cool shirt!

Importantly, also, what a lot of the commentariat responding to Pickering don’t understand is that he is, quite simply, stupid. Being stupid is an important part of being a comedian, I believe. I am stupid. You do not think “fully animated old man Paul Keating hog” if you are smart — I accept that. The problem with the ABC’s panel processing plant is that it’s elevated a lot of morons like myself to places of presumed intelligence, which is kinda a cruel trick on them and audiences, both. If you are getting your political analysis from a comedian, you’ve already lost (sorry, please subscribe etc).

Pickering has the same affliction many comedians of his generation have (think: The Chaser), where they’ve mistaken a private education and a law degree as a marker of a higher plane of brilliance, instead of what it truly is, a skidmark denoting a higher plane of privilege privilege. Crossing these wires is, of course, how our entire media/arts/politics/other sector works in this country, so I feel there’s little point in trying to detangle it here and now. But if you keep in mind that the average Australian comedian reads books as bad as the memoirs they write, then you’ll get a clear idea of the kind of people we are dealing with.

Again: Pickering is Australian comedy. He encapsulates its nothingness like no one else. He is the Australian comedian you’d get if you fed the past 25 years of ABC comedy into an AI and asked it to come up with the perfect ‘late night satirical news recap’ host. He wants to be Charlie Brooker (‘The Yearly’ is maybe the most offensive rip-off in comedy since Carlos Mencia), but he’s closer to Charlie Bucket: a guy who lucked into the golden ticket, and outlasted the competition by being decidedly non-problematic (what’s Sam Simmons up to rn, anyway?).

It’s important to understand his Grace Tame comments as pure schtick! This is as good as the material gets when your self-seriousness is the funniest thing about you. Sincerely insert it into our violently silly times and hey, now! You’ve made your first joke, at last!