Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately has been that in our everyday speech patterns how common it is for Australians when telling a joke to slip into an American accent. I credit this linguistic tick as being a result of our over-consumption of American media; there seems to be little academia discussing the psychology behind this, nor does it seem to be a conversation being had enough.
Throughout this course there does seem to be an overwhelming amount of media originating in the United States, supporting that idea that we perhaps look to American comedy as the gold standard. It’s for this reason that week 8’s topic and reading around Australian news satire was incredibly interesting to me.
There are plenty of Australian satirical news shows that have existed and are currently airing. Mad as Hell and The Weekly are among the Australian programs I enjoy watching, though the fact that that list is so short is indicative of the way I tend to mostly consume American media. This course has led me to interrogate that personal preference of mine, particularly within Higgie’s (2015) dissection of Australian news satire. The core to Australia’s comedy is the art of “taking the piss”. Unlike other Western comedic vernaculars, Australian comedy centres around the use of metaphor, juxtaposition and slang, often describing things not for what they are, but for what they aren’t (Davis 2009 p.34). What Higgies describes as a prominent part of Australian comedy is the trope of the ‘larrakin’ as a personification of the ‘Australian ideal’ (p.65). For Australian politicians to appear on satirical broadcasts, they can establish their image as the larrakin, the ‘every-man’ of the Australian public to boost their electoral success (p.66). This tool has also been seen in American media but rarely to the effect of allowing politicians to laugh at themselves, but rather to more seriously use it as another platform to explicitly promote their policies or campaign. Higgie’s observation that “[T]here has been a shift from annoyance to tolerance, from tolerance to good humour, from good humour to joking, from joking to non-satiric participation, and finally to satiric participation” (p.68) is particularly interesting to me when considering what exactly Australian satire aims to achieve. It has been an ongoing process for Australian news media to not only be viewed as a legitimate ‘5th Estate’, but as something to the standard we expect from American news satire.
Australian audience’s (and my own) tendency to consume largely American media is something we must all question and actively go against. I shouldn’t have a better understanding of American politics than my own country’s, just as I shouldn’t see American comedy as the gold standard way to be funny. Australian news is just as interesting as American and can be easily ridiculed to be just as funny as their comedic counterparts. Australian comedy is continually finding its voice and its conventions – it shouldn’t be seen as less refined than American news satire, but instead something that is growing and developing into a legitimate contributor of the media and political space.
References:
Milner Davis, J 2009, ‘”Aussie” Humour and Laughter: Joking as an Acculturating Ritual’, University of Queensland Press, pp.31-47.
Higgie, R 2015, ‘Playful politicians and serious satirists: comedic and earnest interplay in Australian political discourse’, Comedy Studies, vol. 6, no.1, pp.63-77.