James has asked me, as the resident Australian comic genius, to tell him a bit about the Australian comedian Andrew Denton, currently appearing on UK television screens as host of The Olympics Live and Unleashed. Rather than tell only him, I thought I'd tell all of you readers of Funny Ha Ha. He may not be trans-Atlantic, but Denton certainly is comedy.

Andrew Denton started out in Theatresports and went on to become head-writer for Sydney radio comedian Doug Mulray, but first came to national attention in a 1980s Saturday morning television show on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the government channel) called Beatbox, which quickly gave way to the more ambitious Blah Blah Blah. Blah Blah Blah was a youth-oriented anti-chat show with a rock-and-roll alternative-comedy feel; it also marked Rampaging Roy Slaven's and H G Nelson's first appearances on television - in silhouette, because they still wanted to keep their faces a mystery at the time. (UK readers may know them from their beer commercials; in Australia they are parodists of the Saturday afternoon sports-announcers par excellence, first on radio and increasingly on TV.)

It wasn't until the much-anticipated sequel to Blah Blah Blah that Denton found his archetype. Ditching the everyday clothes for a tuxedo, he hosted The Money or the Gun, a big-budget (for the ABC) talk-show with James Bond credits and linking sketches throughout, based on a particular topic each week. Today it's best-remembered for its musical interludes: each week a different band would cover 'the best song in the world,' Led Zeppelin's 'Stairway to Heaven'. Rolf Harris's version, recorded for the show, even went on to become a hit in the UK, completely stripped of all context. Denton is probably indirectly responsible for any number of comic cover-versions of rock classics that have plagued us since.

Denton bore an uncanny resemblance to Woody Allen in more ways than one: not just because of his glasses, but in the sharp intelligence behind his jokes. He was a master of the difficult art of making serious points and exploring serious issues in a comedy chat-show setting, often with lashings of 'good bad-taste'. His most memorable feat in this vein was a spontaneous interview with a blind girl in his studio audience, which led to a whole disabled-themed episode of The Money or the Gun.

In all of these early shows, Denton was notable for interviewing not 'stars' but ordinary people - exploring their unusual jobs, their unsung achievements and their everyday challenges. It was a refreshing change in an industry whose chat-shows descended en masse upon any visiting actor or musician and interviewed them to death. Denton, in fact, was doing 'reality TV' ten years before it became fashionable.

He continued this theme in his next show, Live and Sweaty, which focussed on that national obsession, sport. Again, he interviewed the less-well-known sports men and women as well as the better-known; and again, he trod that fine line between homage and taking the piss. With Sweaty he was also responsible for introducing TV audiences to Elle McFeast (Lisbeth Gorr), the boisterous interviewer who started as reporter-in-the-field and then took over the helm after Denton moved on; she has since gone on to achieve television notoriety all of her own, in particular for her light-hearted interview with infamous killer Mark 'Chopper' Read.

By now (circa 1993), Denton was the hottest star in Australian television comedy, and had done pretty much all he could do on the ABC. There were a couple more Money or the Gun specials, including one on Antarctica, but his next series took him to the high-spending world, and much bigger audiences, of commercial television. His talk-show Denton ran for two series of hour-long shows, two nights a week over a six-month run, on the Seven network in 1994 and 1995.

Denton was essential late-night viewing. The subversive style he had developed at the ABC met commercial television head-on, and the results were frequently brilliant, particularly in the first series. The show also gave Australia yet another comedy star: Amanda Keller, who had previously hidden her comic talents under a genetically-enhanced bushel as lead reporter for the gee-whiz-techno-futurism of Beyond 2000.

But over the course of months and months of commercial television, Denton became a victim of the very talk-show culture he had subverted. Seven wanted their big talk-show host to interview big stars, not ordinary folks, and by the second series there was hardly an Aussie in sight, as Denton chatted with an endless procession of American actors. There were classic moments, though: none less than when Denton interviewed Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and asked just what they thought of his treatment of 'Stairway to Heaven'. [Technical note: the creator of this page has spectacularly set the background to black without changing the type to not-black. To read the interview, either View Source or save the page as a text file.]

Denton's trademark wit never left him, but something was missing, and he knew it. He left Seven after the second series and moved to the world of breakfast radio, where he professes to be much happier.

Triple M's gain was Australia's loss, because half the country has no access to Denton's metropolitan-radio ramblings. Apart from rare sightings on Good News Week (an Australian version of Have I Got News For You) and Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals, and most recently as host of the Logies (Australia's Emmy or BAFTA awards), we don't see him on TV much these days. Which is a shame; no one has quite managed to fill his shoes.

But in the late 1990s he made something of a TV comeback, albeit behind the scenes, when his breakfast show sponsored something called The House From Hell. Denton and fellow-announcer Amanda Keller selected a handful of people, carefully chosen to be as incompatible as possible, and locked them into an ordinary house for three months under television surveillance to see who could last the longest. They would then concoct tricks and tortures to play on the House's inhabitants just to keep the black comedy rolling. Not only was it funny, it was a fascinating exercise in group psychology, and became a big hit first on radio and then on television, where each week's highlights were played out on Channel Ten.

This brilliant idea has, of course, been shamelessly stolen by American television, which has recycled it as Survivor and Big Brother. The latter is closest in format to The House From Hell, but with the comedy elements removed - which, in an odd kind of way, makes it much more disturbing.

And so Andrew Denton, comic genius from that little-known corner of the world called Australia, has indirectly influenced both the UK pop charts and the US ratings. Who says comedy isn't universal?

FunnyHaHa Gets Sky Tones

Yes, it's not just kottke.org that can get a redesign. Eat my pastel.

The changes:

• The front page now contains only the last post by Rory or myself;
• There are now archives, as well as archive links on each post;
• I've put together an About page where you can find out a little about Rory and myself, and have helpfully filtered the archive posts into Reviews and Essays.

So, there you go. I hope you like it.

[N.B. Some or all of these things may well not be working. But you expect that.]

Some of the Corpses are Missing

SOTCAA has, if not finally, at least for the forseable future, bit the dust.

A day or so ago, you stopped being able to get to it through the www.notbbc.co.uk route. Now the original mudhole.spodnet address just greets you with a depressing message of finality. Rob Seeberger, the man behind the HTML, and The Corpses have been very unforthcoming about the reasons behind the closure, but suspicion currently centres around someone powerful enough to threaten legal action against supposed infringment of copyright. Considering the Corpses gave you access to unpublished scripts (c.f. the recent debacle over Chapman's Out of the Trees script), long lost Python recordings and clips and stills from shows unlikely to be seen again, this does seem a reasonably likely explanation.

The forum survives but is currently turning into something of a eulogy. And given its isolation from the galvanising opinions of the Corpses, it's in danger of losing any momentum and reverting back to its original form as a place to discuss TV idents and broadcasting coverage.

To lose SOTCAA would be a great shame. As someone who works in the industry of comedy, it became for me a valuable place to appreciate the feelings of an intelligent audience towards the comedy that was currently out there, and to discuss, often heatedly, the state of comedy today and what the hell people were doing about it. I didn't always agree with what the Corpses and their forum-goers had to say, but in the end that's what made it so interesting. Yes, the forum was often full of people wittering pointlessly on at each other, flirting safely across the anonymous internet, arranging to meet up for drinks, or just causing trouble with childish inflammatory posts, but so is every forum I've ever visisted; and in this case, I think there were enough people who's love of and fascination with comedy had been galvanised by SOTCAA into useful discussion, and in some cases action.

Let's hope these problems are resolved. If not, then I don't doubt some dedicated forum-goer will help SOTCAA (or its bastard child) rise again.

SF Fringe review number two (or three, seeing I saw two shows last night): 'Jack the Ripper Slept Here' by Theatre Au Naturel, a two-person show starring Eve Smyth and Andy Peterson - 'not naked French people', their flyer assures us, but instead two San Franciscans. A little slow at the start, this built into a pleasantly absurd comedy set in the 'Transcontinental Sewer System' and combining optical physics, stewardesses with inflatable breasts, a man raised by underworld creatures, and juggling. It's the only show I have ever seen (or, I can safely say, will ever see) where the audience got to be both the Swedish Nobel Prize judging panel and a pack of questioning rats and alligators.

[James, now that we seem to be actually making a go of this weblog, how about instituting some permalinks and archives? This page is getting rather long. Oh, and those 'posted by' taglines look microscopic in Netscape 4.x for PC, I'm sorry to report.]

I caught my first San Francisco Fringe Festival shows tonight, and as promised here's a review. It may seem strange for an Australian in America to see the Kiwi Stand-Up Experience first when there's so much American stuff on offer, but I missed these guys during the Melbourne Comedy Festival in April and was keen to catch them this time around. Here's the review I sent in for the Fringe website.

An Australian Reviews the Kiwi Stand-Up Experience

Mark Scott and Mike Loder have appeared in over a dozen fringe festivals this year before coming to San Francisco. Their format is simple - taking turns to deliver half an hour of stand-up each - but it works well. A few of their opening night jokes, based on their touring experiences in Australia and Canada, were a little lost on the audience - apart from the Australian with Canadian in-laws laughing alone in the third row - so you may not hear the ones about curling and funnel-web spiders during the rest of their run. But they're skilled comics, knowing when to ditch a gag and move onto the next, and when they hit a good one they had the audience right behind them. A few interjections were skillfully parried in the nicest possible way; Mike and Mark were, above all else, bloody good company for an hour.

My personal highlights were Mike Loder's impression of a shark phoning an airline with suggestions for inflight safety equipment, and Mark Scott's references to the 'deadly sharks, gnashing of teeth' in Australian waters. I notice that both of these highlights involve sharks, which is not a complete representation of the show (more a representation of yours truly); for the more sensitive among us, there were also some fine gags about kittens, and the house-redecorating applications thereof. Scott's tribute song about JFK Jr. was a hit, and he even got the crowd singing along with the follow-up about Di and Dodi.

All in all, these Kiwis are well worth your time. And remember, eight of your strong American dollars are enough to feed and clothe a comedian for a week in our Antipodean part of the world, so give generously.

(Actually, that was the review I was going to send. Then I saw that all the other reader reviews were about a paragraph each, tops. So I sent in a heavily-abridged version.)

I had a quick chat with them at the end of the night and ended up telling them about San Francisco rents, which are even scarier than deadly sharks, gnashing of teeth. They'll be touring the clubs in London later this year after a spell at the Dublin Fringe, so if you're in either of those areas (or SF until 9/17) keep an eye out for them.

After the Kiwis I also went along to the Original Action Pack, an Oakland improv group. Having done a bit of Theatresports in my time, I know how fiendishly hard this can be, and they handled the challenge well, giving us jokes about the Leaning Tower of Australian Pisa (the Olympics must be weighing heavily on American minds) and a mime impersonation of bathing in cream while torturing a gerbil on a rack. Nothing earth-shattering - and thank God for that, this is San Francisco - but fun.

Ha ha, Mr Bachman, but this time the advantage is mine. Dipped into it, finished it, reviewed it.

Today I discovered that, quite by chance, Rory and I are both dipping into the same book at the moment -- Monty Python Speaks by David Morgan.

There we both are, either side of the world, indulging our eternal interest in all things Python. Perhaps comedy is more universal than I first expected.

I'm sure there's more I could draw from this coincidence, but given the late hour perhaps I'll sleep on it.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Someone claiming to be the REAL Jim Yoakum has now posted a sensible, placatory message on the SOTCAA Forum under the title Dear People of this Newsboard; although Squidgy's comments on an email supposedly received from him seems to suggest this is perhaps the work of some prankster. Either that or Yoakum is the living embodiment of Me, Myself and Irene. (Cue discussion of the merits of lampooning mental disorders in comedy.)

Don't mean to go on about this -- the last thing I want is this blog to turn into my comments on the comments of those commenting on the SOTCAA Forum. That's what the SOTCAA Forum's for. But I think it's interesting to discover whether people who control comedy actually have a sense of humour.

I'll get back to something sensible and write you some reviews of the comedy I saw at the Fringe last week. You'd like that, wouldn't you?

Fascinating developments at geek comedy site Some of the Corpses are Amusing: as part of the Archive Review section of their site, the Corpses have posted the script of Out of the Trees, a little known and rarely seen one-off comedy written by Graham Chapman, Douglas Adams and Bernard McKenna. Subsequently, Jim Yoakum, witless American literary executor of the Graham Chapman estate, has asked for its removal and as a result it is no longer there. Fair enough: Yoakum has jurisdiction over all Chapman's material on behalf of his family including, apparently, this co-written piece (though I wonder if Adams and McKenna have been consulted) and hence seems to have every right to ask for it to be removed.

Unfortunately he now seems to have got embroiled in the resultant furore on the SOTCAA forum, and has driven it to quickly degenerate into childish name calling. (I would provide a link to the relevant posts but SOTCAA has a rather horrible frame and Flash-based interface which requires you to go in through their front end. Navigate to the forum and read the Out of the Trees thread or anything with Yoakum's name in.) Yoakum really seems to be doing himself no favours by posting his abuse there and reveals himself as a man of little wit, sympathy or perspective; particularly for someone whose apparently honourable and non-financial motives for exploiting his connection to Chapman seem so dubious.

I won't launch into a personal attack on Yoakum -- nobody knows the real basis of his relationship with Chapman but Graham and Jim themselves, and seeing as one of them is dead we'got even less to go on -- but, as a writer myself, I wonder if Chapman would have really been so precious as Yoakum is when it comes to extracting every possible penny out of his work? Pay me for distributing my work in the public arena, but I won't begrudge a few comedy spods the opportunity to look at something for free in private. (And SOTCAA, for all its self-importance, does not really have enough readers to justify itself as a public site; legal definitions aside -- although of course these definitions are the ones that matter to Yoakum in his, and most Americans', ceaseless battle for the law to defend his position as the wronged 'little man'.)

There is an audience for unreleased Chapman material -- I myself have been trying to research him and am finding it difficult, particularly when the only biography available, Chapman's own A Liar's Autobiography, opens with an admission that most of it is nonsense -- yet Yoakum seems willing to hold it hostage. He may well be about to publish the script himself, and the sooner he does the better, but until then Graham Chapman's work will find itself disseminated by someone a little more public spirited.

In the end, I cannot hope to bring more than a tiny fraction of the on-going argument to you here. If you want to know the ins and outs of Jim's tedious, angry, knee-jerk reactions to the reasoned (yet, admittedly, fallible) arguments of the SOTCAA forum-goers, then I suggest you visit it. It makes great reading.