TOBY
HALLIGAN
BY STEPH GRAY
is going to get a reaction from
most people.
Political comedy tends to
be predominantly left wing.
What do you think of that?
Is political comedy something that comes naturally,
or is it something you have
to work towards?
It’s funny because at Political
Asylum, people kind of show
up, and they’re inevitably really
good comics and they’re like
‘oh man, I don’t know how to
write a political joke, what am
I gonna do?’ and they’re great
comics with funny insights.
Because it’s anchored in a
theme and a subject, a lot of
the component parts for a joke
are already present. When it
comes to writing more general
a certain area, you’ve gotta
come up with all of that stuff
yourself. A lot of the details in
comedy stories are inevitably
just made up, with an element of truth to them. But that
means you’ve gotta work all of
that stuff out yourself.
With political comedy, you’ve
got someone like Tony Abbott
and you know what his views
are on a particular subject and
then it’s actually very analytiing political comedy is you’ve
usually got a pretty good idea
of where most people stand
and what they’re going to
think about a particular thing
and you can play off that. You
know that with most crowds,
offering commentary on Tony
Abbott’s strange behavior; his
interactions with women, or his
weirdness with his daughters,
More educated people tend to
be left wing. Whereas people
who are right wing, often have
nomic system as it presently
stands and they don’t want it
to change very much. Or they
tend to be people who are
afraid, people who are afraid
of Asians or Muslims or gay
people or women having more
rights. They who don’t necessarily have a huge understanding of the world, or their
lives are a bit out of control, so
they might be afraid of things
that are going to change and
potentially hurt them. Even
though, in the long run, they’re
not going to have the impact
that they think they’re going to
have.
There are very few comics
who are genuinely just out
there to make people laugh. I
think almost all comics will say
that’s their primary motivation,
but I think most people would
also like to talk about things
and make people think about
things. It’s only really the pure
pub comics that seem to have