Changing Demog
By Katie Horneshaw
mysometimesshitlife.blogspot.com
‘Throw another shrimp on the barbie!’ implored
Paul Hogan in 1984. With his American
audience, he was sharing a cultural myth. A
mythology that involved larrikins and akubras
and a sprawling, mustard-tinged outback. The
Australia personified by Hogan and his downto-earth, wisecracking alter-ego Mick Dundee
was the same Australia from which our comedy
industry sprouted and grew. The Australia
imagined by Banjo Patterson, Graham
Kennedy and her majesty Dame Edna was a
simple one, and a funny one at that. But it was
never real.
ethnic comedy was still considered niche,
relying heavily on self-parody and racially
based jokes. As George Kapiniaris of WOOW
puts it, ‘we took offensive stereotypes, turned
them inside out and laughed at them.’ Fast
forward to 2015 and, from Nazeem Hussain to
Anh Do, our comedy scene is as diverse as the
migrant nation we all call home.
But for many, the decision to claim the comedic
microphone was born of factors more complex
than an ancestor’s distant migration. In a
country where pop-culture is still dominated
by, as Randa Abdel-Fattah puts it, ‘white faces
hosting television programs, delivering the
news, commenting, discussing, advising’, the
reasons non-Anglo residents claim the public
In a country where nearly half the population stage are as manifold as the countries from
are migrants or the children thereof, we had to which they hail.
wait till the 80s for a bunch of unapologetically In the case of Nazeem Hussain and his takegreasy wogs to burst onto the scene and give no-prisoners satire Legally Brown, it’s about
us a look at ourselves. And from the caricatures disrupting stereotypical portrayals of Muslims.
of yore we’ve matured, evolving to boast one As Waleed Aly points out; ‘It’s more than ethnic
of the most diverse ranges of voices of any stereotyping. It’s being a consistent target
national comedy scene. From Egyptian Akmal of political opportunism.’ For many ethnic
Saleh to Matt Okine of Ghanaian descent, our minorities, comedy provides an opportunity to
comics have chipped away at Australia’s white- have their voices heard, and to reclaim often
washed representation one carefully aimed misrepresented cultural narratives. For others,
gag at time.
it’s a platform to assert political beliefs. Or, as
And we’ve come a long way since Wogs out in the case of Anh Do, a method of interpreting
of Work. The seminal Nick Giannopoulos his own unique identify, somewhere at the
and Mary Coustas production cemented wog intersection of being Vietnamese and being
humour within the Aussie vernacular, and Australian.
paved the way for Australia’s migrants to ply
their comic wares. From the Chinese of the
gold rush to Slavic refugees of the Yugoslavian
conflict, the decedent