Double the risks for comedy shows
The Age
Thursday July 23, 2009
SKETCH comedy? Hardly a risky venture. But in launching a satirical sketch comedy in the wake of The Chaser's brush with public sensitivity to cruel humour, it is important to understand the goalposts have moved once more."I think that changes all the time and I'd almost say every 10 years something happens that makes people re-evaluate what is permissible," says David McDonald, the executive producer and director of Seven's new satirical sketch series Double Take.McDonald, despite his relative youth, is an old hand at the genre, having made Nine's late-night Comedy Inc. and the SBS lifestyle show parody Life Support."With a show like Life Support, we did a lot of stuff in that show which would have been questionable in terms of taste and we were fairly rigorous with that show but whether we would be allowed to do a show like that now, I don't know," McDonald says.Double Take's co-creator, producer and head writer Rick Kalowski (The Big Bite, Comedy Inc.) says navigating the uncertain path through an audience's sensibilities was made easy because the brief from Seven was very clear. "Double Take has some very dark stuff, satirical stuff and some commercial and accessible stuff."Kalowski says they wanted Double Take to be "a good laugh but we have a strong philosophy, which is that people are generally smarter than you think, and we wanted to give them a broad range of funny stuff that didn't insult their intelligence."As for comic influences, McDonald cites the Marx Brothers, Friends and Seinfeld among his favourite comedies. Kalowski's taste is more esoteric: Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Will & Grace, Scrubs and Fawlty Towers.Double Take stars a mixture of comedians and actors, including Amanda Bishop, Robin Goldsworthy, Hollie Andrew, Guy Edmonds, Darren Weller, Helen Dallimore and "stalwart sketch comedy impersonator" Paul McCarthy.Creating a sketch comedy is, to some extent, an easy ask. Creating one that gets traction is more ambitious. Ten, for example, has launched three in the past decade - skitHOUSE, The Ronnie Johns Half-Hour and The Wedge - but none had long-term traction.Even with the venerable and much-loved Fast Forward, which made its debut on Seven 20 years ago, the first year was unsteady."If you return to the episodes themselves, not the best-of [collections], you can see them finding their way," McDonald says.Kalowski says the biggest change since the Fast Forward era is the significantly shorter attention span of audiences."There is no way an audience would sit through an hour of sketch comedy now, they will just get up from the television," he says. "So you have a half-hour but a really pacy half-hour. You'll see more segments in this show than you might see in any other half-hour sketch comedy."McDonald says Double Take can still deliver "minute-and-a-half" sketches but they are broken up into smaller segments. "You see it in drama as well, which is perhaps why a show like Mad Men is so refreshing. In that case, unlike everything else, there is no underscoring and they let the actors act."The other significant change, Kalowski says, is that competition for viewing now is much more fierce."Audiences are now more sophisticated because they consume a lot more content. There are 10-year-old kids who know the classic moments from Goodfellas and The Shining, even if they haven't seen the films."Double Take premieres today at 8.30pm on Seven.
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