One of my best friends and I share many inside Jokes about Chris Lilley’s Blake Oakfield Character from Angry Boys. Its not the way he says or does anything laugh out loud, its the arrogant confidence and obliviousness to how stupid he sounds all the time that just makes the segments he is in so compelling and funny. We’ve both known plenty of Blake’s and possibly been Blake’s ourselves at times which is what makes it all the more so cringe worthy and funny. Australian ‘culture’ is ripe for mockery on so many levels, there is much about our history that is so incomprehensibly dumb that you really have to laugh, otherwise the sadness of it all will overwhelm you.
Surf culture is the main unofficial ‘cool’ culture of Australia. Backpakers and tourists from overseas want to learn how to surf when they visit, its an awesome lifestyle of knowing weather patterns and tidal movements, healthy exercise and mental stimulation with the added bonus of seeing parts of the coastline that many never even know exist. There’s a territoriality that exists among experienced surfers and certain people can become the unofficial guardians of certain locations through many years of simply being there. This, coupled with the hierarchy of type of craft from Malibu, short boards, knee boards, body boards and body surfers all helps differentiate an subculture that is a fascinating and complex microcosm of Australian culture in general .
Surfing started as a backyard business and has become global and corporate, to the point where most surf brands these days are shadows of their former grass roots community lifestyle brands. This is exemplified by the sponsored surfer that Blake epitomises. Sponsored surfers participate on the world tour as brand ambassadors, no different to formula one race car drivers with their logos all over their cars and logo emblazened suits.
Blake Oakfield interrogated the fragility of Australian masculinity, his being an ex-pro surfer all the more sad in that he has nothing left in his life with which to define himself. His partner is not joking when she describes him as her oldest child, his life revolves around an increasingly shrinking network of friends and acolytes, drinking beer, playing ping pong, ‘checking the headland’ that is all too familiar for those with Blake’s or wanna be blake’s in their lives.
This type of humour is best when it is ‘punching up’, surfers have lifestyle choices that many stuck in urbanised, middle class, working to pay the bills jobs would only dream of. There’s a certain type of privilege that goes with this lifestyle that is not easily afforded to those with out the family and social networks to support them.
Its when this type of humour is used to depict people outside your social class or racial networks that what starts as a joke cannot be seen as anything other than an insult. in basic terms if you have to describe the joke, its probably not as funny as you think it is. Some of the central characters that the spin offs of this series developed into became warped caricatures of ethnicity that in the end really shows that in Australia its still difficult to discuss race in public arenas. There is something deep in the way Australia cant face the issues of race that is exemplified by ‘punching down’.
Chris Lilley’s representations of Chinese, Samoan and African American characters represents an uncomfortable aspect of Australian comedy that really needs to be explored further by the comedian. What started out as an offbeat series “We can be heroes Finding The Australian of the Year” that used his satirical fictional documentary style to create characters that were funny and relatable yet at the same time questioned the whole idea of what is an Australian and exposed the very idea of whiteness and priveledge in Australian culture. A country that still had vestiges of a ‘white Australia Policy’ written in its law until the early 1970’s.
The idea of ‘everyday’ Australians has always been comedy gold, from Norman Gunstan, through Poida to Kath and Kim among hundreds of others developed by comedians over the years, there is a sincerity in the working class representations of Australian’s by comedians that deserves more critical attention., specially in the way comedy and race are explored in the public area of popular culture.
Its interesting the way Lilley chose to portray an aboriginal person in his series. He created a character of a Chinese university student (itself a stereotypical depiction of an over achieving student with domineering parents) Ricky Wong, portraying an Aboriginal man in the first series. it’s brazen attempt at pushing things as far as they could possibly go was a genuinely funny attempt to bring ideas of race into mainstream TV culture and to look at areas of thought some didn't like it at the time and there was definatley an element of being a bit to clever for itself.
The Ricky Wong Story line involves a naive interpretation of Aboriginal culture as a meta joke about the way anything to do with Aboriginal culture is a short cut to fame in Australia. There were elements of this aspect such as where Aboriginal actor Jack Charles walks out of a performance of Indidgeridoo by Ricky Wong, astounded at the absurdity, and Wong’s obliviousness to the wrongness of his dream to be an actor in Australia by portraying an Aboriginal, that were genuinely clever and at the time a welcome comment.
Where some characters where quite funny and mocked Australian self interest and personality flaws, elements of the series and the way insults and identity politics play out ion public arenas really need to be explored further in contemporary Australian society. there were ambitious elements of Lilleys body of work that deserved the acolades and awards that he gained.
But there is an altogether different aspect of his work which has especially become problematic in an era of social media. It is in its depiction of non white characters and subsequent spin off such as Jonah from Tonga that the identity politics surrounding his representations and caricatured become grotesque, especially in the depiction of people of different racial backgrounds to his own.
The zenith of his being out of touch with contemporary experiences was when Lilley tweeted a reference to one of his more ridiculous characters S.Mouse and the song ‘Squashed Nigga” days after a court case where a jury gave a lenient sentence to a man in western Australia who had been charged with murdering an Aboriginal teenager by running him over with his car. In these days of manufactured outraged its difficult to believe that their wasn’t a malicious intention to appeal to a specific demographic in the timing of this tweet two days after the announcement.
Even in 2015 when this character of S.mouse was first revealed its pettiness was spoken of by actual american raps stars as underwhelming if not bizarre. As journalist Matt Shea best summed up in a 2011 article through actually asking American audiences who this character seemed designed to appeal to by Zilla Rocca, MC — 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers.
“ S.mouse, while funny at times, wasn’t going for the revelation of ugly racial truths through the most controversial medium available (a white guy in blackface); he was making fun of American rap stars who aren’t his colour. The rap stars he chose to lampoon (Soulja Boy, Lil’ Wayne and the year 2000 rap star who frankly doesn’t exist any more) are truly the lowest hanging fruit. He didn’t mimic Kanye West, the son of academics, Jay-Z, the most savvy and sharp businessman rap has ever seen. He didn’t punk Drake, the polished preppy child star, Diddy, a millionaire impresario of nearly 20 years, or 50 Cent, the ruthless student of Robert Greene and Forbes Magazine. He picked rappers who record dumb songs, talk like illiterates, and live up to the stereotypes of rappers my mum frowns upon: obsessed with money/hos/clothes with no real street cred and proud to be “hood” all in the same. Sadly, this is not the current state of the American Pop Rapper. He is 10 years late on his “clever” takedown. With the internet and invention of smart phones, it’s no excuse.”
So where does this need to insult come from in Lilleys work? feigning ignorance is almost a national sport in Australia, something climate change skeptics wear as a badge of honor. In Blake Oakfield he mocked the tribalism of white surf culture in a way that was genuinely interesting, by the time he developed Jonah from Tong,a an altogether different idea of tribalism was used as a prop for a character that needed a lot more cultural context to explore th3e issues that the actor was attempting to portray.
In his first depictions of the Tongan teenager Jonah and his struggles in lower working class western Sydney, their was a poignancy with his personal situation, his obvious unresolved issues of the death of his mother, his latent homosexual tendency to draw dicks on everything that he hid with an over confident hyper-masculine machismo.
But by the time full series was produced and marketed the true test of the characterization of weather a white actor could play a brown actor of another ethnicity was demonstrated. which ultimately failed was ultimately the fact that most from the communities he sought to represent found it offensive. It showed there was more laughing at his cultural experience rather than laughing with his character going through.
But the historical precedents of the mockery of Black people for being who they are go back to some of the first stage productions in Australia, and the importation of racists attitudes from America seen in more places than just the media. It is almost tragic, the way when Lilley represented his blackface to american audiences it fell so flat.
But it is also a particularly Australian history of lame interpretations of perceived american values that are probably the source material in the first case. Maybe Chris Lilley is ahead of his time, and maybe this type of comedy will develop into a uniquely Australian style of social commentary, maybe the those on the other side of the insult deserves the chance to explain themselves a bit better before the jokes and caricatures about other peoples cultures are a normal part of mainstream discourse in Australia, maybe… maybe not.
