Kate and I have been fans of Chris Lilley ever since Althea gave us a copy of his first series, We Can Be Heroes. So like a good half of Australia, and a fair few Brits, we've been keenly watching his latest series Angry Boys over the past couple of months. And we're a bit underwhelmed.
For those who don't know him, Lilley basically borrowed the mockumentary style of the original series of The Office but added some broader and absurdist elements as well as a certain tenderness. He's a unique talent and well worth seeing if you haven't already. But I probably wouldn't start with Angry Boys.
The problem for Kate and I is mostly with two characters who are basically ethnic stereotypes: Jen Okazaki, a Japanese woman who takes control of her teenage son's life to turn him into a skateboarding star; and S.Mouse, a juvenile and deluded black American rapper. Neither character really works, and I don't think the reasons are just because of the politics of race. Clearly, the politics of race are intertwined with the history of the entertainment industry. It wasn't so long ago that white comedians routinely trawled for laughs by wearing blackface, and Lilley must have known he was taking a risk to his reputation in trying out these characters. But I think he thought that his talents would carry him through, and that he would succeed in being both post-racial and a bit edgy. It's a high-risk strategy, and it fails for the same reason that this sort of ethnic comedy always failed: he doesn't really understand the people he's satirising.
It's telling that both characters exist in the world of celebrity. Celebrities seem so familiar to us that we think we know them and their backgrounds, when all we're really getting is surface. And surface doesn't work well for Lilley's comedy: his talent is for capturing the nuances of characters, which is why he plays various types of Australians so well. In previous series, he's tried out the minority-ethnic thing before: A Chinese-Australian biology student in "We Can Be Heroes", and a Tongan-Australian schoolkid in "Summer Heights High". Both characters work because he understands their backgrounds enough to make the portrayals convincing and give a certain poignancy to them. I think the success of those portrayals has led to some overconfidence in this series.
Both characters are intermittently amusing, and I certainly wouldn't say I was offended by either. But Lilley simply feels out of his depth. Even I can tell that S.Mouse only dimly resembles the sort of young black American he's meant to be satirising: he's just a hodgepodge of arrogance, swearing and stupidity. Jen Okazaki is marginally more successful because she's basically one of the truly vile characters that he normally does well; but far too much of the humour seems to be built around the old Engrish ranguage thing about how Japanese people can't pronounce 'r's and 'l's correctly. If the characters were better realised, I don't think Lilley wearing blackface would matter in the least. But given the history of racism and the entertainment industry, doing this sort of thing imposes a pretty high bar if you want to pull it off. Lilley doesn't clear it.
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