Send in the clowns

At a ‘Defund the ABC’ protest, Charlie Pickering was speaking his mind to convicted domestic violence perpetrator and Zionist Rebel News part-owner Avi Yemini. The long-time ABC personality answered a question from Yemini by complaining that the ABC had given former Australian of the Year Grace Tame a four-part podcast, calling it “problematic”.

Charlie Pickering and Australia’s legacy comedians are the perfect embodiment of the problem: overpaid, risk-averse gatekeepers who savage a four-part podcast by Grace Tame while happily gorging at the ABC trough and staying silent on genuine atrocities.

Grace Tame, a former Australian of the Year, well-known public figure, and champion for the rights of victims, is doing a limited four-part podcast on neurodivergence. The sum involved would be negligible to the man complaining to Yemini about her. Charlie Pickering, by contrast, is no stranger to large recurring paycheques from the ABC. He currently hosts The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, Drive (774 ABC Melbourne), and TGIF! (Thank God It’s Friday!) on ABC Radio. Although he is not on Karl Stefanovic money, he sits in the upper tier of on-air talent at the national broadcaster and produces some of the content he presents.

Placing himself between the wet lettuce leaves of the Australian media and reducing himself to the archetype of a generic white male Australian media comedian drone, Pickering has cruised through a prosperous career in the shallow and vacuous world of variety entertainment, comedic political takes, and talking-head fillers. He is one of a handful of unfunny TV people whose oversized head blocks out the sun on media spots. Enamoured with his own Dunning-Kruger-riddled bubble, he demonstrates the lack of awareness, humility, and talent that plagues Australian screens and airwaves in the post-Rove McManus/‘The Panel’ era of legacy entertainment.

Aside from the fact that Pickering was fluffing around at a ‘Defund the ABC’ rally outside the studio, openly and honestly having a candid chat with Avi Yemini, and throwing a newly minted fellow ABC representative under the bus is another thing entirely. The post-Rove McManus comedic landscape is a cinematic universe strewn with half-laughs, milquetoast takes, and risk-averse, money-hungry vultures. The Rove-era comedians are now senior figures in Australian media – gatekeepers of the industry, running production companies and choosing the talent. Yet YouTube and TikTok comedians are selling out large theatres. So is Grace Tame, for that matter. Charlie Pickering can’t fill a room unless it’s an ABC audience clapping along to flashing applause signs.

Like the innocuous and vapid musings of Dave O’Neil on a cushy radio program, or the continuously renewed contracts of Matt Bevan, the ABC is stacked with safe, semi-funny white dudes paying their bills with shows funded by Aunty’s allowances. Bevan has been allowed to make podcasts that square the circle on the assumption that Western power is still nicer and better than Russia. Former Murdoch stars like Patricia Karvelas, Clare Armstrong and David Speers recycle the same Samantha Maiden opinions across multiple shows while Grace Tame doing a four-part podcast series on neurodivergence is somehow “problematic”? Way to treat a new hire.

The lack of comedy is by design. A weak established independent arts scene in the country, compounded by a decade of Coalition slashing and half a decade of Labor neglect, has left new talent in the cold. While established legacy artists, musicians, and comedians stay out of revolutionary politics, up-and-coming artists who choose to challenge the status quo rarely become established. So it’s more Hughsie, Hamish Blake and Charlie Pickering, and anyone else prepared to reheat the same shit in the microwave.

Every single one of these clowns is not about cutting edge comedy. They posit for ping-pong balls bounced down from the corporate pipes above, turning their heads and waiting for the right gig on a new Channel 9 game show that will last six months, or an ABC variety show written by nihilistic Gen-Xers from inner Sydney. Dave Hughes is the richest comedian in the country with multimillion-dollar holdings that dwarf the rest of us, yet he sits with us in his dressing gown doing “mad as hell” renditions about capital gains tax. Tim Minchin got on the front foot in the prick stakes by denigrating theatre group members who wore keffiyehs on stage. Adam Hills, Andy Lee, Kitty Flanagan, Wil Anderson, Hannah Gadsby, Anh Do, and Tom Gleeson haven’t said a meaningful word about Gaza. Apart from Celeste Barber, not a single prominent Australian comedian has spoken against Israel or the Australian government’s support for it.

Charlie’s yarn with Yemini represents the shifting centre in Australia, whereby our “artists” shift with the political paradigm rather than act to shift it with their art. They prefer to meet the checkboxes that qualify them for a hosting gig on a commercial variety show instead of cutting through in a time of political and global crisis.

The United States has comedic rebel legends like George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, and Doug Stanhope. We have Greg Fleet. Bill Burr and Theo Von get millions of views challenging the genocide in Gaza, not a word out of the cushy comedians of the legacy wasteland. Tim Minchin looks like a prick, Hughsie is acting like one, and Pickering has joined him. Australia certainly doesn’t have a George Carlin. The D-Generation were not that based, the ABC-iteration of the Chaser team only occasionally strayed outside the Overton Window, and Hughesie is the richest comedian in Australia. How the fuck did we get here?

It’s not that Pickering spoke to a wife-beater shit-stirrer linked to Israel. It’s not that he called non-Jewish Australians and the majority who condemn Israel “bandwagon jumpers.” It’s that he called a little four-episode guest podcast with Grace Tame “problematic,” while he himself blocks out the sun with his over-employed status at the national broadcaster.

After the Tame comment, Pickering defended the ABC for being impartial before letting Yemini talk at him and point for 15 minutes. He lacked the conviction to rein in Yemini and looked ultimately disinterested in his purported task of facing the anti-ABC crowd outside his studio. Towards the end he was surrounded by Iranian monarchist flags, conspiracy theorists, and Zionists sour at the ABC for mentioning facts about the wars Israel is causing in West Asia. They were protesting Tame, who abhors Israel’s genocidal activity — the activity they support.

Did we ask for another ABC program slot for Charlie Pickering? Is it problematic that two liberal Zionist Jews (Raf Epstein and Charlie Pickering) are running half a day’s programming on ABC Melbourne while Israel commits war crimes on seven different fronts? Why was Tame’s position problematic again? Pickering later retracted his intentions without retracting the “problematic” bit, saying he “should have known better” and that he was “a little naïve” before insisting he was “misrepresented.”

These clowns are not rebels – they are the custodians of the establishment. Fat and overfed hacks like Hughesie and Pickering roll around in the mud and slurry of the Australian culture they have helped cultivate, more terrified of losing their next ABC contract than of staying silent and being complicit in a genocide. In the end, Charlie Pickering didn’t just embarrass himself at a Defund the ABC rally, he also perfectly embodied everything rotten about Australia’s legacy comedy scene: comfortable, captured, terminally unfunny and full of lame opinions that ridicule genuine champions of the people while kissing the boot of our masters.

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[Disclosure: Grace Tame writes for The Shot, and The Chaser previously owned The Shot]