Australians have a great sense of humour and love to laugh at themselves. Curiously the manifestations of this cultural truth are almost entirely absent from our literature, television and films. We do in fact love to laugh at British and American self portraits but stop short at welcoming or even producing our own. And so the conventional wisdom has developed that we can’t make comedy here. And examples prove it. Wait a minute though, what about our legendary sense of humour, our ability to shrug off the outrageous slings etc? Our wry, self deprecating, realistic sense of the world and its ironic ways? Our distrust of the self important, the puffer, the bragger, the tall poppy. Isn’t there a contradiction between these two perceptions? Well, yes. But that is in the nature of national stereotypes and myths. They don’t have to be accurate or real. Comedy on the other hand has to be both. 

Television executives will cite chapter and verse their attempts to get local comedies on the air. Pilots and even series sit on the shelf unshown, evidence of our inability to make a worthy companion to ‘Bill Cosby’ or ‘Yes Minister’. And with each new imported success comes the complaint — Why couldn’t we have done something as good as that?