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Keywords: Comedy

  • MEDIA

    Australian film industry boys club needs redressing

    • Rochelle Siemienowicz
    • 23 November 2015
    10 Comments

    The success of the Australian comedy The Dressmaker is thrilling to those watching the local film industry. There's more to cheer in the fact the film is proudly female in both story and production. We're not as bad as Hollywood, but even in Australia, there are not enough films for women, about women and by women. Since the 1970s male directors have been responsible for more than 85 per cent of the feature films made. Why does it matter? Because women are more likely to tell stories about women.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Atheist Clive James' hymn to God

    • Philip Harvey
    • 10 June 2014
    8 Comments

    Rumours of his death are greatly exaggerated, but Clive James has since 2010 made a public art of dying. It is in this intense moment of re-evaluation of life that we read his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Possibly no great poem is so immersed in the connections between our life here and now with life after death. It's striking that an avowed atheist produces the best poetry in Paradiso.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The theology of Chris Lilley

    • Michael Mullins
    • 12 May 2014
    12 Comments

    The jury is out on whether Chris Lilley's new ABC1 comedy Jonah from Tonga gives a free kick to racism and other forms of discriminatory behaviour. The prejudices in Lilley's Jonah are depictions of the wounds of Australian society, not the attempt of a far-right ideologue to promote a stratified nation based on race.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Fawlty thinking about the aftermyth of war

    • Ray Cassin
    • 29 January 2014
    15 Comments

    'Don't mention the war!' admonishes John Cleese as the hapless hotelier Basil Fawlty in the classic television comedy series Fawlty Towers. With a string of war-related anniversaries to take place over the next four years, beginning this year with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, we may soon find ourselves sharing Fawlty's sentiments.

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  • RELIGION

    Laughing at Islam

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 10 October 2013
    4 Comments

    Tax consultant turned satirist and comic Nazeem Hussain's SBS series Legally Brown does more than just poke fun. Perhaps the most effective and most difficult ways to tackle prejudice and fear is to laugh at it. Chris Kenny's objections in The Australian that Hussain's appearance on Q&A was 'highly disturbing and dangerous' and 'an apologia for terrorism' show that Hussain and his fans continue to have plenty to laugh about.

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  • RELIGION

    Politics played as holy comedy in Cambodia

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 June 2012
    5 Comments

    Meetings between holiness and politics are inherently dramatic. Think of Jesus' trial, of A'Beckett's murder, of Luther at Worms, of Romero's last sermon. These were tragedies. In Fr Pierre Ceyrac, a French Jesuit priest who died last week, politics and holiness met dramatically, but as comedy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Banning Dante's Divine Comedy is a human tragedy

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 19 March 2012
    17 Comments

    The 17th century Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi's Book of Travels describes Christians as pigs for slaughter. Yet its beautifully imagined world is open to Christian readers who can forgive the comparison. In the same way Dante has much to offer beyond derogatory depictions of gays, Jews and Muslims.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nursing home subversion

    • James McPherson
    • 16 August 2011
    9 Comments

    'You've got a wicked mind, Padre.' 'All the wickeder for seeing you.' Enter Big Nurse. Big Needle. Big Sleep. I check the stopwatch when I wake. I do not tell Big Nurse her response time is a personal best.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mixing news and comedy

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 18 March 2010
    1 Comment

    Dave Hughes' presence in the line-up is likely justified more by ratings potential than by any insights he might offer. The good will inherent to The 7pm Project's presentation makes it a positive alternative to other more lecherous, leach-like current affairs programs.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No easy answers to stressed Jewishness

    • Anthony Morris
    • 19 November 2009

    For once in the Coens’ recent comedies not everyone here is an idiot. But not being an idiot doesn’t help serious man Gopnik much, as his world continues to spiral out of control.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Coens' cynical spy spoof

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 23 October 2008
    5 Comments

    It can be hard to spot the villain in a Coen Brothers movie. The ill-fated scheme at the heart of their latest comedy is instigated by Linda, an endearingly goofy gym employee who longs to be able to afford cosmetic surgery.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Life becomes her

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 26 June 2008

    Half way through Happy-Go-Lucky, effervescent heroine Poppy encounters a homeless man under a bridge. The scene marks the emergence of a serious subtext in the upbeat film, regarding the tension between personal and social expectations about how best to live.

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