Australia’s Dry And So Is Our Comedy

Classic Australian humour, we never take ourselves too seriously and take-the-mickey out a situation any chance we get.

There many great examples of this in our Official Selection series this year including Aunty Donna – The Album (AUS), Plonk (AUS) and Wine (AUS).

These series were created and produced within Australia, but publishing their content through YouTube and Facebook has allowed them to gather a supportive international audience.

Comedy group Aunty Donna have garnered a huge local and international following and are currently touring across the United States. Aunty Donna – The Album showcases eight ridiculous songs with equally ridiculous music videos.

When interviewing the Aunty Donna writing team always expect the unexpected. We asked Mr Samuel Rodney Lingham, one of the five writers on Aunty Donna – The Album, what inspired their series?

“The same thing that inspires all great art. Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” Lingham says.

As is always the case some challenges arose while creating the series, the greatest being “keeping back the devil”, Lingham explains.

“He offered to give us the best comedy song in exchange for our souls. As devout Christians we immediately accepted and the devil gave us the best comedy song ever which turned out to be a chicken and mushroom pie. We were going to put the delicious pie in the web series but we accidentally ate it instead.

Do not trust the devil he is a bad egg.” Lingham warns.

…Sounds legit. I’m quite convinced the devil is responsible for the song Chop-Chop in particular.

If audiences take away one thing from the series, Lingham wants it to be that the album is available for purchase.

Similarly to Aunty Donna, Plonk tends not to take itself too seriously either, with the humour revolving around the ineptitude of the TV crew.

Plonk Season 2 explores the industry in the wine regions of South Australia.

“The wine makers were all brilliant to deal with. We always wanted the series to be a sort of documentary/narrative comedy hybrid, so it was very important early on to get the support of the industry as a whole for the project,” says Nathan Earl the executive producer and director.

Earl grew up around the industry in the wine country of New South Whales.

“I was always frustrated that the types of wine programming on offer never really reflected the industry as I knew it: full of fun, eccentric passionate characters, all with very dry senses of humour, battling the elements of agriculture, science, farming and sales & marketing year in year out.”

“Plonk is sort of ‘the little show that could.’ It just keeps chugging along building up viewers across multiple platforms around the world from month to month.”

And because you can always have just another glass of wine, we are excited to be featuring another series that centres around everyones favourite pass-time.

Wine is …well about wine, and the stories of from the fabulous women who drink it. We spoke to the series co-creators and lead actresses Jess Harris and Emily Taheny.

“The series was really created by our desire to work together on something, we became new best friends and would catch up over a glass…. bottle of wine and tell each other stories, some funny, some sad but often there was a life problem to solve, we took what we where living and laughing about and made a show,” Harris and Taheny say.

“The sketch was inspired by years of working in hospitality where I [Jess] watched women deliberate and debate over whether to get a bottle of wine or not, I thought there was something funny in it,’ says Harris.

Harris and Taheny wanted to create a heightened but ultimately relatable series.

“We worked really hard on the scripts and rehearsing so that it felt really natural and an honest reflection of a conversation between two friends… We wanted our audience to share it with their friends and say let’s get a wine… which is exactly what happened,” they say.

Harris and Taheny would love to see the audience laugh at the characters and themselves.

“The tag line, ‘A bottle shared is a problem halved’ says it all, if you talk something out with your bestie, no matter how big or small, it makes everything easier – wine also helps. We love wine.”