‘Unfunny, boring and utterly unrelenting,’ says the Guardian’s one-star review of Chris Lilley’s new sketch series Lunatics (Netflix). And if that’s not incentive enough, our woke critical chum goes on to declare the series ‘problematic’. That’s a weaselly way of saying ‘this triggered all my snowflake sensitivities’ but in such a way as to make it sound like a loftily objective judgment.
In truth, Lunatics is only problematic if a) you have no sense of humour and b) you’d prefer all comedy to be politically correct, inoffensive and utterly devoid of satirical edge. Sometimes, Lunatics is so cruel that it’s almost too painful to watch. But this isn’t because — yet another complaint being levelled by the wokerati — Lilley is ‘punching down’. It’s because this reclusive, perfectionist Australian writer/comic is a satirist in the Swiftian tradition: scabrous and unforgiving in his gleefully misanthropic scrutiny of the human condition.
Lilley made his name with Summer Heights High, the 2007 mockumentary set in an Australian secondary school, which introduced us to such characters (all played by Lilley) as the camp, heroically inappropriate drama teacher Mr G, Ja’mie the bitchy snob girl on exchange from a private school, and the crude disobedient Tongan student Jonah Takalua.
Jonah was the least funny of these but I was glad he was there, cheerily giving the middle finger to all those professional offence-takers who get a fit of the vapours whenever a white actor plays outside his race. But Lilley probably couldn’t get away it now, not even on Netflix. Future TV historians may well conclude that the cut-off year for that kind of caper was 2010 when Matt Lucas and David Walliams played what now seem like impossibly bad-taste stereotypical Pakistani and black characters in Come Fly With Me.
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