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Look at television, radio, open mic nights, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival line-up: there is no shortage of straight white men doing comedy. Yes, there are a lot more non-straight, non-white people also doing comedy now, and that is a great thing. There are only a couple of reasons you would have a problem with adding different voices to the mix, and none of them make you look good. But that doesn’t mean the end of straight white men making jokes. A lot of them are doing it, and doing it successfully. The difference is these men have been smart and funny enough to figure out how to stay relevant.
Daryl Somers with co-host Jacki MacDonald and Ossie Ostrich on Hey Hey It’s Saturday in 1987.
Older people often make fun of younger generations for not wanting to work hard, but nobody wants to work less hard than men like Daryl. They are angry because once upon a time they had to compete with a much smaller pool of talent, they were given opportunities to do what they wanted, and nobody ever told them no. They are furious that to keep having success, they might have to learn, adapt, or change. They simply don’t want to.
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They want to roll out the same old stale schtick they’ve been doing for 30 years, they want to say the easy thing for shock value, and they want cheap laughs for doing it. The fact that society has progressed and audiences demand more infuriates them. The fact that people from the very groups they can no longer make fun of are funnier than them, and are finally being allowed to take the stage, is infuriating to them.
If cancel culture were real, Daryl Somers, who built a career and life on the back of a show where he did and said a lot of questionable things, would not feel comfortable publicly complaining about cancel culture. If cancel culture were real, Somers would not be giving an interview in a newspaper while doing press for his new job hosting a popular show on national television.
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It has always been the audience’s job to decide what they like. If you were a doctor in 1998, you had to adapt with the system as it moved forward. You grew as there were updated processes, and you received more education. You can’t use the exact same skills and tools you had in 1998 and complain when patients in 2021 demand to see a different doctor.
Rebecca Shaw is a comedy writer. She has been on the writing teams at Tonightly with Tom Ballard, Get Krack!n, The Weekly, and Hard Quiz. She was deputy editor at SBS Comedy, and was contributing editor at Kill Your Darlings.