Jaquie Brown and the in-joke vortex
It’s good to see a new series of The Jaquie Brown Diaries. Last year this was easily the best NZ comedy on air. The rise-and-fall of Jaquie Brown’s hyper-alter ego was fun to watch because of an extremely good and focused cast, despite the easy and somewhat lazy premise of satirizing Auckland’s media scene. The new series continues to deal with her epic decline*, but unfortunately by making a lot of in-jokes about Auckland radio it seems to have disappeared somewhat up its own arse.
I’ve never heard of James Coleman, and I suspect many people outside Auckland who’ve never listened to Channel Z or watched Sunrise have never heard of him either. Jaquie returns to Radio “Hautaki” to work with her crass, angry, balding nemesis, but it’s not actually funny unless you know it’s based on the past working relationship of the actors, and how are those of us outside a very small Auckland industry expected to know this – without reading about it in the magazine supplement of the Sunday Star Times?
It’s like those scenes in Family Guy when Peter Griffin will mug at the camera and recite a line from an ’80s American TV ad – it’s in the shape of a joke, it’s delivered as a joke, but because we were never exposed to the original object of reference, it’s not actually funny.
Still, Friday’s episode did made local comedy history by finally giving Josh Thomson (Welcome to Paradise’s Tongan John) something funny to do on TV. At least, I think it was him.
