Skithouse

The show "Skithouse" is the funniest show ever to hit Channel Ten, after Rove Live. Its hilarious mix of sketches and just plain old stupidity leaves me on the floor in laughter! As well as a wide variety of acts, there are the regular sketches such as the Australian Fast Bowler (played by Tom Gleeson), The geeky, squeaky-voiced high school kid (Scott Brennan) and the delightful antics of the somewhat masculine-looking Fleur the ballet dancer (played hilariously by Damian Callinan) that make this show so unique. All in all, Skithouse rates at the top of my list in the comedy department!!

Welcome back to good Aussie comedy. It's about time too. Established actors give Skithouse an big edge over many past and present comedies, with all new skits not relying on derobertory comments about other people and shows.

Special mention to Simon Hall, Scott Edgar and Steven Gates also known as Tripod for the comedic songs at the end of each show. But the others should not get left out of been praise either.

Australians have always had their own brand of comedy, dating back to the days of Graham Kennedy, Bert Newton and Kingswood Country just to name a few. Then flash forward a decade or two to 1987 and we were graced with what can ultimately be described as the beginning of modern sketch comedy in Australia. I'm talking about the DGeneration of course. It was the original team on this show that was responsible for pretty much every other well known Australian sketch comedy show (Fast Forward, Late Show, Comedy Company, hell even The Panel). These shows captured Australian culture and satirised it perfectly.

Unfortunately times change. The shows eventually got cancelled (or in The Panel's case, were created) and we were left with nothing. Totally Full Frontal tried to capture the success it's predecessor had on channel seven, but it didn't work and with that there was no sketch comedy on Australian TV anymore.

So what do today's writers do? They take an original concept from an English television show (short, literal sketches) and turn it around to aim it at an Australian audience. This is the birth of Skithouse.

If sketch comedy shows were Brady sisters, Skithouse would definitely be Jan. Boring, annoying and always trying to out do Marcia (which we will refer to as The Sketch Show). I'll give you an example:

There is a guy in an office, he keeps running into a wall. Someone walks by and notices what he's doing and says, "Hey (insert name here) the door is over there."

Yeah that's top notch writing.

My only question is, why is this still on television? Have we forgotten how funny we can really be? There's only one other sketch show on and that's Comedy Inc. and while it has it's moments, it's not that much better than Skithouse.

A hint of advice to the writers: BE FUNNY! You have some talented people there (Tom Gleeson and Tripod) USE THEM!

The only reason that I watch this show is for Tripod. Now, I may be a little biased being a Tripod fan before I started watching the show. Honestly though, the rest of the cast annoy me immensely and the skits are often more cringeworthy than funny. Its only worth it to wait for the Tripod skits (that phone hold skit was priceless!) and songs at the end which are ALWAYS funny. Songs like "Stuntman", "The Xbox Song" and "I only get into stuff (just after it's finished being cool)" are way too funny to be lumped alongside such drivel as that Australian fast bowler crap. If anyone noticed on the Skithouse 'greatest hits' (the biggest joke of all!) episodes, a great majority of the skits were the ones involving Tripod.

Go Scod, Gatesy and Yon!!!

I watched a couple of episodes of this sketch series while I was residing in New Zealand for a couple of months, and I must say, I found it to be quite hilarious. The episodes consist of a series of unrelated sketches (although there often are recurring character across episodes) played by a small group of actors. The humour mostly has an absurd and/or "groaner" kind of style, frequently leading up to a punchline that will make you want to slap your forehead ("D'oh!", to put it the Homer Simpson way). I will readily admit that this may be a "love it or hate it" kind of thing. Both this structure and style of humour are somewhat reminiscent of what can be seen on several British comedy series of this type, like 'Little Britain', 'Smack the Pony', 'Dead Ringers', 'French and Saunders' and others in this rather politically incorrect league. Even though some characters bear names like the Australian Fast Bowler, the jokes are not largely Australia-specific; in order to get them, you basically need to speak English and you're there (if not, grab a subtitle).