Good comedy isn’t always comfortable.
Some of the best comedians say things that make audiences squirm. Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes is a good example. When booed over comments he made about the nature of Epstein’s death, he told the audience of Hollywood elite to “shut up, I know he’s your friend but I don’t care”.
Comedians like Gervais push boundaries, test assumptions and force us to think differently about the world around us. Sometimes they offend people and that’s often part of the point. But there is always something outside of that; a greater meaning they’re working to impart.
That’s what makes the backlash to comedian Lisa Jane Spencer’s latest social media video so unsurprising.
In the now widely slammed clip, Spencer portrays a character called “Aunty Lisa”, claiming she recently started “identifying as a black fella”. The video then descends into a series of tired stereotypes about Aboriginal people, including chanting, dancing barefoot, covering herself in white face paint and mimicking behaviours that have long been used to demean and ridicule First Nations communities. The depiction of her character sniffing petrol at the end, the clincher.
The backlash to her post was swift, with numerous viewers telling her to “take it down” and branding her a racist. Instead, she doubled down. In a post to her social channels, Spencer wrote: “I stand by the jokes. This is comedy. I make fun of everyone equally. Plenty of people loved the video. I find the welcome to country offensive”.
She also addressed criticism on social media, arguing she was simply making a “joke” and that she likes to “push boundaries”.
Despite what Spencer’s defenders will inevitably argue, this isn’t a debate about whether comedy should be allowed to offend people. As a comedy lover, I personally think it should. But it’s about whether what Spencer’s doing actually constitutes comedy.
Satire works when it says something. The best comedians use humour to expose hypocrisy, challenge prejudice or shine a light on uncomfortable truths. The shock is a vehicle for the message.
But Spencer’s skit has no message. There’s no commentary, no insight, no clever observation about race, identity or modern Australia. It’s just so, cringely basic.
Compare it to someone like Jimmy Carr.
Carr has built an entire career on saying things that make audiences groan. But beneath the provocation there’s usually a level of intelligence and self-awareness. During a recent Australian performance, he ventured into material about domestic violence, drawing the audience into uncomfortable territory before turning the spotlight onto perpetrators themselves. He made it clear that if there were men in the room abusing their partners, they were surrounded by people who opposed them. The joke wasn’t at the expense of victim-survivors. It was exposing something ugly and forcing the audience to confront it.
You don’t have to love Jimmy Carr’s comedy to understand what he’s doing and to appreciate that there’s a purpose to it.
What was the purpose of Lisa Jane Spencer’s joke? Was it a sharp comment on the rampant racism in Australia, or our shameful history of abuse toward Aboriginal people? Nope. The joke is Aboriginal people. That’s it.
Noongar-Yamatji woman, Brooke Blurton pointed out in her response to the video, that as boring and lazy as this content is, it isn’t harmless. It reinforces stereotypes that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have spent generations fighting against. It’s exhausting to see, and even more exhausting to watch it being defended under the banner of “free speech” or “just having a laugh”.
Humour can absolutely tackle race. In fact, some of Australia’s best Indigenous comedians have done exactly that, using comedy to dismantle prejudice and expose the absurdity of racism itself. But that’s not what’s happening here.
And perhaps the most telling thing about the whole saga is that almost nobody is talking about the quality of the joke itself. Even defenders of Spencer aren’t praising her potent wit.
Because for all the outrage it has generated, the skit isn’t sharp or clever. It’s just racism. Trying her hand at something else, (perhaps a campaign manager for One Nation?), might be the better option at this point.