The Chaser’s Age of Terror Variety Hour

I’ve been a fan of The Chaser ever since their excellent CNNN in 2002. Their popularity (infamy?) has been steadily growing over the past few years but the APEC stunt really clinched it. In fact, I am surprised they still manage to find people who are genuinely bewildered by the Citizens’ Infringement Officer or the Surprise Spruiker.

Being a fan means I am quite familiar with most of their previous work: the newspaper, the election specials, Today Today on Triple J, Chris Taylor’s Dead Caesar and crucially for this review, I also saw their original stage show, Cirque du Chaser, at the Seymour Centre in 2005.

Why is this crucial? Because Variety Hour features two of the same segments I’ve already seen in Cirque du Chaser – Online Dating and PowerPoint: The Benefits. Just because you make a few self-referential jokes about recycling ideas from your TV show does not mean you can sneak in 20 minutes worth of old material – and I mean word for word, PowerPoint slide by PowerPoint slide, old material. Sure, it’s funny, but it was a lot funnier when I saw it the first time around. Is it unreasonable to expect 100pc new stuff when you fork out $50 a ticket? I thinks not.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I can simply say that the show is otherwise classic Chaser. This is to say, they don’t just cross the line, they drive over it with a cement truck and then set fire to it. But, I love their shtick and it was overall an entertaining, if slightly underwhelming experience. Biting social satire and undergraduate toilet humour are, after all, a strange mix, and perhaps best suited to a 30 minute TV show.