FriendlyJordies Cancels the Media Review
Summary: If you are a fan of Friendlyjordies and want to see him live you would have already tried to book this show or missed booking it as it sold out sucked in stooge!
5
100% NO YILMAZ STOP ASKING
Comics Lounge Melbourne, Saturday 10th April 2021
SOLD OUT SEASON
This show was set to run last year but funnily enough it was cancelled due to COVID, I talked to someone on the tram back to the city afterwards who said they had tickets for it but they got refunded and then they got an email for this run as they gave everyone who booked last year first dibs on tickets.
I have not been to that venue since actual Chopper did a show there and a group of friends from my local took the pub chef along for a night out. Quite a circus-like atmosphere as you can get choc tops and popcorn or have a parma and chips there before the show. Jordan has been playing a lot of shows around the place in leagues clubs and out of the usual inner-city venues. He is not part of the comedy festival this year and has his own team for promotions.
A lot happened with FriendlyJordies last year, the media attempted to cancel him several times and he almost caused the collapse of the NSW state government but that would be a whole other show so I won’t go into it here and he does not mention it in this show at all. It’s almost like someone high up does not appreciate him speaking truth to power and sends a warning as unsubtly as the animation of the knife being thrown into the wall with the words “YOU’RE GETTING TOO CLOSE GUMSHOE!” when you are on the right track in Where in World is Carmen Sandiego.
As a student of media studies and public relations myself I had an interest in this show already, I even have a Facebook page where I go through and find the stupidest headlines from Australia’s best gutter press the Truth Newspaper, the only newspaper that was 100% made up or they printed whatever people sent them. I will use some of the dumbest headlines that I have found to illustrate this review. They also invented clickbait as it is kind of pointless to read the rest of the story once you see the headline.
The premise behind this show is that the media is a tool used by the elites for a “guided democracy” so the same people stay in power and the status quo is maintained. To demonstrate this Jordan goes all the way back to the Han dynasty and then skips ahead to after the first world war when the science of propaganda was first used by the government to set the agenda. It turned out during the massive steel strikes it was easier to write anti-strike articles than send in strike breakers and the industry has only developed from there.
I did not agree with his lionisation of Kevin Rudd as he was always a cockhead and only cared about himself. If he actually cared about Labor he would have just quit like Gillard did when she lost the leadership and not sat on the back bench waiting to get the numbers.
The right of the Labor party in NSW screwed things up so much that not even having the worst premier in NSW ever in power was able to get them back in. Memories of Jeff Kennett being in power in Victoria are long and the LNP lost so bad they were out after one term. Even with all the lockdowns in Victoria, Dan Andrews is still in power and even had one of his quotes sampled and remixed which ended up in the Hottest 100 on JJJ in 2021. A lot of my friends watched 120 press conferences in a row where Dan Andrews answered every single question from the media and got to see how the media was trying to paint it.
Scott Morrison comes up as he was a PR hack in a former life and all his schemes have a catchy title that they even managed to rip off one of Sleaford Mods songs for one of them. Having been part of the public service for the emergency Coronavirus response I can’t really say much on that as I am still sort of around that area.
I did actually try and get into journalism back in the day in one of the most sought-after courses they had the journalism entrance test (JET) at RMIT that 4000 people would sit per year and then got through to the interview stage for only about 50 spots in the first-year course. I did not make it and ended up in a computer course at Monash designed to get you a job at a blue-chip company. I still maintained interest in the field and have been writing reviews, taking photos and making art since the 1990s.
I have had the line “no one tells me what to write” line quoted back at me by someone who works at the Age but they also said they haven’t had the money troubles since Nine took over. Kind of sucks all the actual decent writers at that paper had to go to the Australian or other places. The Age built a “state of the art” printing facility out at Tullamarine in 2004 that could only print broadsheet format (it is now an AUDI showroom). They also botched the online portion of their business as the classifieds on the weekend used to be their “rivers of gold” as it was called. I can remember the Australian’s huge IT section for jobs every Tuesday and I went up to Sydney twice for interviews from it.
I do like the line “look daddy we know a published writer” in the TV adaptation of the Stand, Stephen King’s biggest ice-burn on other writers. I can relate having once earned $24.95 from a job that cost me $24 to do.
Far from being regarded as a working-class profession these days, journalism is more for the middle class who have the right connections. They do like to whinge about their job on Twitter and FriendlyJordies gets into a lot of pointless fights on there. Journalism is not “so hard”, it is only like that if you are doing it right as people will not want to talk to you due to not playing the game.
There are some crass jokes in this at the expense of Australian media identities, he can get away with more as it is in person and people would not register complaints as much. One of the funniest parts of the show was Jordan reacting to the audience’s reaction about the Sydney joke, you never give a Melbourne audience a chance to stick the boot into their northern rival they will take it.
He actually likes winding people up and would stop and wait after some jokes where he knows he went too far just to savour the outrage. Nothing as bad as the Kim Beazley school shooting joke from his last show, but a couple of times at least.
I didn’t get to see Sandie who does the PR for Friendlyjordies this time as they kicked everyone out the back door as soon as it finished and I went and got the tram and train straight home after. I do talk to her a bit on email and in chat for the Twitch stream of the podcast each week. I swear it was like the remedial class with just Mislav and Ali there this week.
Places like Twitch are also diversifying away from just streaming games. I talked to someone who went to the show after and they said they are not on social media at all, but still watch all of Friendlyjordies videos and have been doing since the original non-political videos. It did seem like a more diverse audience this time as his reach is growing and Prawny even got a mention at the end for getting him on his show and sharing his videos.
I am aware if you have made up your mind to see Friendlyjordies live then you are already a fan as his shows sell themselves by now. He was apt to say that a lot of the younger audience is off watching YouTube on many different channels that speak directly to them these days so you can’t just go on half a dozen TV shows to get the message across.
You shouldn’t go to this show expecting a laugh-a-minute riot or his character comedy like Yilmaz or Aunty Shelly even though he does do the voices. Those sketches seem best left online and are a hook for his more serious work these days. Sooshi Mango has picked up the ethnic comedy torch these days for the second or third generation making fun of their parents and seem to be doing well off it as in “we are breaking down the ethnic barriers, we are holding a mirror up to society”.
He does quote his sources during the show but I would like to see the whole list of articles for reference reasons. I know he reads a lot of self help and has a second YouTube channel just on this sort of content but I don’t tend to watch it as much.
It is actually pretty hard to get a ticket to this show as it sells out fairly quickly when it is announced. I know Friendlyjordies does not really hang out with people from the comedy scene that much but it is not for nothing he had his show during the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and a lot of shows sold out this year. If you have the opportunity to go see this show and are prepared to have some of your values challenged then go see it.
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