Too Much Sport Is Barely Enough: What Makes Roy And Hg Funny?

uws.edu.au Comedic duo Roy and HG simultaneously celebrate and critique the place of sport in Australian culture. Network Ten The Sochi Winter Olympics has seen the return to Australian television screens of sport parodists extraordinaire Rampaging Roy Slaven and HG Nelson. Roy and HGs Russian Revolution presents the familiar routines honed since the 1980s on radio and television, and which reached Olympian heights at the Sydney 2000 Games and The Dream with Roy and HG . At the Sydney Olympics they wittily skewered the pretentiousness, national chauvinism and commercialism that mar this most global of sport spectacles. They even managed to cause consternation among the International and Australian Olympic Committees and their commercial sponsors by creating an absurd local fauna mascot, Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat , to rival the official trio of Millie (echidna), Olly (kookaburra), and Syd (platypus), the last of which they preferred to call Dickhead. An unlikely symbol of spontaneous popular Olympic resistance to bureaucratic and commercial authority, Fatso made guerrilla on-camera appearances, including at some medal ceremonies with successful Australian athletes. Fatso embodied Roy and HGs comic technique of playing with the visual grammar and language of sport, rendering super-slow motion replays of live action in absurdist ways, and attaching curious folk labels, such as the battered sav and Chiko roll, to arcane gymnastic manoeuvres. In alternative live calls of games such as rugby leagues State of Origin during their self-inaugurated Festival of the Boot, Roy and HG also invent nicknames for players, the most renowned of which is The Brick with Eyes for the now-federal Senator-elect Glenn Lazarus. Repetition and circulation of nicknames for players (like Backdoor Benny) and for some of their practices (such as the squirrel grip to describe the practice of manhandling the genitals of opponents) provide an alternative framing of sport, substituting whimsy and wild extrapolation for the deadly earnestness of sports commentary. And when stuck for a gag, Roy and HG can always resort to making fun of neighbouring New Zealand. From The Dream with Roy and HG, 2000 Olympics. The vehicles for the performance of these feats are the stock characters that they inhabit. Roy is the know-it-all ex-sportsman prone to mythologise and re-invent his heroic past. HG is the combustible commentator always on the point of exploding into another barely comprehensible rant. These archetypes are recognisable to anyone even mildly acquainted with the Australian sports media. But they also raise the question of whether Roy and HGs humour only really works for the initiated: the people who understand and embrace the sport that is being parodied for comic effect. And yet, to laugh at and with Roy and HG it is not necessary to know or to love sport, although sometimes it helps. Roy and HGs sport-related comedy works in two main ways and plays to rather different galleries. In their coverage of the most popular sports, they are making the familiar strange and exposing its inherent silliness. When covering the football codes or prominent Olympic sports like athletics, they are working with a substantial level of audience knowledge in a specialist, media-saturated environment. Here Roy and HGs shtick is to work with what is already well-known.
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