Andrew Hansen explains the joke to Peter Saxon
Some might say that making jokes about a disease in the midst of a pandemic is a textbook case of “too soon.”
Then again, The Chaser have never been angels and have never feared to tread anywhere.
“There’s nothing funny about the virus. And I certainly wouldn’t be making jokes about the horrors of it all. No that that would definitely be too soon,” says The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen. “But I think there is something funny about our sort of ‘stuck at home lives’ that we’re all living at the moment.
“It’s changed topical comedy. It’s quite different because normally you rely on the story of the day. Now there is only one story, although it does have many, many elements. People are being fined but for different things. Are you allowed to go on a long jog? Are you allowed to drive and then jog? Are you allowed to jog to your car and then get in and then drive?”
Hansen who co-hosts the new podcast, The Chaser Report, with Charles Firth and Dom Knight, admits that like hundreds of thousands of others, to feeling the financial pinch of social distancing. Having hosted the ACRAs a record four years in a row with Chris Taylor, he was hoping to get another crack in 2020. “I’m just hoping there’ll be an ACRAs this year. I’m hoping there’ll be any live events this year or ever again, at this stage – whether it’s the ACRAs or anything else. I think we’d all be very, very happy to just get together and see anything at all in a theatre or a restaurant or whatever. I’ll even go to a cabaret show at this point. I’ll do anything.”
The “anything” The Chaser decided on was, The Chaser Report.
“The only thing that anybody can now do is make a podcast. There’s literally nothing else that we can do. We can’t do a live show. I was going to do a tour this year. I had to can that. You can’t film a TV show because no one’s allowed to stand in the same shot together. You can’t even make a porno because you’re just not allowed to be in the same space with someone.”
Like many other freelancers, Hansen is trying to figure out whether to apply for the governments JobSeeker or the JobKeeper allowance.
“As far as I can tell, the JobKeeper is a lot easier because it comes from the ATO. I mean the other, JobSeeker, comes from Centrelink. And as far as I can tell, Centrelink doesn’t function. Anyone who wants that is going to be in a queue for the next 10 or 20 years and they will have long since starved (to death) before somebody answers the phone.”
“This is the one podcast that you can’t trust.
The Chaser Report, released tomorrow is distributed through the Nova Entertainment partnership with aCast. “It’s going to be a sort of weekly report on all the things you don’t need to know,” Hansen enthuses, “This is the one podcast that you can’t trust. What we’re promising is: at a time when you need information that you can trust, the one thing that we can guarantee is that you can’t trust us.
“So, every week we’ll be looking at the news of the week drilling down deeper into it. I mean, there’s nothing like a podcast where you can do a nice deep dive into something like… which things are you panic buying this week? Or we can have a really good look at the worst celebrity isolation videos and pull them apart. And on a podcast, you can spend a good 10 minutes doing this whereas on a normal radio show you’re only allowed to do that 53 seconds before you have to go to an ad or a song.
“The other glorious thing about the Chaser Report is, it can be any length. So, each week you could expect a podcast anywhere between, say, 13 seconds and four hours or anything in between. I think it all depends on what we find and what we dig up in our in our bedrooms to analyse that week,” says Andrew Hansen.
Peter Saxon
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