The Chaser Report - April Fools Day

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Happy April Fools Day! To commemorate our favourite religious holiday we talk about the pranks we've been pulling on each other around the office. Meanwhile Aleksa is cheery about the possibility of peace talks, and Lachlan cracks into a special Producer Notes mystery. Plus all the latest Chaser* headlines from the fabulous Rebecca De Unamuno! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to this April Fool's edition of The Chaser Report. I'm Charles, I'm having a joke. You're not meant to announce that it's April Falls. You meant to like fool people and then say, gotcha, it's April Falls. I'm Charles Firth. Gotcha. Oh, very good.

Sick joke. Charles, Alex, Gabby and Loughlin are here today. I'm Charles. Unfortunately, we don't have Dom. with us because he, no, he's got COVID. Oh, so he's almost good. Oh, April 4th. April 4th.

No, no, he actually genuinely does have COVID. Oh, it's such a good one, Charles. You were such a joke. Has you ever told you you'd be pretty good at professional pranking? Actually, if Dom's listening, can you just turn off your podcast just for five minutes? Just turn it off. Alex, did you do the thing? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, this is the greatest prank ever. Oh, so good. So Dom, for some reason, he's got his rat test, but he does them at work. Oh, he does, doesn't he? So whenever he leaves, I get like a little red permanent marker and just draw a little line. Oh, that's so mean. And the thing is, really mean because he's such a hypochondriac anyway.

And now he thinks he's got COVID. Wait, but how many times have you done this? Oh, no, the thing is I had to do it more than once, because like, one time he just didn't notice. You think you're doing this awesome prank And he just like, he forgets about it And he turns out to work the next day Good to know he's got our health At best front of mind

But the other thing is He can't work out what nobody else Around him has got a guy We're just like, you're just weak, Dom I think that's what it is Yeah, or you've got the Domicron version It's also hard Because he's like, oh you know

Like you have to report rat tests now It's like oh I have to report it And then we're just like Yeah, you have to Like, when do you call it quits? I assume that you're going to fake giving him a jab as well, right? Well, he's had his jab. No, no, no.

They were all prank. Yeah, but they were Alexa as well. He's not vaccinated. Why did you inject him with? Just saline solution. He loves that stuff. I think Alexa wins April. This is so mean.

It's so mean. Coming up on the show, Alex is talking about peace. Or is he. actually joking and it's all a bit crazy. No, no, there's going to be peace. I'm honest. I'm swear. And because it's a Friday, unfortunately, we've got another episode of producer notes. Yeah, I've got a little investigation for producer notes to end the week. First of all, let's go to Rebecca Dan & O, and he chose a newsroom. Chris Rock has told an audience at a comedy show that he was still processing, receiving a slap from actor Will Smith.

in what was his first response since the public smackdown at the Oscars. The comedy superstar thanked his audience for their support during this strange time and was received with a standing ovation from his fans. Australians have condemned the disrespectful booing of Scott Morrison as he attended Shane Warn's State Memorial in Melbourne. The moment has divided social media users as to whether it was appropriate to boo the nation's leader during the service, with some slamming it as disrespectful. Tennis superstar Ash Barty has donned active wear for a trip to her local shops

in one of her first public appearances since news of her shock retirement broke. Barty looked every bit the everyday Australian as she headed to the shops clad in comfortable activewear, sandals and a pair of sunglasses. April Fool's. I'm Rep. Rebecca Dayunamuno, and those are the top three headlines I copied and pasted from the Daily Mail. You heard it here first on the Chase Report. There's going to be peace. There's peace. There's going to be lots of peace. Is that a threat, ironically? No, no. There's peace talks right now. The war is going to be over. In Ukraine. No, no, no, one more at a time. I'm talking about the first one,

the war in Yemen. Oh. Come on. Come on, guys. Everyone that everyone forgot about it. Heads together. Did we forget about it? Wait, so what's the... I didn't know that Yemen was getting... invaded, am I behind the times? Yeah, I mean, look, it's been going on for seven years, so, you know, maybe it got a bit old. But, yeah, yeah, you had the Saudis who backed the previous Yemeni government, and then the Houthis came, and they were like, did a revolution or a coup, and the Saudis invaded, being like, we don't want to guys in charge of Yemen. But it's not just the Saudis, everyone, everyone had a good go, the US military contractors, but anyway, it was. It didn't also Israel's side with Saudi Arabia or something?

It wasn't there some sort of weird thing. It's wild. Everyone's with Saudi Arabia. Everyone got the gang up on. Oh, yeah. Let's get him. Over 377,000 people died. 70% of them are children under the age of five.

Holy shit. Bloody crazy. But, I mean, obviously I'm team hootie. You don't have to take sides, but personally, I love them because I'm serious about climate change. and the Houthis are the only people in the world taking concrete practical action because climate change I know if you remember last week

there was a Formula One race in Saudi Arabia and they're burning fossil fuels and skitting ties and doing all this disgusting shit and at the same time the Houthis did a little like drone attack and they blew up like a Saudi Aramco oil refinery right next the Formula One track

no other environmental groups doing this like they are on the ground blowing up oil refineries I mean, maybe their goal is an environmentalism, but I like to think it is. Yes. Wait, who is the group that killed all the five-year-olds? The Saudis.

So not your team. No, the youth. Because I would say that like... They're the five-year-olds. They're all five. Killing children is also pretty good for the environment. Oh, actually true. It's hard to balance out.

Yeah, your carbon footprint is reduced by heart. Children know more carbon in their lifetime than most four-wheel drives. Yeah. Where did we get that joke from, huh? No, it's true. Wait, so you're saying it's a, it's not that simple. You can't choose sides. So, like, Saudi's killing kids.

Well, I'm just saying if you're really into climate change. Like, surely you've got to look at both methods. No, no, no, that's a good point. It's more your thing than mine. I'll let you have your. Look, Auckland's trying to get cancelled. We can, we can agree to disagree. So I just went to a Peter Singer thing and he just drowned a baby live on stage.

It's fantastic. Well, the thing is we don't have to, we don't have to disagree for very long because there are a peace talk. There might be peace in Yemen after seven years. And what sparked the peace talks? Someone just said, you know what I reckon, peace. I'm pretty sure Alexa just stood in the middle and went, there will be peace, there will be peace.

You'll bet your bottom dollar. You know what, Charles, it's hard to say that anyone sparked it because there is a little issue with the peace talks. Is that only one side isn't going to them. So it's just the Saudis doing peace talks on their own in Saudi Arabia. Among themselves. There was an issue there. We're going to have peace talks.

And Saudi Arabia is like, we should do it in Saudi Arabia. And the Houthis are like, well, no, because usually it's in a neutral country. And they're like, no, no, we're going to do it in Saudi Arabia. Like, well, we're not coming. Which I assume kind of makes sense. Yeah, safety. Those has a home ground advantage. If you're supporting your team, you want them to have the homeland advantage.

Exactly. And it's also like, you know, Kishogi. You don't want to go into places where the Saudis are in control. Yeah, peace talks and all of a sudden there's 16 guns. faced at you. But it could still be the end of the war. Because I mean, if one country is invading the other, surely, like, a P-Soc only really has to involve one side.

They just have to say, okay, we'll stop invading. Yeah. And that's the talk, right? You know that this war directly affects the chaser. Oh, yeah? We, about seven years ago, got pulled up by all our banks and financial institutions that we use, who accused us, and they froze.

a whole lot of money, accused us of being terrorists. Oh. And it turns out that one of our directors at the time was a terrorist? Was it travelling in and out of Yemen. And they had been flagged by the CIA or State Department or something as being a potential sort of terrorist. Is that true? That's totally true.

So he was a fellow environmentalist. I think he was working for a telecommunications company. So he was flying between like mortal enemies. He's like he's flowing between Yemen and Qatar. Oh, Christ. Jesus. And Bahrain and things. And so, yeah, we had a whole thing where we had to sort of prove that he wasn't a terrorist.

How'd you prove it? Yeah. Did you just let him go? You're just like, yeah. No, that's fine. We failed miserably. All of our accounts got frozen. We just started new ones and started the company ground up.

Yeah, yeah. I've got a question about sort of funding. Because is it not true that this company had to pay Al-Qaeda? for all of their war and everything bits with subtitling Osama bin Laden. Oh, yeah, yeah, we had to pay license fees to our quota.

And that's true. Did you have to or was it voluntary? I feel like these stories are kind of coinciding a bit. Oh, no, it was totally voluntary. We just saw, you know, they deserve it. That's not going to come back on you in any way. They worked hard to put that content out there. That's probably why they flagged your mate as a terrorist.

Oh, yeah, it probably was all that funding about... They were probably like, oh, they've given a fair bit of fucking money. What it was about. I thought it was the war in Yemen that we started. No, no, you just gave a bit too much money to a war criminal. Apparently, Yemen's very nice country did. Well, it used to be. It used to be.

Yeah. Lots of really nice babies around. Well, it used to be. Oh. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. So it's Friday. So unfortunately, we've got another segment of British. I like, I like this segment.

I think it's growing on everyone. Gabby's in favour of it now. No, the thing I like about it is that it means that every single week there's one less segment that any of us have to do. That's great. I used to be really scared of it, thought Lockham was going to fire me, but it's good. Now I'm just bored. So it's fine.

Well, no, the only person who's against it is Dom to the extent where he faked having COVID to get out of coming today. But I've got a very serious investigation that we have to get to the bottom of. No pun intended. In a podcast, you put lots of. weird noises and we make lots of weird noises. However, I had fans point out in a recent episode that there was one weird noise that shouldn't have been there and we need to find out who put it there. If you listen carefully towards the end of this sound clip you might hear a

little something. It's like you have integrity if you fess up though. Yeah, I don't think I want integrity though. No, you just got to keep you just got to keep going. Like the next show you got advertised with standing evasions every night. I think that's the table. Is that a gong? Now, is that a table or is that a fart? Because I have had lots of people asking me if someone farted in the podcast. That sounded like a fart. No, it sounded like a fart.

It sounded like the door or like a chair. Wait, wait, yeah, if she's, why is she detesting so much? What the fuck, though. This is not a fraud. No, you are, I'm going to bring up something here. I hate that the moment you have a differing opinion from it's a fart, automatically all the fart gets put on you. Whoever denies it, dilded it.

That's not the fucking thing. Denies it supplies it. It's the road. But so this is the thing. It's a table. If you did it, best up now or forever hold your gas inside. But we can't really, I don't know if it's substantial enough. So I've started going through old episodes of the podcast to see if I can find more farts.

And I did actually find a few more. I dive deeper. I needed more evidence. And there was more. So this is from a war stories episode with Chaz. Have a listen. I'm going to be really polite and civil about this, but do you want to go to the hospital today?

Well, I mean, Charles, they did say that intolerance was a virtue. Oh, Jesus. Well, you can rule me out because I wasn't there. Couldn't have been Gabby because she wasn't there, which means it's between Charles and Dom right now. Right. Is Chaz particularly effluent? But I'm just trying to remember, was Chess in the room?

No, Chaz was in the room for that one. I'm blaming it on Chairs. That was, by the way, that was in. stereo. I only heard that in my right. Yeah, that's why I thought it was Gabby because she's sitting next to me. So surely, did Chaz get up at any point? Was there a lift of a cheek or? The thing about Chaz is he's very healthy. I don't think it would be chair. No, healthy people fart more than unhealthy people do. It's got to be dumb. Okay, so this is the problem is that one added a whole new suspect and it was also still a bit too subtle, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't hard proof. These

farts they're not substantial and whoever's doing it is clearly it was a real mistake to put microphones in the tears wasn't we thought we were so clever getting the inside scoop whoever's doing it is clearly hiding it in the laughs and i needed to catch them out however everyone slips up eventually i can confidently say that as of this moment queen still alive and that means we can probably that I'm having carded. Wait, wait. Oh, no. Now, here's my bet for that one. Admittedly, Charles is the only person who's been in all three,

but you can hear at the end of that clip, Alexa audibly goes, oh. No, no, no, no, no. Yes. So who did it? No, you know what, Lucky, I think it was you. It was weird. You're editing all these things.

I agree. You got a hot mic on your laptop. And also, also, I don't know, There's been a little bit of a change in the office over the past couple of weeks is that Lachlan brought in this, like, really, really acrid-smelling eucalyptus spray. Yes, it's horrible. And he just keeps spraying the room constantly. The whole room smells of eucalyptus.

Is he trying to cover for something? I resent you for pushing this onto me. But look, it's okay, because I'm actually not sure if it is any of us. I have a feeling that it might be someone else. These farts, they're all very reasonable. We needed something that was really deep from the Chaser Report vault. So I needed to find an older fart. So I went to the episode.

You got one right here, Charles. I went to the episode with the oldest fart of all. And lo and behold. And we're very lucky to be joined this afternoon by Peter Fitzsimons, who is the chair of the Australian Republican movement. Is that right? Nearly right, Charles. It's the Australian Republic movement.

To make it think from the Republican Party. Ah, right, yeah. So I'm the ARM chair, but you can call me the armchair for short. Completely unadded. That is incredible. No, every time I hear her fart noise, I hate that I laugh. Like, they're fucking funny. Farts are hilarious.

And then I'm always like, no, my human is higher brow than that. The weird thing about that one is it lasted the entire 40 minutes of that episode. We shouldn't have put the kitty litter in the studio. Stop! Whoever it is... Good job. I'm all for it, actually. But, you know, we shouldn't shame, you know, people's guest problems.

Yeah. Is that because he won another interview with Peter Fitzsimmons? That's fine, yeah. It's not an issue. Our gear is from road microphones. We're part of the ACAS Creator Network. Catch you this afternoon. Bye.

Ciao. Then.