The Chaser Report - NOTORIOUS L.I.B

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Oh my god who let the politicians near a music studio.See Aidan Jones' show:https://www.comedyfestival.com.au/browse-shows/aidan-jones-chopin-s-nocturne/Watch OPTICS on ABC iview here:https://iview.abc.net.au/show/opticsCheck out more Chaser headlines here:https://www.instagram.com/chaserwar/?hl=enGive us money:https://chaser.com.au/support/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Jaser Report with Dom and Charles. It's an unusual episode of The Chaser Report, isn't it? We're both in transit. I'm going to be driving for the duration of this call. So, look, if I have an accident or something like that, this is going to make for a very good final episode from me.

Let's just put that out there, whereas you are at Melbourne Airport. Yeah, no, no, I'm at Sydney Airport. I'm heading down to Melbourne. Down to Melbourne. Oh, good as far as to keep up with your movement. Yeah, no, I came back just for one day yesterday to see the family and now heading back down for another weeks of economics, yes. Oh, that's a celebrity, you are, Char.

I know, it's very hard, especially, you know, going through public areas like the airport because you sort of get swamped. Yeah. I mean, for your whole life, Charles, you've gone through any public areas, people who just shouted, wanker at you, but now there's a object. All right, let's hear a bit about your tour and I can't make it down to Melbourne this year. I'm devastated. So you can give me at least a little bit of the bite from Australia's funniest city, but also

I'm very keen to get your reaction to the Liberal Party's hip-hop track. That's the big campaign news last 24 hours because otherwise it's just housing policy. We've kind of did that. So let's take a quick ad break and then you can give us an ad for your show. Okay. Well, that said, are there even any tickets left, Charles? Oh, look, a few. I was like it's sold out tonight I didn't even know that that's how stratospheric I am I don't

even put attention when it sells it sells out now I'm just unbearable but justifiably this time I've seen some amazing shows this year because we're at a stupid time slot we're at 5.30 in the afternoon which is terrible for punters but fantastic for us because what it means is we're finished by 630 which means you You can go and see pretty much any decent show. I'm so astonished by this, Charles. Just to recap, this show Wankanomics, it's about the absurdity of corporate life. It's a very finely take with lots of relatable things that if you work in a modern corporate environment, you'll know about.

Charles, who on earth are the people who want corporate comedy who are finished by 5.30pm? I'm surprised anyone's come. I think what happens is people use it as an excuse to get out of work early. because we have lots of, like, teams coming down from work. Like, so we get these large group bookings, and presumably it's all tax deductible because it's corporate training or something. You know, like, because if you're, if you're one of those wankers in middle management, you probably know how to dodge the tax code enough to get it off tax.

So it's probably making people money because it counts as ongoing professional training, yeah. Right. If I was near to the corporate world where I spent a little bit of time over the years, yeah, I would find that genuinely used Flint how to speak and behave. I'd just trip the satire out of it and get a valuable lesson. That's right. Although this year it's a little bit different because it's like our show is almost, we got a really nice review in Arts Hub the other day.

And it was like you'd think after three, because this is our third version of this show, rather. This is the third, we've been named after three years. Yeah, but we reinvented it by making it sort of a bit dramatic. Like, there's actually a sort of suspension of disbelief. So it's a sort of weird mix of, you know, stand up, but also with these moments of high drama where, and the audience gets really involved in the drama. Like, it's quite, it's quite, because I've never done a long-running play before.

Like, I've never acted in a long-running play. But at the end, you know, it's just these moments where they're totally emotionally involved in what's going to happen. You're going, but this is just completely untrue. And there are stuff, but they're so conditioned, Charles. Yes. It's like when you receive a company-wide email saying, you know, all-staff meeting in the board room in 30 minutes.

Yes. And you know that someone's getting sacked. Yes, yes, exactly. It's like you've managed to trigger the Pavlovian response of a firm-wide email. That's what, that's what this is. It's an all-hand meeting. And it's just discussed the recent sacking of a certain person in accounts receivable. So, yeah, that's the premise of the show.

Look, good on you for finding, particularly as someone who is, can I just say, let's just be honest about this. You have never worked in a corporate office. No, no. That's the genius. I don't even know how you've made these observations. I worked at Triple M. And I've had the interface with the ABC enough to know.

Oh, so you've got the utopia bureaucracy. Hellish levels of passive aggression and. and just sort of there's whole layers of people, I think, who literally, you know, are employed as managers. And the one thing they're not very good at is managing things. So, because my wife has a job, right? And like, it's astounding. Like, one of her, like, she's an academic, right? So she actually has real work to do. But then another whole component of her job, which takes up genuine hours in each day is to manage the people who are supposed to be managing all the affairs of the university because they're so incompetent that they don't they can't you know their job is to say

sign all the contracts and make sure the finances work and she has to as a non-professional non you know finance person she has to keep across that as well because they don't know how to do their job and that's just let's just acknowledge that when you said a short moment ago she's an academic, so she has real work to do. That is the most lefty sentence I've ever heard from you in your whole life. I know a man is working. She actually is absolutely doing real work in the real world. Anyway, point is, this whole time slot has meant that we've got to see lots of really

great show. Yeah, yeah. And the one that I'd like to sort of call out, which is very off-Broadway, he's actually just hired his own venue. He hired a terrace house in Fitzroy to put on the show, right? So you just go into this terrace house on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy and you walk upstairs and the whole idea is it's like a French salon in the 19th century and there's a grand piano in the front room and you sit around this grand piano and then he starts out and he's just literally this totally bogan stand-up comedian who makes a whole lot of very crude and sky. catologically based jokes for the first big tick from you 50 and for the first 10 or 15 minutes you're just going why is there a grand piano here although he there's a bit of a giveaway which is he's dressed as chopin

francis chopin and pretty subtle input them up so just to be clear balsh's favorite movie of all time is dumb and yeah yeah exactly yeah totally so so the thing is it's sort of it's a mixture of dumb comedy and then what he does is he's hit to stown and he starts playing very very well Chopin's nocturns number two or whatever. And then what he does over the course of the next 45 minutes is he deconstructs the music and he says, look, I've taught myself this during lockdown. And because I didn't have a teacher sort of there, I had to sort of work out what was happening musically, you know, the musicology of it myself. And he gives his own interpretation of how the, you know, the minor and the major shifts in the, you know, diminished chords and

things like that interact with each other. It's really quite interesting. And then he goes into the history of Chopin, who, you know, you think of this towering figure. Like, you think of him as the greatest piano player of all time, really. I don't know. But, but actually, even better than Richard Clayton, yeah, yeah. But the interesting thing is he, Chopin was 49 kilograms as an adult. And, and he suffered from consumption, like from tuberculosis, his entire adult life, right? Like he got tuberculosis when he was a teenager and never recovered from it and eventually died at the age of 39, right? But as a result, he wasn't this tearing figure.

He was this very scrawny little, very shy man who didn't like crowds at all and only played for very rich people in French salons. Oh, in tiny salons. In tiny salons. And so almost no one heard his music while he was alive. He was not considered in any way a towering figure in classical music until well after he died. And he then compares that to his own stand-up career about how, which is a really funny turn. Because he goes, I too have completely failed to be recognised in my own time.

But actually, you know, and he makes a good point about it, you know, it's art for art's sake. Like you do things. I was wondering, I was wondering with the comedy festival album that's going to come in. There you go. You should probably mention the name of the show and the performer if you don't like. Oh, yeah. Well, his name's Aidan Jones. I can't actually remember the name of the show, but I'm sure if you can talk Aiden Jones.

But it was just brilliant. And it was something, you know, like when I was there, there was probably 20 people in the audience, maybe 25 people in the audience. And he's going, that is absolutely, you know, five-star quality entertainment. Like just so brilliant. It's very hard to get an audience in Melbourne, at least for people who aren't charles. There's 600 plus shows on. It's crazy. But it's just like that's the brilliance of these festivals is you just get to see just genuinely interesting stuff that you'd never see anywhere else.

So good because there's no curation. It's a bit unlike the Sydney one and some of the others. Anyone can apply to be in the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Yes. And one year I'm going to go ahead. Just so it happens. That'll be hilarious. I'll give you a terrible review.

Yeah, but I mean, I guess, Charles, if only we had a comedy podcast with a bunch of listeners, and have the capacity to, you know, invite people like Aiden on to actually hear, maybe give him an audience bigger than 20. Maybe, I don't know, maybe you should put him in touch with Will Anderson or something. Yeah, yeah, we should certainly put him in touch with somebody who runs a podcast. That's a brilliant idea. Yeah. We had a producer and get to book in there.

Anyway, I'm not going to happen now. Not going to happen. That's very, very exciting. Let's take a quick break and then we can unfold the details of the Liberal Party rap. Oh, yeah, another comedy sensation. The Chaser Report, more news, less often. So Charles, people can feel free to stop listening if they don't want to hear about the campaign. But bottom line is, it's genuinely difficult to appeal to the youth, isn't it?

It's not easy at all. I mean, we now as people... Well, especially if you run policies that make youth homeless, like it's very hard to appeal to people when your thing is you will never own your own home. Well, it has been hard in the past. Yes, Charles. But the coalition have cracked it. What they've done is they've channeled it.

It's not entirely clear who they've channeled here because the cover, the sort of image associated with it on the Liberal Party SoundCloud looks a bit like Drake's album cover for Certified Loverboy with a bunch of pictures of elbow on it. But the actual rap track sounds a little bit like Kendrick Lamar. So they're straddling both sides at that feud, very impressive. Great knowledge of, I'm sure it wasn't inadvertent. I'm sure it was brilliant playing at both sets of fans. But it's such a symbol of Australian politics that you would both sides,

even a rap dispute. Like, it's so centrist and middle of the road. That's right. And so I've got a rap. And I must say they've ever performed the rap. Initially, there was some addition to AI, but it's clearly not. I don't think AI is able to actually rap like this rhythm.

I've done it. And technically speaking, the kind of flow of the rap is very impressive. accomplishment. The lyrics people can make their own judgment off. Do you think that Peter Dutton is going to win the election with the rap track whose refrain is Albo got a go? Yeah, I think this is going to be the moment where everyone went, you know, things were heading in Albo's favour. It was going to be, you know, like Dutton was on the nose, there was no way back. And then, you know, and it'll be boom that he released that album or that song and everything changed. And I think it's going to change Australian politics forever.

Because now... Let's have a quick listen. Let's have a little quick listen to some of it. Here it is the apparently official Liberal Party rap. As you can see, Charles laser focused on the cost of living. And I must say, it did sound as though the coalition didn't spend a lot of money on that. So they've really... I think, yeah, exactly. It's cost of living. It's, well, it's just cost of living, really, isn't it? But the whole thing is, Dom, this is going to be, this is going to mean that from now on Australian elections are decided on a rap battle basis.

Yeah, which is very good in Hamilton, right? We see in Hamilton and Keating in the musical, which we point out used it first, the policy rap battle. They had Fuson versus Keating. Yes. And Jefferson versus Hamilton. I mean, that's it. Why is that not in Parliament? People would change in question time, Charles, if it was a rap battle. I don't know. Personally, I actually think it should be a classical piano battle.

Oh, yes. Get Ada. Yeah, get Aiden. And instead be about, you know, it's Chopin versus Beethoven, but, you know, the modern version of it. Lockela, I challenge you to cut up two dueling piano sonatas now. Yeah, that's right. Inspired by, well, okay, the best.

the best housing policy expressed in the form of jewelling pianos for Charles. Because if Labor is re-elected on the 3rd of May, we'll make it possible to buy your first home with a deposit of just 5%. I will be a Prime Minister who restores the dream of home ownership. We'll also build 100,000 new homes just for first home buyers. A coalition government will allow you to deduct interest payments on the first $650,000 of a mortgage engaged your taxable income. See, that's perfect. There you go.

Let's make them work a bit. All right. Look, I'm at work. Your plan's about to board, I know. It's been excellent catching up. Charles has been even more excellent catching up, not in person. Let's do this again. Yeah, yeah.

Are we part of the Iconicless network? Catch you tomorrow. If I challenge you to release a rap in response, Charles, yeah. Do you have it in you? Yeah, absolutely. Am I allowed to say the, Am I allowed to say the N-word?

Because it's a wrap? No. Negative gearing. Negative gearing.