Aunty Donna is the relative for right now
Aussie show recalls the anarchic nonsense of The Young Ones
Absurd times call for absurd comedy. How else to make sense of this senseless year? Trying to wrap your head around all the madness 2020 has fed us will only see you being swallowed up inside the mouth of that very madness. And being eaten alive is no way to live.
No, the way I see it, you’re best off shrugging your shoulders, accepting that our new reality is mucho bananas and then embracing the absurdity of our times.
To that end the new Netflix comedy Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun is the perfect show for right now. It’s an absurdist delight, a surrealist gut punch, a bloody good laugh.
I hadn’t heard of Aunty Donna until this week when Netflix emailed to tell me they had a “show I might like”. They email this every week and every week I delete without opening. You don’t know me, Netflix algorithm!
That’s not a joke. For reasons known only to herself, my partner has steadfastly refused to ever log into Netflix using her user profile. Each night she points the remote at the TV and blithely glides the pointer over the smiley green square that has her name under it to instead click on the smiley blue square that has my name under it.
This means that all the viewing data the streaming giant has harvested on me over the years and their subsequent viewing recommendations are always wildly, almost offensively, wrong. Although, not in this case. Crazy, right? But I digress. Which is something that happens a lot in this show. Digressions are the foundation of which its framework of nonsequiturs, inappropriate gaggery and randomly violent outbursts are built on. At this point it’s worth noting that Aunty Donna is not an actual aunty and no one in Aunty Donna is named Donna. Whatever relevance the name holds to the Australian comedy trio of Zachary Ruane, Mark Samual Bonanno and Broden Kelly remains a mystery to me. Maybe it’s meaningless. Because if 2020 has taught me anything it’s that nothing really matters.
The series is ostensibly a comedy
sketch show with the skits hanging around a loose narrative story. The first episode is about the boys needing to find a new flatmate after they kick out their current flattie, a foul-mouthed dishwasher.
The show reminded me a lot of the 80s British alt-comedy classic The Young Ones. That was also about young males living in a flat where comedic anarchy and nonsensical surprise reigned supreme and talking furniture was nothing out of the ordinary.
I realise I may be reading too much into this but you may remember that the ska band Madness performed their hit song House of Fun in an episode of The Young Ones. Coincidence? Who can even say anymore?
The show opens with a musical number called Everything’s a Drum which sees the trio performing the song with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of children’s entertainers like, say, The Wiggles.
“Everything’s a drum, everything’s a drum” they sing while tapping out simple rhythms on everyday objects like cups and pots.
But the wholesome vibe is quickly skewered when they assert that their genitals are a drum, bad relationships with their mums are a drum, smashing glass bottles over their heads and violently punching through walls are also all, in fact, drums.
That’s before the song breaks down into an action movie stand-off when a repeatedly struck pot doesn’t make any sound at all. “I left my wife for this,” one laments as he realises everything he believed about everything being a drum has been a lie. This directly leads to the eviction of their talking dishwasher.
Things just get more bizarre, illogical and, yes, funny from there. The rapid-fire montage of the boys interviewing potential new flatmates was ridiculously silly in the best way possible with each candidate getting increasingly and weirdly specific, like “dad at the BBQ trying to do the cool new dance moves”, “superhero who got bit by a radioactive chameleon” and “Sir Alfred Hitchcock.”
Later, Ruane changes the flat’s WiFi name to Poopoo gathering applause and plaudits from his flatties, the neighbourhood and even “Jerry Seinfeld”. This kicks off an Inception level of skits with the premise diverging into sketches within sketches before extrapolating out to ridiculous and unexpected places to eventually conclude in a print shop during Poster Week.
By now you should know whether Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun sounds like your bag or if all of this is just crazy talk.
I haven’t laughed this much in ages, so I highly recommend it. But after the events of this year, maybe I’ve finally gone off the deep end.