GRAHAM KENNEDY. Born in Melbourne, Australia, 15 February 1934. Educated at Caulfield Central School and Melbourne High School. News runner for ABC Radio Australia; worked at radio station 3UZ, in the recorded music library and as panel operator for radio personality Nicky (Cliff Nicholls), 1951-57; moved to television, working for GTV Channel 9, 1957-69 and 1972-74; popular host of GTV9's In Melbourne Tonight; briefly returned to radio in 1961; briefly hosted GTV9's The Tonight Show, 1973; film career as a character actor; worked for Ten network, 1977-79; host of the Australian version of Blankety Blanks, 1977-81; occasional TV appearances from 1981; host, Funniest Home Videos from 1990. Recipient: several Logie Awards, two Penguin Awards. Address: c/o James Laurie Management Pty Ltd., 39 Waterloo Street, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010, Australia.

TELEVISION

1957-69 In Melbourne Tonight
1973     The Tonight Show
1977-81 Blankety Blanks
1988-89 Graham Kennedy: Coast to Coast
1990     Graham Kennedy's Funniest Home Videos

FILMS

They're a Weird Mob, 1968; The Odd, Angry Shot, 1978; The Club, 1980; The Return of Captain Invincible, 1982; The Killing Fields, 1983; Stanley, 1983; Travelling North, 1987.

PUBLICATION

"Foreword." In Parsons, Fred, editor. A Man Called Mo. Melbourne, Australia: Heinemann, 1973.

In 1956, just in time for the Melbourne Olympics, Australian television began on Network Nine, destined to be the nation's most successful popular network. A year later, also on Network Nine, the long-running variety show, In Melbourne Tonight, also began and soon became immensely popular. So too did the host of the show, Graham Kennedy, who became that classic icon, a household word. He was the king of comedy, the recognised successor to Australia's previous comic king and lord of misrule, Roy Rene (Mo), whose stage had been vaudeville and radio from the 1920s to the late 1940s. With In Melbourne Tonight Kennedy brought to and adapted for television Australia's rich history of very risqué music hall, vaudeville, and variety. In Melbourne Tonight included musical acts, game segments, burlesques of ads, and sketches, including "The Wilsons." In this segment, perhaps reminiscent of The Honeymooners skit on early 1950s American television, Graham played a dirty old man, married to his Joyce, carnivalising marriage as comic disaster.

After some 15 years of In Melbourne Tonight, Kennedy's TV shows and appearances became more occasional. In the middle 1970s he was host of Blankety Blanks, a variety quiz show that parodied other quiz shows. On Blankety Blanks contestants would be asked to provide a reply which matched the responses offered by a panel of celebrities; there was no "true" answer, only answers that matched, as Kennedy would occasionally remind viewers amidst the mayhem and clowning. The program tended to go sideways into nonsense and fooling, rather than go straight ahead as in a quiz "race". In the latter 1980s Kennedy was host of Graham Kennedy Coast to Coast, an innovative late night program (10:30 to 11:30 P.M.) that mixed news, accompanied by its conventions of seriousness and frequent urgency, with comic traditions drawn from centuries of carnival and vaudeville, a hybridising of genres usually considered incompatible.

Kennedy's humour was saturated with self-reflexivity. On Blankety-Blanks he insulted the producer, chided the crew, complained about the format of the show, and chaffed with the audience. He made jokes about the props he had to use, or the young lad called Peter behind the set whose task was to pull something. He was addressed by Kennedy as Peter, the Phantom Puller, and frequently instructed to, "Pull it, Peter". On Graham Kennedy Coast to Coast he continued to make comedy out of self-reflexivity. At various times he showed how he could beep out words with a device on the desk in front of him. He demonstrated the cue system, and revealed the cue words themselves. He discussed his smoking problem, announcing that he was a chain smoker, and though he wasn't supposed to puff on it in front of viewers, he held a lighted cigarette just below his desk. He presented ads, making fun of the product, revealing how much the station received for them. He showed a tiny new camera, and what it could do, and invited the audience to ring in with suggestions for how he should use it. Every night he read out telephone calls resulting from the previous night's show, some registering their disgust with his extremely "crude"--grotesque bodily--jokes.

Everything--the studio, the situation of sitting in front of cameras and dealing with a producer, the off-screen personalities of his straight men (Ken Sutcliffe, a sports compere, then John Mangos, back from the United States where he'd been an overseas reporter for Network Nine)--served as grist for Kennedy's comedy mill.

As with professional clowns from early modern Europe through pantomime, music hall, vaudeville, to Hollywood, Kennedy presented his face and body as grotesque, highlighting his protruding eyes, open gaping mouth, and long wandering tongue. His comedy was indeed risqué, calling on every aspect of the body to bring down solemnity or pomposity or pretension; his references to any and every orifice and protuberance were often such that one laughed and cried out at home, "that's disgusting". His relationship with his audience was, again as with clowns of old, competitive and interactive, particularly in the segments when he read out and responded to phone calls. To one viewer, who must have been demanding them, Kennedy commented, "There are no limits, love, there are no limits." It is the credo of the clown through the ages, the uttering of what others only think, the saying of the unsayable.

When Queen Elizabeth was shown in a news item visiting Hong Kong in 1989, Kennedy remarked that for a woman her age she didn't have bad breasts, a purposely outrageously sexist comment, directed at a figure traditionally revered by Anglo-Australians. The night following the San Francisco earthquake, Kennedy and John Mangos staged a mock earthquake in the studio, with the ceiling apparently falling in on them. This piece of comic by-play was discussed in the press for some days. "Quality" papers such as the Sydney Morning Herald debated how distasteful it was. Kennedy was here calling on an aspect of carnivalesque, uncrowning the monster death with laughter. Such comedy usually remains verbal and underground, but Kennedy brought it to television.

Coast to Coast always highlighted and played with gender and gender identity and confusion. Kennedy created his TV persona as bisexual. He might make jokes of heterosexual provenance, as in expressing his desire to make love to Jana Wendt, Australian TV's highest rating current affairs and news magazine host. Or he would play up being gay. One night Ken Sutcliffe suddenly said to Graham, "Would you like to take your hand off my knee?" Jokes flowed, and Kennedy later included the performance in his final retrospective 1989 Coast to Coast program. Graham and John Mangos were also very affectionate to each other. In his last appearance on the show, Graham kissed John Mangos' hand, and said of Ken and John that "he loved them both".

Kennedy also highlighted ethnicity on Coast to Coast, particularly with Greek-Australian Mangos. With George Donikian, an Armenian-Australian reading out head-lines every half hour, and with an American-Australian listing stock exchange reports, Graham set about exploring contemporary cultural and ethnic identities in Australia. His ethnic jokes probed, provoked, teased, challenged. The jokes were uncertain, revealing his own uncertainty.

The popularity of Graham Kennedy since 1957, a popularity almost coterminous with Australian television itself, was extremely important and influential for contemporary entertainment. This comedy king gave license to many princes and lesser courts. He enabled them to explore comic self-reflexivity and direct address, the grotesque body, parody and self-parody. For if Kennedy mocked others, he just as continuously mocked himself, creating for Australian television a feature of long carnivalesque signature, comedy that destabilises every settled category and claim to truth, including its own. Such self-parody also drew on what has been remarked as a feature of (white) Australian cultural history in the last two centuries, perhaps directly influenced by Aboriginal traditions of mocking mimicry: a laconic self-ironic humour, unsettling pomposity, pretension, and authority. Kennedy belongs not only to cultural history in Australia; his quickness of wit in verbal play, double-entendre, sexual suggestion, inverted meanings, and festive abuse joins him to a long line of great comedians thrown up by popular culture across the world. What he adds to stage traditions of comedy is a mastery of the television medium itself.

-John Docker