From such traditions great comedians, such as George Wallace and the legendary "Mo" (Roy Rene), emerged before the days of television. Australia's greatest TV comedian, Graham Kennedy, in his long­-running variety program In Melbourne Tonight, adapted such vaudeville traditions for television, where they continued to thrive in specifically televisual teens. The compere of Hey Hey It's Saturday was Darryl Somers, a comedian who was perhaps the successor to Graham Kennedy on Australian television. While he may not have been so much a king of comedy, he remained a noteworthy lord of misrule. One of Kennedy's writers at In Melbourne Tonight, Ernie Car­ roll, provided another connection between Hey Hey It's Saturday and the earlier tradition. He became the producer of Hey Hey and also the arm and voice for its resident puppet figure, Ossie Ostrich, retained from the children's show version.

Hey Hey differed from 19th- and 20th-century vaudeville in not having showgirls or animal acts. It did for a period have a character called Animal, who silently wandered about the set, a walking icon of a crazy world, purely visual signifier of the Judie, of a world upside-down. The show did continue vaudeville and revue tradition in having an orchestra (a rock band) and, for a long period, a resident comedian, Jacky MacDonald. She portrayed an apparent na'if, telling sly risque jokes with wide innocent eyes.

Although Darryl Somers, with Ossie Ostrich sitting beside him, guided the show, Hey Hey was decentered comedy, dispersed through the various figures and performers, who often include the production crew. The show also contained various (changing) segments. "Media Watch" presented mistakes in TV commercials, or funny items, usually taken from the provincial press. "Red Faces" offered amateur acts. "Ad Nau­seum" invented a quiz show with questions about TV ads. "What Cheeses Me Off' was a complaints column, and "Beat It" a music quiz.

Hey Hey used all the technical and audiovisual resources of TV itself to make everyone and everything in the show part of the comedy. For example, viewers rarely saw John Blackman, but he was a regular voice off-screen, doing impersonations, being ironic and sarcastic about guest acts and cast members, or making dry jokes and performing "insult comedy." This visual "absence" was countered by the highly visual cartoon jokes flashed on the screen at any moment. When "Media Watch" speculate on possible mistakes in TV commercials, a camera might suddenly focus on a producer. Surrounded by cameras and cords, he held a microphone and said what he thought, though he would earn derision if the others thought he got it wrong. Puppet Ossie Ostrich would comment on everything dryly and ironically. The other puppet, Little Dickie (a blue head held on a stick, with a raspy voice provided by John Blackman), might suddenly rush forward and be rude about someone or something. In turn, in one show Ossie commented of Little Dickie that his stick had "terminal white ant."

The show reveled in the festive abuse that Mikhail Bakhtin has identified as a feature of carnival in early modern Europe. In a society where, he suggests, people were "usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, professions, and age," festive abuse overturned hierarchy in social relations, creating an atmosphere of equality, freedom, and familiarity-Hey Hey exactly.

In Hey Hey all was chaos and anarchy, the reverse of structured sequences guided by the straight person and chief comedian. Darryl Somers as compere was, instead, a relatively still space across which all the mad traffic of jokes, the different comic contributions and voices, traversed and clashed and commented on each other. If he maintained an ongoing program, he was never a central voice of authority, a ringmaster. His strength was in his alertness to what was going on about him as much as in his own comic contributions. Traditional stage variety entertainment thrived on familiarity and audience involvement. Similarly, Hey Hey actively drew on the vast and intimate knowledge that its audience (in the studio and at home) had of the media, of the rest of popular commercial TV. Like Monty Python's Flying Circus in the early 1970s, Hey Hey was a variety for the electronic age. The media were often the material for the comedy: parodying Lotto in "Chook Lotto," the media in "Media Watch," talent shows in "Red Faces," or testing knowledge of pop music in "Beat It."

Involvement by the studio audience was always encouraged. If, for example, a show was declared a 1960s or a Science Fiction night, Darryl and Jacky and Ossie would wear extravagant uniforms and masks. The audience would also dress up-a touch of the masks and disguises of carnival of old, taking people out of their ordinary life and circumstances. In "Red Faces," perennially one of Hey Hey' s most popular segments, the audience could override Red's gong if it liked an act.

Clearly, in Hey Hey there was an extreme self­ reflexivity; viewers saw camera people with their cameras and crew with mikes and cords going everywhere. For television culture, this built on a very long tradition of self-reflexivity in popular culture and theater. The festive abuse of Hey Hey reminded viewers that a great deal of popular culture, from carnival in early modern Europe to music hall and vaudeville in the 19th century and into the 20th, featured parody and self-parody. This was more than a way of mocking received attitudes and official wisdom. It was a philosophical mode, a cosmology, a way of questioning all claims to absolute truth-including its own. To the degree that our own "wisdom" is drawn from and dependent upon the media, Hey Hey It's Saturday suggested we should look on that knowledge with a wary eye.