My ethos as an artist is taking silly things seriously, whether it’s dogs on reality television or farts. As a social media user in 2024, I’m cognisant of the way in which my experience online is shaped by the whims of billionaire technocrats. However, I need to consume 8m images a day for me to be intellectually fulfilled, so here I am drinking the Kool-Aid and loving it.
This list is far from definitive, and I’ll probably look back on this in 18 months and cringe, but here goes:
1. Bailey J Mills’ Cordelia Cathy Weasel
Because at the age of 29, I’m quickly becoming digitally illiterate, I don’t actually use TikTok; instead I watch reposts of TikToks on Instagram, like a grown-up. Duh. Bailey J Mills is a drag queen and content creator who consistently makes me laugh no matter what she does. In the spirit of Bailey’s work, my favourite drag is trashy, cheap and deeply crass. Drag as an art form thrives in the gutter. This TikTok skit of her wearing a breast plate backwards is so stupid, but also maybe a work of genius?
2. Lindy West’s review of Sex and the City 2
Sex and the City 2 might be the worst movie of all time, but as a time capsule of late noughties Hollywood before intersectional feminism was cool, it’s a masterpiece. Lindy West’s acerbic and brutal review of the film articulates a lot of what I find so funny about SATC2:
SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human –working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it’s my job – and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car … essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.
As a spokesperson for the “gay men who own and play with Barbie dolls” community, thank you Lindy for your beautiful prose representing my people.
3. 10 Drunk Cigarettes
10 Drunk Cigarettes is a song created by Girly Girl Productions, an AI-assisted artist who released their debut album Demure this year, featuring entirely AI vocalists. Generally, I find a lot of AI-generated art very boring, but when our girl AI tackles the late-stage capitalism girlboss/drunk white girl/yass slay hunty queen/brain rot cultural phenomenon, the results are profound, as evidenced by this delicate poetry:
Seriously, I don’t need anything from a man
Actually, maybe give me some money
I don’t need money from a man, I got my own
But I want money from a man
Apparently, it’s famous on TikTok, but I wouldn’t know, I live in the real world.
4. Missladysalad
@Missladysalad (also known as Shawn Escarciga), the prolific meme creator/artist, is able to articulate the rage, frustration and irony I feel as the destructive machine of globalised technocapitalism co-opts the language and aesthetics of queer culture, which in itself is very funny. The US government is enabling missile strikes on children in Gaza, but thank god that Kamala is Brat. It’s worth exploring Missladysalad’s vast oeuvre of memes.
5. John Cage on I’ve Got a Secret in 1960
As a composer and performer of experimental music, I try to resist framing and presenting my practice in purely academic platforms. I love when experimental performance artists engage with the mainstream, when their work escapes the hallowed concert hall, the gallery or the university. I want to see Marina Abramović on America’s Got Talent, or Helmut Lachenmann on Instagram live with Kesha.
This clip of John Cage performing on the 1960 CBS television show I’ve Got a Secret feels like a core text for me; a perfect meeting point of serious and silly and a weird intersection of mass media and experimental music. Cage is so wonderfully effeminate and deeply serious, which is so camp. He’s a star.
6. Panda dogs
This story from China where Shanwei zoo tried to pass these painted dogs off as pandas is perfect. The funniest thing to me is that the dogs don’t know they are meant to be pandas. They were just living their doggy lives while the humans were claiming they were a rare breed of “panda dogs”.
7. Pam and Oscar on America’s Got Talent
I’m obsessed with musical dogs (so much so that I’m writing a PhD about the phenomenon). I especially love when canine-human musical collaborations coincide with 21st-century commercialised mass media. This clip of Oscar and his human Pam, competing on America’s Got Talent in 2018, really tickles me: the shocked look on Simon Cowell’s face when Oscar sings IN TUNE, Oscar’s little happy dance when the audience applauds, it’s all so strange and uniquely of this time. Just like the Panda Dogs, Oscar is oblivious to the farce that is the Got Talent franchise; he just loves singing with Pam. And boy can he sing.
In case you’re curious about their journey after this clip, three of the four judges say “yes” and Oscar and Pam move on to the next stage of the competition. In the subsequent “judge cut”, Oscar and Pam (performing an arrangement of Andrea Bocelli and Céline Dion’s The Prayer) were only given 10 seconds of airtime before they were “buzzed” (eliminated) by Mel B. She unkindly declares, “I just couldn’t take it any more. It was actually, like, torturing my ears a little bit.” Oscar doesn’t deserve that, Mel.
8. The Newington College co-ed protests
I have three items on this list that document real events. In many cases, the best, most absurd comedy hails from reality. No exception here, with this news report about a group of parents and alumni of exclusive Sydney private boys school Newington College protesting against the school’s decision to become co-ed. The same kinds of people decrying the influence of “woke snowflakes”, literally crying over the prospect of their children socialising with girls, is true poetic justice.
9. Joan Rivers at the Logies
“I don’t know why the fuck I’m here.” Nothing better typifies the beautifully parochial essence of Australian entertainment’s night of nights better than when the queen of TV can’t quite believe how low she’s stooped. At all costs, I want to resist the ever-present American colonisation of our media and entertainment, but Joan Rivers dressing down the Australian quorum of coked-out commercial TV rabble is comedic perfection.
10. The Onion buying Infowars
Promote the person who conceived of this brilliant move where parody news site the Onion bought Infowars, the publication formed by alt-right figurehead Alex Jones, at a bankruptcy auction. The Onion plans “to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking ‘weird internet personalities’ like Mr Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements.” I’m following this story with bated breath.
Solomon Frank is the composer and sound designer on the play Heaven, playing at Brand X in Darlinghurst, Sydney on 13 and 14 December
