Why Chris Lilley deserves to be cancelled
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06.03.2018

Why Chris Lilley deserves to be cancelled

Image by Ben Timony
Words by James Di Fabrizio

An open letter to Chris Lilley.

Dear Chris Lilley,

Please don’t make another comedy show that promotes negative racial stereotypes of cultures that are not your own.

Yours Sincerely, All of Australia.

Although we can probably all relate in some way to the toxic high-school bully that was Ja’mie King, Chris Lilley does not have a good track record for portraying racially and culturally sensitive characters in his extensive body of work.

His most recent show, Lunatics, filmed for Netflix in 2018, was estimated to add $6.35 million to the local Queensland economy at the time. While Queensland’s Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk rejoiced at the dollar signs, the good news stopped there.

Why so harsh? Because unless we start to call out the type of gratuitous racism exemplified by Lilley, people will keep paying for it to be put on our TVs and laptop screens.

Case in point: In 2012 Lilley released a blackface music video for his “comedy” song ‘Squashed N****’. Lilley even went so far as to share the clip the very same day Melburnians protested the death of a 14-year-old Aboriginal boy.

Lilley’s music video featured a young black man being run over by a car.

(Editor’s note: For obvious reasons, we’re not going to embed this on our website. But you can watch it here if you feel like testing your patience). 

Briggs and Trials from Australian hip hop group A.B. Original have been very vocal about their distaste of Lilley’s frequent use of blackface, and his misappropriation of Tongan and Indigenous culture.

A couple of years later, in 2014, Lilley still hadn’t learnt his lesson. This time receiving negative attention for reviving brownface character Jonah Takalua from his Summer Heights High series, giving him his own show: Jonah From Tonga. 

The Tonga Herald published a piece in August of that year, thanking several major US civil rights associations for contacting HBO – one of the show’s production companies along with the ABC – to condemn the racist programme.

New Zealand’s Maori Television also cut the show from their scheduling.

Lilley has never had a problem offending Asian cultures either, with both his Chinese Australian character Ricky Wong in We Can Be Heroes, and overbearing Japanese mother Jen Okazaki in Angry Boys playing heavily into offensive and damaging Asian stereotypes.

Wong is a parody of an overachieving student migrant, working way too hard to please his strict, academically-minded parents while studying physics.

Okazaki is the epitome of a lazily-written stereotype, rehashing the tropes of an Asian mother who is only focused on making her child a rich star as opposed to a good person. The fake accent is horrific to say the least.

By far Lilley’s most offensive character, let’s take a look at S.Mouse. This was the character Lilley used to bring us ‘Squashed N****’.

S.Mouse is described as an “underprivileged black kid from the slums” who is later found out to have attended a rich white private school and grown up in a wealthy household.

It’s hard to even write about that particularly offensive storyline without getting angry at Lilley’s ignorant reduction of hip hop’s rich cultural, musical and social significance to the type of pastiche that could only come from a place of white privilege.

Is that really someone who should be supported on a widespread commercial level?

Now with Netflix stripping Lilley’s TV series’ We Can Be HeroesSummer Heights HighAngry Boys and Jonah From Tonga from its streaming platform as of June 2020, is that the last we will see of Lilley?

Let’s hope so because his work is just downright offensive and in bad taste. It’s a surprise his shows even got approved by the television networks in the first place, but that’s another issue in itself.

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