To most Australians Shane Jacobson needs no introduction. The Aussie actor has made a career out of making us laugh in great Australian comedies such as Kenny and Strange Bedfellows. Well recently Jacobson had another idea to make Australian’s smile – how about bringing back the good old-fashioned Aussie past-time of telling jokes – the way comedy greats like Maurie Fields did.
So in order to deliver the laughs Jacobson invited his comedy mates including Paul Hogan, Lehmo, Mart Fields and Jimeon to name a few to a country pub and then got them all to tell their favourite jokes… oh and he invited some musical mates like The Black Sorrows and Dan Kelly to play some tunes and then filmed it all. Now it is being released in a little film called That Is Not My Dog which has a very limited run in cinemas until this Sunday. HEAVY Mag caught up with Shane Jacobson to chat about the film.
We started off by asking Shane how he came up with the concept of the film. “The film is literally thirty joke-tellers, yarn-tellers if you will, slash mates of mine that I invited to a party and we told everybody to come as themselves,” he explains. “We said don’t bring any food, don’t bring any alcohol, I’ll supply all that – just bring your favourite jokes and yourself and that is what we did. We filmed all that and the music… and it sounds weird but the reason that we did that is because myself and Dean Murphy who directed the film and co-produced it with me we believe that joke-telling is unfortunately a dying art, so this film becomes a salute to the dying art of joke-telling.”
At the premiere Marty Fields told the audience that he has noticed that most stand-up comedians talk about their own lives rather than tell jokes these days and that is something Jacobson agrees with. “Yeah they do,” he says after pausing for a moment. “And that style of comedy doesn’t bother me because a lot of comedians in the past have told stories and weave punch lines into them but where I miss it mostly is just in the workplace, people standing around telling jokes… I mean my Dad and I actually used to have a joke of the week. We would ring each other and tell each other that… and we still do that, not every week, but we still do that when we hear a good joke. That’s getting harder though because it is almost like an ocean with no fish… the jokes just aren’t swimming out there like they used to be. So it’s not so much in the entertainment industry but it is just with the everyday Australian out there. In the past you would run into people at work or the pub and say “oh I heard a great one” and I just don’t think that is happening as much as it used to… in fact I know it’s not.”
You can hear HEAVY Mag’s full interview with Shane above.
That’s Not My Dog opens in cinemas today.
