Bad Boy

Some people see screwed up stuff in the world and they try to focus on the good. But other people can’t. Other people see all that fucked-up shit and just have to make fun of it. Anyone with even one single cell of humor swimming around inside his body should be thrilled that the critically acclaimed work of Chris Lilley falls into the latter category. Lilley, whom you may already know as creator and star of HBO comedy Summer Heights High, and one of Australia’s beloved contemporary comedians, will be delighting Americans again with his latest offering, Angry Boys.

Angry Boys follows in the footsteps of Summer as a mockumentary that craftily turns a group of dementedly self-centered characters in upon themselves, resulting in a masterpiece of irreverent humor that won’t just cause the viewer to chuckle but make them feel that much better about the hateful people they encounter in reality.
“HBO actually called me to say that they believed in my work and wanted to do something with me and I said that I was too busy working on a show here!” says Lilley, laughing at himself, on how he almost didn’t make the jump from Australia’s public ABC to having a show on our country’s most prestigious cable network. “I didn’t really understand what HBO was, but they were patient, thankfully, and here I am today.” It’s safe to assume that Lilley’s two Australian Logie Awards (akin to our Emmys) for Most Outstanding Talent and Most Outstanding Comedy Program are what propelled HBO to take note.

But Lilley doesn’t seem like he’d be the man behind such a mischievous brand of humor. In fact, the first thing you notice when sitting face-to-face with Lilley are his placid, deep-set eyes, bivouacked by the most innocent flower-petal eyelashes we’ve ever seen on a straight man.

Second thing you take note of is his unexpectedly polite demeanor. “Sorry I’m late; it was the subway,” he says with sincere apologies, meeting us sans publicist in the lounge of his Soho Hotel. You’d hardly expect this to be the guy whose roster of self-played characters includes Summer Heights High’s fan fave Mr. G, an ambiguously gay and narcissistic high school drama teacher; or Boys’ Japanese mom Jen Okazaki, who is such “an awful person” that “she forces her son to be gay” to get his skateboarding career some press;  and Gran, a decidedly inappropriate elderly female juvenile detention center guard. But possibly his most risky new character on Angry Boys is phony roughneck hip-hop star S.mouse  which the actor plays in full black-face.

That is not to mention the identical redneck Australian twins, Daniel and Nathan Sims, two abjectly delinquent teenagers, one of whom is deaf. Both twins have shown up in Lilley’s previous work, but this time around they needle and thread together the various recurring sketches from Angry Boys (including S.mouse, Gran and Okazaki).

With so many touchy subjects taking center stage in this, er, white boy’s work, you might expect there to be a political agenda to provide fuel to the fire, but for Lilley it’s all just about a good laugh. And in this day and age, it works because, like Stephen Colbert, Lilley’s characters are so over-the-top that audiences instinctively know whose side the writer is on. “I mean, I don’t set out to make a statement, but I think when straight guys who say homophobic things [like the twins characters] see how stupid they look, they might start to see how stupid [homophobia] really is.”

Lilly’s cross-dressing has been part of his act since the beginning. “They told me I didn’t have to play women’s roles, that they could get actual women for that but, I just thought it would be funny for me to do it,” Lilley says, adding, “It’s actually very difficult to do. The role of Gran was the hardest I’ve had to play, emotionally and physically; it’s just hard to dress like a woman in all that heat.”

If he’s nervous about Americans not understanding his culturally charged sense of humor, he harbors no signs. “I mean S.mouse is a total fake and [Okazaki] is such a terrible person that I think people here will laugh at them.” Whether you laugh—or if, for some reason if you don’t—we still think everyone will agree that Angry Boys will be one fucked-up show.

Angry Boys premieres January 1 at 10pm on HBO. Visit HBO.com/Angry-Boys for more info.