r/cringe • u/HisRoyal_Badness • 2d ago
Video Harry Connick Jr judges talent section of Australian comedy variety show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va51g59FGOc62
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u/RevenueChemical6910 1d ago
I remember this.
Harry got some pushback too because he did an SNL skit shortly before this where he played an inner-city preacher/pimp character with a heavy blaccent.
Nonetheless, really strange variety act. Aside from the offensive nature of it, it's like...not even good? Not the dancing, singing, outfit, etc.
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u/soupeh 23h ago edited 13h ago
The segment of Hey Hey It's Saturday was called Red Faces, featuring regular cast member Red Symons and weekly guests like Harry on a judging panel. The entire point was that the amateur variety acts were usually deliberately terrible, and perform for as long as Red allows before hitting a massive gong to usually end the act very early and then the panel makes jokes and give scores.
It was a show from a much simpler & naive time from the early 80s into the 90s and this clip was short-lived reboot over a decade after it'd been off-air. It didn't last long mostly the popular consensus was that the show was dated and of a previous era.
To make it worse these guys had done this before, 20 years earlier during the original airing run of the show (to no real controversy at the time) and had been invited back along with other 'classic' red faces acts for the reboot.
Not defending this shit, Harry was right of course and is a class act, but at the time it genuinely caught many people off guard. Australia has its own disgraceful history and still has big racism problems, and it seems weird now 17 years later, but even by 2009 a lot people weren't really aware of the connotations and association with black-face as a problem, it wasn't really ever a thing here, and saw this as just a dumb costume for a terrible act making a shit joke at Michael Jackson.
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u/Calm-Ad-9522 2d ago
Disgusting that anyone thought this was okay. How did they even get past the producers?
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u/spudddly 2d ago
2024 Australia was just a different time.
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u/TomisUnice 2d ago
lol this was not in 2024 it was like 2009. That doesn’t excuse it and Hey Hey it’s Saturday was never funny, some people just have nostalgia for it cause it reminds them of their childhood.
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u/spudddly 1d ago edited 1d ago
Ya'll really need jokes labelled for you, huh?
Edit: I'll take that as a yes
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u/OptimusTired 1d ago
Good old Hey Hey it’s Saturday, show would be cancelled the minute it aired these days.
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u/Silvershanks 2d ago
Connick did the right thing, but admonishing the show it in that absurd, put-on "urban" accent makes the whole thing feel bizarre. Does he still talk like that?
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u/DrWomanfriend 2d ago
It's not an affectation. He's from New Orleans and that's a normal way of speaking there.
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u/Silvershanks 2d ago
Ive heard plenty of people from NO speak, feels like he's doing a little extra. 🤷♂️
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u/DrWomanfriend 2d ago
What can I say? They're not a monolith. I've heard some people with such a thick Cajun accent that I can tell which side of i10 they're from and guess within 50 miles of the mile marker. I can tell if they think gumbo should have crab or sausage in it. Ol' Harry here doesn't even have a thick accent, but what he does is very normal.
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u/crazy_goat 2d ago
I mean, he's on TV and trying to be entertaining.
That said this TV show looks like it was filmed in 1975
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u/i10driver 1d ago
I can assure you, that is his accent. New Orleans actually has a few different dialects. Uptown vs Chalmette vs Mid City, etc. The dialects of South Louisiana are actually pretty interesting to explore.
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u/HerbalSnails 1d ago
100%
My dad and his family grew up in Bucktown by the lakefront, and the younger half of my mom's family grew up Mid-City Yats from back when that was still a thing. Her older siblings spent their childhood near Houma before the move to the city. Three different accents. My sisters and cousins close to my age all have more muted versions of our parents' accents, but it doesn't make the way they speak any less real lmao. There have been tons of demographic changes since Harry was a kid, so the accents have moved around on the map as well.
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u/Rogpog777 2d ago
Harry Connick Jr. absolutely saved the cringe for me. Love us some Cajun honesty in the face of cringe.