Stream It Or Skip It: ‘LOL Australia’ On Amazon Prime Video, Where Rebel Wilson Presides Over A Reverse Escape Room Filled With Comedians

What if quarantining were a game show, and you could get kicked out of the show for laughing, and you and all of your competitors were among your country’s funniest citizens, and a movie star got to judge whether you won or lost? Welcome to LOL: Australia on Amazon Prime Video, hosted by Rebel Wilson.

LOL: AUSTRALIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Rebel Wilson, emerges from behind red curtains, walking onto the set. “Comedians have one job, and that’s to make an audience laugh,” Wilson declares. “So what do you do when that entire audience is made up of other comedians?”

The Gist: In real life, we’d call that an open mic. And all of the would-be comedians would be beyond terrible. But this isn’t real life. This is “reality TV.”

For American audiences, the format looks like a mash-up of Last Comic Standing, Big Brother and the old game show Make Me Laugh. In essence, it’s a game show engineered as an escape room in reverse. Take 10 stand-up comedians, put them in a room (with a closet and bathroom) together, and if they crack too wide of a smile or crack up into laughter, they’re out of the room and the competition. The “Last One Laughing” wins $100,000. Amazon Prime Video introduced the format in 2018 for the Mexican audience with LOL: Last One Laughing, hosted by Eugenio Derbez.

Wilson presides over the Australian edition, featuring “packing a punch line, comedy heavyweight” Joel Creasey, “physical phenomenon” Frank Woodley, “she’ll do anything to come out on top, fearless” Anne Edmonds, “brilliant baby-faced” Becky Lucas, “joker in the pack” Nazeem Hussain, “the super cool jolly ginger” Nick Cody, “devilishly dapper” Dilruk Jayasinha, “quick-witted and sure-footed, the smiling agile assassin” Susie Youssef, “the master of disguise” Sam Simmons, and “gunning for the title, sharp shooter” Ed Kavalee.

Amazon already has a vested interest in three of these contestants, as Woodley, Edmonds and Jayasinha all released their own Amazon Original comedy specials on the platform this spring.

The show introduces the contestants to us, and then to each other, before Wilson re-enters the room to explain the rules. She’ll watch the proceedings from a separate room on dozens of cameras. When she hits her green button, trumpet fanfare sounds and it’s game on. When she spots anyone laughing, she hits a red button and the room turns red, alarms go off, and she’ll present either a yellow card warning or a red card eviction, just like in soccer, er, football, er, Australian rules football! But wait, there’s one more card. Each contestant can hold up a Joker card, and upon doing so, compels all of the other comedians to pay attention for the next three minutes.

But each contestant gets a Joker card, too. If you hold up the card and yell Joker, all the comedians have to pay attention to you for the next three minutes.

We’re 12 minutes into the first episode before the game begins and the clock counts down from six hours. In what time remains (episodes are about a half-hour each), three red alarms go off and two Joker cards get employed, but nobody gets eliminated, perhaps because the two comedians who used their Joker cards didn’t quite take advantage of their time in the spotlight. When Wilson delivers her warnings and eliminations, though, she does show them and us the reason why onscreen via replays. And during these time-outs, all of the comedians let their guards down and freely laugh and smile.

Our Take: I let out my first belly laugh three minutes into the competition, and I wasn’t in the room. And I’m a comedy critic, so much more immune to an actual LOL than the casual comedy fan!

As the comedians themselves note, what it takes to make each other laugh is usually something entirely weirder than what it would take to make audiences laugh. That’s also how in a previous generation, stand-ups adopted The Aristocrats, a documentary film about a joke comedians would tell each other behind closed doors about a family looking to enter show business, and improvising the family’s pitch with extreme vulgarity and out-of-bounds elements to provoke a laugh from their fellow comedians. Same concept applies here. Nothing is off limits. When one comic tries to grab a paper clip off another comic’s tongue with his tongue, the conversation immediately suggests passing the clip via genitalia.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is off limits. The “c-word” bellowed as a non-sequitur elicits the first red-alarm laughter in the room.

If you’re worried about not knowing who these Aussie comics are, don’t worry. Their antics will make you laugh. And the great thing about Prime Video, especially for a show like this, is the platform’s X-Ray function, where you can pause your TV (or hover your cursor on your computer screen) to see bonus trivia about them. I’ve seen Simmons perform before, but even if you haven’t, then perhaps you’ve heard him as the voice of Mr. Wallaby on a Peppa Pig special? Or you can learn that Creasey was the last comedian to work a gig with the late Joan Rivers, performing on a bill with Rivers the night before her surgery that eventually killed her. OK. Maybe that’s not a fun fact.

Sex and Skin: Lots of crude sexual talk, and threats of skin. One comedian sports a jacket covered with rubber penises, and not only he, but others pull at them and even suck on them in attempts to make someone laugh. At least one will go fully nude by the second episode. The production shows us ass, but graphically covers up frontal nudity.

Parting Shot: A montage of scenes from the following episode, including that first display of nudity, with Wilson then plugging Amazon’s X-Ray feature for bonus content.

Sleeper Star: Simmons, among the Aussies, definitely is the most outrageous of the 10 comedians assembled for this competition. But it’s the comedian described as the veteran among them, Woodley, who delivers the best impression, so to speak. And it’s not just because he’s the only one wearing a suit. His quick wit, physicality and off-kilter ad-libs have everyone onscreen and in the audience on edge every time the camera focuses on him.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing too cringe-worthy is said for the sake of saying it on camera, which, considering they’re all comedians, is quite refreshing. They actually all already are friends here, and complimentary of one another.

The lines that struck as the most meta, though, were these three.
From Creasey, on Wilson selecting him as a contestant: “She needed a fabulous gay man here. She’s a Hollywood actress. She’d be surrounded by gay men. I’m her cheap Australian version.”

From Hussain: “This show was pitched to me, and my manager called me up. She says, ‘Hey Nazeem, there’s this show,’ and I said, ‘Yep, I’ll do it.'”

And from Edmonds: “I’ve got no idea what’s gonna happen, and I feel like it might be money won but dignity lost.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. I’ve longed for NBC to reboot Last Comic Standing as some variation of this. The first couple of seasons of LCS packed its contestants into a house to live together, and everything that happened in the house was far funnier than the contrived comedy competitions with live studio audiences. LOL: Australia does just that, and it’ll make you LOL IRL.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch LOL Australia on Amazon Prime Video