Australian Comedy Films

Kenny is a mock documentary about a plumber who works for a corporate bathroom rental company.  His job is to bring porta-pots to public events and to keep them clean at all costs.  The film shows Kenny's work environment as well as in his personal life.  He is separated from his wife, but has a son that he cares for very much.  Despite being treated badly by his ex, he remains relaxed and patient throughout the film.  At work and outside of work, Kenny is continually being mistreated by people around him.  We see Kenny as we continues to positive in the face of person problems and work problems. 

Though this film had good reviews overall, I was not overly pleased with it.  I found the film to be more depressing than humorous.  Throughout the film, people treat Kenny poorly because of the business he is in, and in these parts of the film, it was more serious than funny.  The humor that was in the film was all “toilet” humor, which apparently many people seem to enjoy.  Al Cossar says the following in his review of Kenny's toilet humor: “A concept central to both proctology and screen based comedy, and one which has kept the makers of every second teen comedy out of the gutters themselves, poo is a stalwart of movie making, from the diarrhoetic outbursts of Dumb and Dumber, to the more dramatic s*** smearing of North Country, to the films of Uwe Boll, themselves pure cinematic semi-liquid nuggets of week-old vindaloo proportions”  (http://www.infilm.com.au/?p=24).  The film seemed to go a bit overboard with this type of humor. 

On top of this, the naivety of Kenny seems to become a spectacle to the audience as we watch him interact and see new things outside of his normal business.  An example of this is when he flies in an airplane for the first time.  We notice the people around him giving him sideway glances as he awes at everything around him and makes somewhat of a scene.  Though I felt like this was meant to be amusing, I did not find the humor in it. I found this to be more uncomfortable and irritating to watch him be criticized by the people around him. 

As I said before, most reviews of the film have been positive.  It had an average score of 7.5/ 10 on Rotten Tomatoes , and the Australian TV series, At the Movies, gave it a 4.5/ 5.  In Australia, it has a total gross of $69,220 since it has come out and worldwide the total gross is $6,732,051 since it has come out (http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=kenny.htm).