The world is in chaos. It’s time for a revolution, goddamnit, and “comedian” Tom Ballard is ready to serve as its glorious leader. (Or at least to tweet about it to #raiseawareness).

After 30 years of his entitled Millennial life, Ballard has had enough of the smashed avocado jokes. He’s furious at the raw deal his generation has been given, and he’s pretty sure things can’t be this crappy because of brunch. It’s not your imagination: Millennials really have inherited the bill for our current ‘prosperity’, and it sucks. Millions of Baby Boomers got beach houses, free education, jobs for life and a franking credit-fed retirement; Millennials have been handed a housing crisis, crippling student debt, the gig economy, a cooked planet, a truly broken political system and now a global pandemic, as a treat. For a moment it looked like COVID-19 might radically change things – like housing the homeless and lifting the unemployed out of poverty – but it ended up just making rich ghouls like Gerry Harvey even richer.

In I, Millennial: One Snowflake’s Screed Against Plague, Boomers, Billionaires & Everything Else, Ballard unpicks how we got here and why. Through the power of jokes, history, interviews and sass, he decodes the state of Australian society today, and lets his fellow Millennials in on just how outraged they should be. Fact-filled and furiously funny, this sprawling book reveals shows that the real joke is how much the ruling class has been getting away with at our expense. It will be a must-read not just for Millennials wondering whether they’re alone in thinking things are weird and bad and massively unfair, but for anyone with an interest in how we’re making our future impossible.

Tom Ballard is an award-winning comedian, broadcaster, philanthropist and virtue-signaller. He pretended to be cool on the triple j breakfast show for years, then went on to perform stand-up all over the world and front his own naughty late-night show for #theirABC, Tonightly with Tom Ballard. (The program was cancelled because it was too funny). He’s also guest hosted Q&A for some reason, and since 2015 he’s sat down with everyone from Lyle Shelton to Yassmin Abdel-Magied for his political interview podcast Like I’m A Six-Year-Old.

“Having never read a book before (too boring), I’m delighted to now be writing one that will fix all of the problems in Australia,” says Ballard. “I hope everyone enjoys reading my insightful social and political analysis, which will involve lots of swearwords and ad hominem attacks. Also there will be some pictures.”

Ben Ball, Publishing Director of Scribner Australia says: ‘As anyone who has seen Tom perform his too-hot-for-the-ABC shows or heard his podcast will know, he has a genius for making genuine, urgent political arguments stingingly funny. This book will speak to the Millennial in all of us who feel the system is broken and the future needs to be rethought.’

I, Millennial will be published in December 2021.

simonandschuster.com.au

Hello. It’s my new show for 2021 and it will officially restore comedy.

In this time of fire, plague and the stupid internet, “we” are “all” “in this” “together” (?).

In 2019, Tom sold out shows all over the world, received critical acclaim and annoyed a lot of Baby Boomers on Facebook. In 2020, he took some time off and wrote a book.

Now he has a brand-new show full of jokes about our cooked planet, the bad people in power and his sex life. Plus some outrage.

“A blistering hour of motor-mouthed, slick-as-black-ice comedy.” ★★★★½ Herald Sun

“Will have you laughing til it hurts.” ★★★★½ The Age

MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY FESTIVAL

MARCH 24th to APRIL 18th  

SYDNEY COMEDY FESTIVAL

MAY 7th & 8th

NEWCASTLE COMEDY FESTIVAL

MAY 29th

So last week, academic Holly Lawford-Smith wrote a pretty wild opinion piece about how a stand-up set she saw me do constituted “hate speech”:

I think it was approbation; community in shared loathing. I think it was a cheerful variation on the ritualised “Two Minutes Hate” gatherings in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell wrote: “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture … seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” Or to be slightly less melodramatic about it, I think their laughter was to Ballard’s jokes what applause and chants are at a Trump rally.

I was offered a right of reply, and ended up having a lot to say about the routine in question, comedy, offence, civility and hypocrisy:

Again, we return to the importance of context. No, Holly Lawford-Smith, my comedy does not meet any serious legal or moral definition of “hate speech” — because it is comedy. I wasn’t simply “saying” (that is, not joking) that Liberal voters are “evil demon lizards”, nor was I making sincere “comments” or literally “celebrating the deaths” of COVID victims. I was delivering prepared and considered jokes, tongue firmly in cheek. I thought that this would have been extremely clear. When someone performs a routine that includes a line like “I love democracy, I just think that voting for the Liberal Party should be illegal”, I think there’s good reason to suspect they’re taking the piss.

 

See what you reckon and tell me that I’m correct and smart, please.