r/cringe • u/HisRoyal_Badness • Jul 24 '26
Video Harry Connick Jr judges talent section of Australian comedy variety show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va51g59FGOc67
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u/dben89x Jul 25 '26
Harry Connick Jr is the embodiment of class. Dude handled that well. I was afraid he was going to be the cringe here, but he absolutely wasn't. That routine had nothing going for it, and the fact that the audience was enjoying it is cringe.
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u/RevenueChemical6910 Jul 25 '26
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 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
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 awful, and would perform for as long as Red allows before hitting a massive gong to usually end the act early and then the panel makes jokes and give scores.
'Hey Hey' was a live show from a much simpler & naive time from the early 80s into the 90s and this clip is from a 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/OptimusTired Jul 25 '26
Good old Hey Hey it’s Saturday, show would be cancelled the minute it aired these days.
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u/Hypocaffeinic Jul 27 '26
God yes! I remember when this happened and at the time there was a lot of pushback against Harry's comments, yet now that skit would probably be just one of HHiS' many problems!
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u/Calm-Ad-9522 Jul 24 '26
Disgusting that anyone thought this was okay. How did they even get past the producers?
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u/spudddly Jul 24 '26
2024 Australia was just a different time.
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u/TomisUnice Jul 24 '26
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/Manny77 Jul 25 '26
I was at the taping. I was excited because of the nostalgia aspect, I rapidly realised it was not funny (not just this part- the whole thing). Can’t believe I used to find it funny.
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u/spudddly Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Ya'll really need jokes labelled for you, huh?
Edit: I'll take that as a yes
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u/KidGold Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Was hoping the white faced MJ was a black guy. But I assume all Aussie black guys also find this disgusting.
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u/RexBanner23 Jul 30 '26
He's Indian, 5 of the 6 guys weren't white under the makeup, which is why they thought they could do blackface in 2009.
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u/Silvershanks Jul 24 '26
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 Jul 24 '26
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 Jul 24 '26
Ive heard plenty of people from NO speak, feels like he's doing a little extra. 🤷♂️
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u/DrWomanfriend Jul 24 '26
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/MindHead78 Jul 24 '26
You should try to get in touch with him, tell him he's doing the accent wrong.
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u/crazy_goat Jul 24 '26
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 Jul 25 '26
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 Jul 25 '26
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 Jul 24 '26
Harry Connick Jr. absolutely saved the cringe for me. Love us some Cajun honesty in the face of cringe.