Karl Puschmann: Is Jim Jefferies’ new comedy special high and dry or down and out?

Comedian Jim Jefferies in his new Netflix comedy special High and Dry. Streaming now.

Stoners will laugh at anything. There’s a reason we used to call weed “giggle grass”, and that reason is when you’re high the dumbest gags take on the virtues of high art. Only they’re even better than high art because high art isn’t funny. Unless, of course, you’re high.

But even then it can’t hold a candle to the brilliant dumbness of movies like Airplane!, Hot Shots! or The Naked Gun. Watch any of those or their ilk stoned to the bone and you will literally be convulsing on your couch and crying with laughter at their unrelenting barrage of silliness, dad jokes, bad puns and sight gags.

This, I presume, goes a long way to explaining why Jim Jefferies’ new Netflix comedy special High and Dry is down and out. I wasn’t scoobing the dooby when I watched it but, by the sounds of it, Jefferies was when he wrote it.

After struggling with alcohol in a big way for years, Jefferies reveals in the special that he has quit the booze. Good on him. As a champion of blokey Aussie larrikinism, giving up the VBs or XXXXs woulda been bloody hard. Massive kudos to Jefferies and for that matter anyone else who has achieved this monumental task.

Now, I’m no expert - which is a phrase you’ll rarely hear any of my esteemed fellow columnists say - in addiction recovery but I do have to question the method Jefferies credits in High and Dry for his newfound sobriety. Essentially, he just swapped out the booze for the broccoli, the drink for the dope, the grog for the ganja.

He’s now, he delights in telling us in the special, a stoner. Fair enough. But he’s also a comedian. And if you’ve been partaking of the devil’s lettuce then everything seems funny to you. Even if it’s not. And sadly a lot of High and Dry just isn’t that funny.

Jefferies is an especially funny guy hiding a perceptive and sharp mind beneath his exaggerated obnoxious Aussie-ness. But I guess that sharp mind has been blunted by the, er, blunts. Where he once railed against worthy subjects like the madness of America’s gun control laws - or lack thereof - in a brutally humorous fashion that highlighted their deathly absurdity, he now takes limp potshots at played-out, unwarranted targets like teenage environmentalist Greta Thunberg and the trans community.

Where he once concocted a brilliantly woven, hour-long shaggy dog story about the terrible consequences of eating too much soft cheese on a date, he now resorts to hamming it up with a bit about sex-change operations. The bit about coming up with the recycling bin being his generation’s contribution to fighting climate change was pretty funny. But his big finale callback linking Thurnberg and the goings-on at a Swedish abortion clinic was not.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t offended, I was just disappointed. Worse, I was bored. This is something I didn’t think was even possible before hitting play on the special.

Like a prizefighter who’s been in the ring one too many times, Jefferies still showed brief flashes of the old brilliance. As an increasingly follically challenged man myself, his impassioned rage at the injustices that face the male bald community was very funny. Even if he led into it with some hack jokes about Jada Pinkett Smith. He should keep Will Smith’s wife’s name out of his f***ing mouth not because he might get a slap but rather because those jokes are more feeble than a middle-aged man sporting a combover.

“I believe in the term ‘happy wife, happy life’,” he says, before humorously observing that there’s no saying going the other way. It could have been a springboard into some keen insights about his life as a newlywed. Instead, he stomps happily down the dusty, worn-out path of the put-upon husband.

“If my wife had a saying it’d be ‘happy husband, we’ll see about that’,” he says, entirely too satisfied with the punchline. Take my wife, please.

Jefferies isn’t the first to puff the magic dragon and have their talent weakened by the weed. In comparison to the bite of his early work, this special is every bit as gummy as the edibles he chomps down every morning. While there are laughs to be had, there’s not enough to make it worthwhile.

Maybe if I’d been high I would have enjoyed it more. But as I wasn’t, the special just left me dry.