Australian comedian Chris Lilley has been called racist for donning brownface to play a teenager from Tonga. But that hot-button transgression is not the only issue surrounding Lilley’s latest show.
Jason Moleli, Lafaele Tauali'l, Chris Lilley, Tama Tauali'l, Antoine Marsters.
HBO/Ben Timothy
"Jonah Takalua is well on the way to becoming the voice of his generation," one Oz television critic wrote of the Australian-born teenager of Tongan descent in Chris Lilley's 2007 cult hit series Summer Heights High. In the mockumentary comedy, which aired in the U.S. on HBO, Lilley played not only a bratty queen bee and a campy drama teacher, but also troubled Pacific Islander Jonah, a rebellious and loud-mouthed kid with a fondness for scrawling cartoon penises all over the place. Seven years later, Lilley's resident bad boy has gotten his own mockumentary with the new Jonah from Tonga, which premieres Aug. 8 on HBO in the U.S. But the voice that Jonah is giving to his generation, and more so his Tongan community, is something that many are unhappy about.
When Lilley's fans last saw Jonah on Summer Heights High, he was being expelled from school, and Jonah from Tonga picks up four months later, with Jonah living in Tonga with his uncle, a move his father and aunt felt would help teach him discipline. Instead, Jonah ends up disrespecting the community of the Polynesian archipelago so much that — Spoiler Alert! — he is sent back to Australia. But it's not just Jonah's television family that's upset with his behavior; many viewers have called Lilley out, both for donning brownface and for misrepresenting the Tongan community.
This is hardly new territory for Lilley, who played black rapper S'Mouse and Japanese mom Jen Okazaki in 2011's Angry Boys (which also aired on HBO), performing in blackface and yellowface in the process. When asked by Vulture if he had concerns about how American audiences would react to seeing him in blackface, Lilley said:
Yeah, and it's actually a big deal in Australia as well. The idea is that I play multiple characters. That's what I've always done. Part of what I like to do is to push the boundaries and try new things. When I came up with the idea of the boys' heroes on the wall, I thought, Well, they're going to be into hip-hop. They're going to want a rapper to come to their party, so I have to play a black guy. And I just thought, It's going to provoke people, it's going to be headlined — and certainly everyone in Australia fell into that trap. It was all over the place, like, "Blackface! He's doing it!" Like, Australians definitely don't walk around dressed up in blackface going "Ha-ha." We're exposed to American culture and stuff, so we get it. I think I wanted to do it because I thought it was a challenging, new, interesting idea, and mostly I just thought it was a really funny character. I think once you get through 30 seconds of S'Mouse you realize there's more to the character than just a blackface joke. Like, obviously that's not the joke. You see that he's this vulnerable guy who's living at home with his dad and he gets exposed by the documentary for not being the big tough guy he's making himself out to be. There's a lot more going on. It's a character … It's kind of funny that there's only certain races that it's an issue — yes, it's that history with blackface — but, I don't know. There's no comparison. I think it's a bit stupid that you would shut yourself off to being able to do that.
Lilley didn't stop there. "I think I'm pretty brave with putting myself out there and looking stupid and doing things that are potentially offensive," Lilley told Vulture at the time. "I've already gone far enough with the blackface thing — I can't go much further." (Multiple requests by BuzzFeed for comment from Lilley were declined or went unanswered.) Yet, despite the charges of racism, Lilley said in a more recent Esquire about Jonah from Tonga that he didn't foresee an issue with performing in brownface because "with Jonah, the Pacific Islander, people aren't interested. They're probably not even going to watch the show and it's a little more genuine for that."
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