Politics

Scott Morrison Is Trying Hard To Pretend He Wasn’t Brutally Owned In This Video

Finally, someone has roasted our Prime Minister's embarrassing video strategy.

by Sam Langford  2 November 2018
Mark Humphries roasting Scott Morrison's abysmal videos.

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There is a classic tweet by user @dril that I find myself returning to time and time again. In one line, it manages to succinctly evoke the delight of watching someone who has just been publicly humiliated insist that they have not, in fact, been publicly humiliated.

It is, in other words, the perfect tweet to summarise Scott Morrison’s latest attempt to pretend he isn’t the laughing stock of the nation. See, lately, our illustrious Prime Minister has been trialling an interesting new video strategy where he seems to be trying way, way too hard to appear casual and off the cuff.

See for example this video, where he walks into frame fiddling with his phone’s flip case as if he’s not actually aware the camera’s rolling, but then launches straight into a monologue about slashing electricity prices. Or this video, where he delivers a little speech about supporting veterans from the back seat of a taxi, as if the thought occurred to him mid-journey.

The videos are funny viewing, and ScoMo’s been pretty resoundingly roasted for them. Yesterday, Mark Humphries went a step further and absolutely skewered the clips in a video of his own for the ABC’s 7.30, where he poses as “the visionary behind Scott Morrison’s online videos”. It’s a brutal (and brutally funny) roast, though Morrison tried to side-step the humiliation today by tweeting “love your work, mate. Had a good laugh!”

In the immortal words of @dril: “I’m not owned!”

If you haven’t seen Humphries’ video yet, it’s worth a watch. He really manages to find a way into the mindset of whoever’s directing the Prime Minister’s videos, giving us an insight into how these disasters came to be.

On the taxi driver video, for instance, he offers this directorial insight: “Around the time of the Invictus Games, I was really influenced by Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which is why we shot this one so that Scott looks like an actual taxi driver!”

“That looks like fucking shit, don’t change a thing!” he then tells his video editor, clapping him on the back.

“With these videos, we wanted to capture Scott being natural,” he adds. “We thought the best way to make him appear natural is to heavily script and choreograph every single thing he does.” He then proudly demonstrates the way he taught Morrison to unnaturally raise his leg and place it on a chair mid-sentence, a move he calls “the trouser wink”.

The brutal owning just escalates from there, but we’ll let you experience the magic for yourself.