The case of the comedian accent

Well, this is rather odd.

Josh Thomas is appearing on TV a lot on Optus ads, and I tend to find him likeable in them.   (My daughter does too, and I think I have withheld the "gay" information from her so far.)  But then, I assumed he genuinely had an accent picked up from somewhere in England.

But reading this lengthy Guardian interview about his critically praised (but little watched) dramedy show, I learn (from comments after it) that he grew up in Brisbane.  My side of Brisbane, in fact.   Googling around, it is clear there has been chatter for years about why he sounds (by most people's reckoning) Irish.  Either that or Welsh.  And it seems a fair few people claim it is genuinely a fake (or greatly exaggerated) accent, although others say he has Irish parents and kids sometimes pick up accents that way. *  

Someone at The Guardian thread says this:

you may be right about the accent, though he himself has said that he didn't grow up with that accent, he "just woke up one morning talking like that." I don't know how to feel about that story, but it does suggest that the accent is utter affectation.

And in one interview on line Thomas himself sounds ambiguous:

You’re from Brisbane, so why do you have a Welsh-sounding accent?
I don’t know – your guess is as good as mine. I didn’t even know I had it until I started going on television and I started getting asked in interviews all the time.
Your friend Tom Ward said you sounded like a female Elmer Fudd in high school. Is that fair?
Yeah, that’s pretty good. I used to be really bad at pronouncing my words. If I was doing stand-up I’d get into trouble for it, so I had to put some effort into pronouncing my words. That’s why I got this stupid accent. There was one point where I was so sick of being asked about it every day I was going to get lessons to learn how to stop talking like this, but then I realised how contrived that would be.

 His voice and, um, comic persona, certainly grates on some people who read the Guardian:

HE's totally unbearable! His accent is Y-gen medication. Or Woolloomooloo Yank. Or ADHD teenager. Or Antonioni-ennuied young monotonal adult. Like one of those obnoxious brats on the bus going to private schools. Like, like and um like they can't stop talking, like OMG I shouldn't have said that. I just find the show and the persona the most irritating things I've ever seen on a television set. Even compared to yet another irritating, nasally whining gay performer, Adam Carr whose range at least extends beyond A to B and sometimes beyond......The endless pursuit of self-absorption through self abnegation as a performance style is cringe worthy even before he gets through the first line of dialogue. I mean monologue. And if this is "writing" I'm , um you know, err straight.
And somewhere, buried in this supposed comedy is the idea that we should be nice to him and the show because he's, um, you know gay.
So am I but I would rather go to an execution than watch him again.

Well, I can't say I feel that strongly about him, one way or the other, but I am surprised about the questionable authenticity of the accent.   It seems that it may be another case of Ben Elton-itis.  As noted in the Telegraph last year:

When it turned out that Elton wasn’t quite as seditious as the comrades had hoped, and, by his own admission, was slightly bewildered to find himself being cast as any kind of political figurehead, his reputation in right-on circles began to wither. The process was accelerated by the discovery that he came from a well-to-do family, the son of a prominent physicist, had been educated at a top Surrey grammar school, and that his street punk London accent had been adopted in the hope that comedy circuit audiences would find it funnier. 

Come to think of it, the other British person who used to "bung it on" (to use an Australian-ism, I guess) was Cilla Black.   I clearly remember her embarrassment and quick reversion to exaggerated accent in some interview or other she was giving on Australian TV way back in perhaps the late 70's or 80's, where she had to started to answer (accidentally) without accent.

But what is the truth?   Can't someone who knows Thomas let the world know whether he used to sound Australian when he was at school?

[Incidentally, I just think Please Like Me - which I've caught in bits and pieces - is not very funny.  Self involved in a very young 20's way, a bit mawkish, a bit too obvious in many respects, but not very funny.  Hence I am pleased it actually doesn't rate well.]

*  (Don't know that anyone has ever mistaken me for being from Liverpool, although the European looking man in the post office near my home in 1980 did insist that it seemed to him I was from mainland Europe.  "Where are you from" he asked when I was buying a stamp.  "Here!" I said, "Just down the road".   "No, originally, where are you from?"   And so on, until he explained he felt sure English was probably a second language for me.  (!)  He was from somewhere mid-Europe himself, I believe.   Honestly, the guy seemed quite normal despite this surprising line of interrogation.

This was when I was at university, just after I had been backpacking in New Zealand, and many fellow backpackers could not readily pick that I was Australian.   It would seem my accent is considered pretty indeterminate both within and outside of Australia, so perhaps I am not the most obvious person to be criticising other accents after all....)