WHERE: Pulteney Pokies
WHAT WE DRANK:
- 3x pints of Great Northern
- 2x pints of Coopers Pale Ale
- 1x pint of West End
Dan Schmidt and Trent Bartlett – who once played in a ska band together – run the satirical news site, Adelaide Mail. With a combined Instagram and Facebook following of 22,000 they’re more than a bit player in the local media ecosystem. As much as they prod fun and local and state politics, they’re always down to give their competitors a whack.
CityMag begins by asking: Why did you bring me to Pulteney Pokies?
Dan: We wanted to find the the funniest place in the CBD, because we looked through all the other Knockoffs. They’re all very nice places. So we wanted to find the funniest place in the CBD, and possibly the worst. So it was between this and Pole Position. We’re just big fans of alliteration. The joke backfired because this place is awesome.
Trent: I thought there would be more people threatening me. I’m kind of disappointed.
David: Tell me about the two of you.
Dan: We started this in 2018 just for fun. We’ve always been great friends since high school, and we played in a ska band together.
Trent: We only do things for comedy.
Dan: We always pick the least popular thing to do, and not even exceed at that. So yeah, we played in a ska band for a long time. Adelaide’s sixth favourite ska band, and we were looking for a job in the media, or I was looking for a job in the media. So we started this up to see if we could do it.
Trent: Dan put it up on Seek, looking for journalists, and I applied, not knowing it was Dan who advertised, and you tricked me!
Dan: It wasn’t even Seek. It was just Gumtree.
David: How well is it going?
Trent: We haven’t kept up on our incomings or outgoings, but I would guess we are several thousand dollars in the hole.
Dan: We have spent much more. I don’t think we’ve made anything. We haven’t made a single cent, that’s serious. We do this for our own entertainment. And today I’m so entertained because I put up a story yesterday about the Mall’s Balls. Someone’s offended that the Mall’s Balls are going to be renamed because it’s too gendered and sexist and patriarchal. I checked just before I came here and there’s 500 comments of angry Boomers on our Facebook. You can see why they fall for scams.
David: How closely do you follow things like city council or state politics? Do you just enjoy it from a distance or are you watching meetings to get fodder?
Dan: No we watch you guys then take the stories and say ‘how can we turn this into something funny?’. I’m not saying your work isn’t hilarious…
Trent: I don’t know if I could put myself through watching an Adelaide City Council meeting.
Dan: A lot of stories about Adelaide just write themselves – they’re already funny.
Trent: The Adelaide City Council is Australia’s first self-satarising council. But Adelaide is a bit like that – it’s ripe for satire. I think South Australians like to poke fun at ourselves to an extent, if it’s the right people doing it. But at the same time, Adelaide is just so odd that the jokes have already been made, you just need to observe things.
Dan: We’re big enough where a lot of things happen, but small enough still where a lot of people know everyone – so that’s what makes it funny. We never try to be mean spirited. I think that’s what sets us apart from a lot of other social media things…punching down…and we saw that and decided we wouldn’t do that ourselves. We want to punch sideways and punch at ourselves. That’s what we try and do.
David: Do you have any favourite beats?
Trent: Veale Gardens, Ray’s Outdoors Car Park on Main North Road. Oh do you mean areas to cover, like topics?
Dan: We’re born and bred in the northeastern suburbs so a lot of our content is just what we know. For a while there was an O-Bahn story every week.
Trent: That’s how you know we’re really scratching around. Either we go silent for about nine months at a time or there’ll just be a string of really poor O-Bahn puns.
Dan: I think this is in our early days in 2019, when no one knew we existed, or fewer people knew we existed, and we created a Facebook event saying, like, hey, come and try driving on the O-Bahn. Like, I made it a public event, and we made an Eventbrite page where people could sign up and buy tickets and stuff. We said it was only limited to 100 free, but you had to have a ticket to do it. It was between Christmas and New Year, so it’s a quiet period. We thought people would get that joke. Then 1000s of people shared the event, and then I was getting lots of emails from people with non-Anglo sounding names being quite serious about it. It ended up with my wife getting a knock on the door from SA Police saying ‘can you tell your husband to stop telling people to drive on the O-Bahn?’.
David: You guys have had a big year this year thanks to your Reels – it seems like you’ve crushed the Instagram algorithm.
Dan: Well the whole aim of getting you here was to get InDaily to buy us… but maybe show us your books and we might be buying you.
Trent: It’s been a big year, it feels like there’s some momentum. We have felt that before and then not capitalised.
Dan: But yeah we go through cycles. I have three kids and do everything far too much so the Adelaide Mail sometimes is last priority.
Trent: And I’ve got a dog.
David: Obviously I loved the Reel you guys did about the InDaily and The Advertiser 40 Under 40 war. What do you think about the media landscape in Adelaide – obviously you don’t mind making fun of us.
Dan: We think anything’s fair game. We know a lot of people at The Advertiser who are really lovely people, and hard-working journalists. But the media landscape in Adelaide is certainly ripe for satire because of how incestuous it is.
Trent: It’s a small city and a small industry. In broadcast media it’s musical chairs. One degree of separation.
David: Do you have any favourite satirists or comedians you look up to?
Trent: Invoking these people is bullshit, because we are bad.
Dan: We’re both huge Shaun Micallef fans. Tony Martin. New comedians… James Donald Forbes McCann – an Adelaide guy doing really well at the moment.
David: Now for some quick-fire questions. Favourite spot to get a sando in Adelaide?
Trent: There was this little place where you could actually… it was a drive-thru… Subway. You could actually drive-thru and they would do meatballs, they’ll do BLT and they do this thing called a Subway Melt – which was like turkey and chicken… all different types of meat.
David: Favourite place to get a pint? Apart from Pulteney Pokies.
Dan: Fox And Firkin. Proper pint.