‘Kenny was a riff on decency’: how a low-budget comedy about a portaloo plumber became a $8m hit

Having grown up in a family intent on making each other laugh, it wasn’t a surprise to Clayton Jacobson when his younger brother Shane came into the advertising production company he owned and started improvising a character for the amusement of the staff.

Shane was working as a lighting technician at stadium shows and festivals, rubbing shoulders with the “dunny men” of toilet-hire companies. He appreciated their sense of humour and began riffing on it. “Everyone’s going to have a joke at their expense, so they had gags ready for everything,” Shane says. “They were ‘working classy’, as we called them.”

Clayton, who’d cleaned toilets himself while at Swinburne Film & TV School and had an admiration for this kind of labour, was struck by the poignancy in the humour of Shane’s routine. “Without sanitation, you have nothing. You have disease, you have anarchy, you have death,” he reflects.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Kenny, the Jacobsons’ low-budget mockumentary about a hardworking, heart-of-gold portaloo plumber, which became an unexpected success, pulling in nearly $8m at the box office. This month, it will be honoured by a screening and Q&A session at the Aacta awards festival.

The titular Kenny may now be forever lodged in the P-trap of the Australian psyche, but initially he was only bound for short-film festivals. The Clayton brothers originally co-wrote a 47-minute feature based on the character, asking permission of real portaloo hire company Splashdown to depict him as one of their crew. The film was made on the smell of an oily rag, using the company’s trucks and equipment.

Shane, who had done stints as a stand-up comedian and MC, took the lead role. Clayton, who also directed, played his nouveau-riche brother. Their father, Ronald, and Clayton’s son Jesse also played family members. Real locations and events such as the Melbourne Cup and the Calder Park Raceway added an authentic touch.

(Left to right) Ronald, Shane and Clayton Jacobson. Brothers Shane and Clayton co-wrote the movie as well as acting in it, while Clayton also directed, produced, edited and served as camera operator. Photograph: Clayton Jacobson

The early to mid-2000s saw a peak in the mockumentary genre, with Best In Show, A Mighty Wind and Borat pulling in impressive numbers at cinemas and The Office and Arrested Development capturing TV audiences. While Kenny embraced that format, it was more of a kneejerk response to the political climate of the Howard government – particularly the “be alert, not alarmed” campaign.

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“There was so much talk about watching your neighbours,” Clayton says. “It didn’t feel very Australian. I’m not political, I just knew that the world that I’d grown up in was, for the most part, very tolerant.

“Kenny is a bit of a fantasy character. He has a strong sense of self and what’s right and wrong. Kenny was a riff on decency.”

While Australia has a long history of grimy depictions of the criminal working-class (à la Animal Kingdom, Chopper and Two Hands), Kenny Smyth – like the Kerrigan family in 90s comedy The Castle – is a very different kind of underdog.

Clayton points out that both movies were “made by filmmakers that lived five streets away from each other in Avondale Heights [and] were embedded in this real laconic sort of environment”. The Jacobsons’ father worked at carnivals and slept under canvas. Kenny was a homage to him, and to the uncles who took jobs in abattoirs and road gangs.

“I’ve always thought that the way that blue collar Australians have been portrayed is simple and uneducated,” says Clayton. “The smartest people I knew growing up wasn’t a doctor down the road, it was my uncles. They could be anywhere in a story and you didn’t know there was a punchline just around the corner. They talked with a rhythm – I call it ‘up the hill, down the hill’. Humour was at the centre of everything.”

Shane and Clayton Jacobson on the set of Kenny. Photograph: Clayton Jacobson

When the short version of Kenny made its premiere at the St Kilda film festival in 2004, Clayton was in Japan filming a commercial, but Shane rang him as soon as he saw the audience response.

“They were laughing really loud or were really silent when they were feeling something, and they were with it all the way,” Shane recalls.

When the Jacobsons heard about a Pumper & Cleaner expo being held in Nashville, they realised they could expand their film into a feature-length fish-out-of-water tale. “The Crocodile Dundee idea,” as Clayton says.

Critics may have been divided (on At The Movies, David Stratton awarded two stars while Margaret Pomeranz gave four), but audiences rooted for this unlikely hero. Shane won best actor at the AFI awards (now Aacta), and the film was nominated in five other categories.

The Jacobson brothers worked as hard as their protagonist when it came to promotion, and Shane did the entire press cycle in character. He was particularly convincing, because he’d temporarily taken a job helping run Splashdown.

Clayton recalls: “I said to Shane, ‘You’ve got to [take the job] for one reason only: there won’t be a single question when we do the tour that you won’t have an answer for.”

‘We’d hoped that the film would resonate with tradies and their families’ … Shane Jacobson as Kenny. Photograph: Madman Entertainment

Since the release of Kenny, mockumentaries have fallen out of favour; a 2008 spin-off series, Kenny’s World, wasn’t renewed for a second season.

But the fandom for the original film has seemingly not diminished: the Jacobson brothers frequently receive videos of Kenny cosplay. One terminally ill woman asked permission to screen the film at her funeral, and another man told Clayton that his family had taken his sister, who had cancer, on a world trip, and that her rule was that at every location they all had to watch Kenny, to keep things light.

Shane’s also been asked to sign plenty of restaurant toilet seats and the odd bum. “I say, ‘How about this bum just signs a bit of paper for you?’”

Clayton thinks the film’s success is attributable to Kenny Smyth’s relatability.

“We’d hoped that the film would resonate with tradies and their families, and hopefully filmmakers,” he says. “I’m still shocked that it has resonated with so many people, and I’ve come to realise it’s that thing of validation.

“The number one thing we all look for in life is to be validated. We need to know that we have been put on this earth for some reason. The saddest thing is a person that’s invisible.”

• Celebrating 20 years of Kenny: a screening and Q&A featuring Clayton and Shane Jacobson is at Aacta festival on 8 February on the Gold Coast, Queensland.

• Kenny is available to stream on Netflix in Australia.