Article and Art by Katie Lockwood
“Oi, what are you doing in there you fucken druggos!?”
“He’s hitting the Stingin Roger!”
The group of snowboarders descended upon the little tree fort tucked in a snowy glade like a murder of crows on skunked roadkill, their squawked remarks overlapping one another wildly. Their Australian accents were embarrassing enough that I hid over by the tree line, trying desperately not to be associated with the idiots who gave me a ride to the mountain that morning.
“’You’re gonna fucken die of lung cancer, mate. You’re gonna get punched in the face by the long dick of cancer.’”
It occurred to me that these harassments could hardly be original, as they left the mouth of the biggest stoner of all my friends.
“What were you quoting at those guys smoking in the tree hut?” I asked him later on the ski lift.
“Wadiyatalkinabeet?” he replied in one sputter before erupting into a laugh so loud people on chairs in front of us looked back. I remained stoically confused, at which he gasped:
“You don’t know The Big Lez Show???”
Though I couldn’t see his eyes through his goggles, I could tell they were locked on mine. He explained there’s this animated YouTube series about this fat guy named Leslie living in Brown Town, Australia who’s actually an alien, and he smokes a lot of weed with his neighbors who are sasquatches named Sassy and Donny the Dealer, but he’s also got beef with his alien brother and they are always beating each other up and pooping on each other’s things, which is super distressing to Lez’s orphan kid Quinton, and really I just need to watch it for myself.
I Googled the show when I got home. I can’t remember if it was before Lez, Sassy, and Donny hit the volcano bong, after a lifeguard jumps off the lighthouse to kill a shark by body slamming it with a knife, or once Lez blasts the head off of some yellow creature called a Choomah, but a question took shape in my mind: who the fuck comes up with this shit?
If you’re a stoner or YouTube rabbithole enthusiast, Jarrad Wright hardly needs an introduction. However, if you find yourself in the position I did, allow me to familiarize you.
Jarrad Wright was a daydreaming teenager at Tweed Heads Highschool in New South Wales when he met two fellow losers named Izak Whear and Tom Hollis. Their attention spans were quick to glaze over lectures and landed hard in shitty doodles on the margins of their assignments. The threes’ sketches turned into characters turned into lore turned into a whole damn universe.
And when their art came into inevitable orbit with the introduction of school issued laptops? Naturally, Jarrad abused it. Only, rather than playing video games or whatever else normal kids did at the time, he dedicated himself to learning Microsoft Paint. Pixel by painstaking pixel, he animated the first episode of an instant cult-classic internet sensation.
From the jump, the story of the alien/humanoid Lez taking drugs with his sasquatch mates and fucking shit up in the outback captivated the high hive mind. At some point, the story naturally spread like fire on the side of the road from a misplaced cigarette butt; it was something the rest of northern New South Wales and the world was talking about.
I say it spread to the rest of northern New South Wales, but I think it would be a shame to rob the area of some partial credit in the genesis of Lez. I imagine that they call it the “Rainbow Region” for fun, but certainly not for no reason.
The “Aquarius Festival” occurred over the span of 10 days in 1973 in the declining rural community of Nimbin in the Northern Rivers area. Today, the festival is broadly thought of as some obscure gesture to what America was doing with Woodstock: another new age exposition where concert lawns sprouted with Hendrix-ogling flower children. From an uneducated glance, it’s hard to really differentiate one mass bender in a dying dairy farm town from another. But student organizers Johnny Allen and Graeme Dunstan (who called themselves “Kaptain Kulture” and “Superfest”) vehemently sneered at Woodstock for being a stealth marketing scheme.
The Australian Union of Students posted an ad in 1972 hiring a director and cultural director for the 1973 version of a biennial arts festival that had been running since 1967. As soon as Johnny and Graeme got their hands on those titles, an additional government arts grant, and, I assume, at least two joints, they sat down and wrote the “May Manifesto.” The mission was simple: sell drugs, not culture. Aquarius declared that it would not sell you a lineup of headliners to sway to; it told you to get up and post the drum circle you wanted to host at dusk on the chalkboard set in the middle of camp. It was a chaotic, radical experiment on self sufficiency and tribal living, and it was all advertised by word of mouth. After the festival, people actively relocated to the area of Nimbin and stuck around to see the droplets of their cultural manifestation refract brilliantly in the new anti-capitalist light shone by Johnny and Graeme. The Rainbow Region, northern area of New South Wales where Tweed Heads resides: the counterculture capital of Australia.
I don’t know if I would say I completely believe in reincarnation, but if Jarrad and his mates aren’t Johnny and Graeme re-embodied, they at least must be frequented by the ghosts of Kaptain Kulture and Superfest. Or perhaps it is simply that The Big Lez Show is an inevitable product of its environment — the great grandchild of the festival. What could possibly be more Aquarian than using a complimentary software like Microsoft Paint on a school laptop to inefficiently make a raunchy cartoon to put on YouTube for free? And with zero advertisement besides sending the link to classmates, who then decided everyone else needed to get a load of this shit? The whole affair reeks of ancestral haunting.
The familial tree has only grown, as Jarrad has created several other spin-offs from The Big Lez Show. The Mike Nolan Show (2016-2019) chronicles the tales of Lez’s friend Mike (the one Lez told was going to get punched in the face by the long dick of cancer) who continually finds himself chain-smoking and completing odd jobs. Sassy the Sasquatch (2020–2022) follows Sassy interdimensionally from the dawn of the dinosaurs as he keeps unknowingly escaping death through drug induced psychosis. And then there’s The Donny and Clarence Show (2024), which has sasquatch drug dealer Donny beating up this dumb little potato head creature named Clarence (Clarence appears in the first season of Lez, but everyone hates him, so I spared you the details of his miserable ass until now).
Of course, Jarrad would never stoop to the level of explaining himself, but choosing to use Microsoft Paint for every episode he has ever drawn even in today’s ripe new technological age nearly gives himself away. Either he’s a total masochist, or it’s always been about the medium. I know I sound like a mother who insists their toddler’s Crayola scrawls are masterpieces oozing with unbridled creative genius, or like an insufferable college student talking about the politics of pixelation, but my god! The neon green grass and cyan skies are utterly naïve, the cartoonish texture of sasquatch fur and fat rolls is completely artless, and the simplicity of the houses and surroundings is totally guileless. It, like an empty chalkboard in the field, does the bare minimum, and that’s what makes it so goddamn wonderful!
And then there’s the sasquatch in the room, who I’ve largely let remain uninterrogated until now. Why would an intensely Australian show choose to steal a North American cryptid? The idea of a furry man-like creature isn’t singular; the Himalayas call him the Yeti, South America the Mapingauri, and even Australia has their own version which they call the Yowie! Why wouldn’t Jarrad just use him? The Yowie is a name originated from Aboriginal oral tradition meaning “hairy man” of an unpredictable nature. The creature, though, is considered as something beyond animal or human; it is said to inhabit the spiritual realm as a powerful ancestor tied to the land and the mysteries it keeps. Maybe, even under the influence of drugs, Jarrad’s mind was clear enough to comprehend that venturing into Yowie territory could teeter on appropriation; it is admittedly a super risky idea to bastardize a sacred indigenous figure into a drug mongering buffoon.
Luckily for him, I guess, America already did that to the Sasquatch! Indigenous Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest similarly saw the sasquatch as a transcendent protector of the forest. And, as Americans do best, they stole the idea and packaged it into something “discoverable.” In 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin released 59 second video of a testimonial squatch sauntering heavily through the Bluff Creek bed in Northern California. From there, amateur cryptozoologists were crazed to find Bigfoot, or at least say they did. In other words, Bigfoot became a movie star. The price of his star power is not too different from any other silver screen icon: beef jerky commercials, unflattering family-fun comedies, and rumors of drug abuse. Especially in California, where weed grew where the squatches roamed, it didn’t take long for dispensaries to token the elusive, smiley gorilla on their strain names and packaging.
But Sasquatches weren’t the only consumable America manufactured for young, Bigfoot loving Jarrad. The US is also uniquely skilled at creating nightmarishly laughable deadbeat father figures, and nearly as good at making adult cartoons about them. It’s horrific how many there are when you start to list them: American Dad, Rick and Morty (grandpa but still), Family Guy, South Park, Moral Orel, Big Mouth, Fairly Oddparents, and I’m sure the list goes on. Jarrad has stated outrightly that Choomahs, the yellow aliens I mentioned earlier, were born from a competition of who could draw the most fucked-up looking Homer Simpsons. And though Lez is not a yella fella, he did eat a drug sandwich and pass out for two weeks, leaving Quinton to play with a GameCube he dug out of a dumpster for his birthday.
And yet, Lez is not just a bong wielding Homer. Maybe that is because Lez’s friends actively encourage him to do drugs while Marge whips her bumbling husband into believing in the Nuclear Family they’ve made. Maybe it is because Matt Groening is a Portlandian punk poking fingers at the obtuse absurdity of the traditional Springfield family, and Jarrad secretly created Lez based off one of his friend’s dads (but made him fatter and wear pink to disguise it). Maybe that’s because Matt had everything to prove and Jarrad just wanted to make his friends laugh.
Brown Town is a fantastical no place, and yet every Aussie recognizes it as a portrait of the suburbs. Brown Town is the sun-baked flatlands soaked in washed New South Wales humidity. It’s Tweed Heads. It’s Nimbin. It’s your cunt neighbor who fucks your fucken eyes with their fucken stupid flowers. It’s your druggo friend who accuses you of being a fucken druggo.
I’m sure positively none of the people I know who love this show could point to where the hell Tweed Heads is on a map, but they can quote the damn show ad nauseum. I can now too, and it’s fun. It feels like a little secret that I get to be let in on. I’ve never had any desire to watch The Simpsons; I need to spend $11.99 a month on Disney+ (with ads) like I need an abscessed tooth.
So, indeed: who the fuck comes up with this shit? I have come to know and love Jarrad Wright as a fair dinkum dipstick who loves making his mates laugh, including the parasocial fiends on the internet who have gotten tattoos based on the show. He is the salt of the earth and sediment of the Rainbow Region.
But did I really need to know him? I’ve shown the show to at least 12 different people, and they all laugh sidesplittingly regardless. It is painfully ironic to me now that I wrote an essay about people who never cared for the limelight of their own work and scoffed at the culture which placed the artist above the art. I’m sure if I showed any of my psychoanalysis to Jarrad himself he would simply reply:
“Wadiyatalkinabeet?”