Shut Your Big Fat Mouth John Safran!: what’s ‘free speech’ in 2026?

John Safran is worried. As pretty much the only person who, when accused of being offensive, defends himself with examples where he’s offended other religious groups – and if you remember television series like John Safran vs God, you know he’s not short of examples – the current push towards censorship in Australia threatens to make his schtick illegal. How far is too far when it comes to free speech in 2026? He’s about to find out.

That’s the set up for Shut Your Big Fat Mouth John Safran!, his return to our screens for the first time since an episode of 2023’s Who The Bloody Hell Are We? Since then he’s been writing non-fiction books, and now mostly appears in public wearing a white suit and large-brimmed hat because … well, it never hurts to have a gimmick.

Safran: things have changed

It’s safe to say things have changed a lot since Safran was a regular hot button-pushing provocateur on our screens. His last major series was 2009’s John Safran’s Race Relations; he spent much of the following decade appearing with Father Bob Maguire having a somewhat more subdued but no less insightful discussion about religion and social issues.

Here he’s back speaking to Nazis, porn stars, exorcists, lawyers and the kind of people who complain about ‘woke bs’. In between, Safran is frantically telling people ‘I’m not trying to be a troublemaker’ and turning up at a Free Speech Summit so secret its very location had to be blurred out. Directed by Tony Jackson (who also directed Who The Bloody Hell Are We?), it’s pretty much business as usual.

Initially it seems like the problem with free speech might be more that there’s limited interest out in the community for news about full-term abortions (it seems babies are being born healthy and then killed and nobody is talking about it!) and preventing Covid using the body’s natural electricity. But then it’s time for Holocaust denial, and things start to get real. Suddenly the idea that everyone should just be able to say what they want has consequences beyond having to listen to a crank talking about forced vaccinations.

While it’s always interesting to lift up a rock and see what crawls out, and Safran’s earlier television work proves he’s got a real nose for that side of things, what gives this a bit more of an edge is that today’s world is one where free speech is no longer seen by many as an absolute good. And those people opposed to it often have a lot of power, whether it’s online organisers or billionaires.

Back in the 90s, saying the unsayable was a way to show we had moved beyond the old issues that divided us. Today we’re all too aware that those issues are still with us, and in many ways have somehow gotten worse. When free speech too often means overt sexism, racism, and calls to harm other groups in society, Safran is in a bit of a bind.

To his credit, he’s well aware of this (he also gives out his phone number, if you’d like to give him a call). His take is that trying to blanket ban offensive speech often overreaches, and providing exemptions creates loopholes. Attitudes change over time too; porn used to be bad, now it’s vaguely feminist … unless you think porn leads to real violence and are willing to organise online campaigns against it. Which might be a problem for Safran, who owns a copy of Big Butts complete with 3D glasses.

Safran: classic stunts

It’s not all serious inquiries, as Safran wheels out a few classic stunts along the way. Asking a lawyer if he can get an artistic exemption to anti-Nazi laws to give someone he dislikes an ironic Zig Heil, trying to paint a flattering portrait of Gina Rinehart, inserting himself into the courtroom scene from A Few Good Men; you can’t keep a good prankster down.

At just over an hour (including ad breaks), this has a lot going on, and with some of the interviews being little more than a soundbite, it can occasionally feel a little like a highlights reel. While Safran rapidly runs through topics and speakers, he keeps his throughline consistent: trying to crack down on points of view causes more problems than it solves. Yes, even when that includes Nazis.

Safran has a case to argue here and while this doco does have its share of loose ends and bits that don’t really go anywhere, overall he does a solid job of it. It’s all the more interesting because it runs counter to what is increasingly the mainstream take across society as a whole: there are some groups that are too dangerous to allow to speak freely.

Safran goes on a bit of a journey as well – as one of Australia’s more high-profile Jews he is repeatedly confronted with offensive views directly targeted at him. Will this free speech defender find there are some things that just go too far? Or do we all deserve the right to be a bit of a jerk?

Shut Your Big Fat Mouth John Safran! premieres Sunday 24 May at 7:30pm on SBS or stream on SBS On Demand from 24 May.

Discover more screen, games & arts news and reviews on ScreenHub and ArtsHub. Sign up for our free ArtsHub and ScreenHub newsletters.