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EVERYONE thinks they're a comedian, but if you're planning to make your own contribution to the next comedy show you attend, be warned that heckling, like smoking, is increasingly on the nose.
Melbourne comedy doyen Anthony Morgan says he is a reformed heckler. "I don't encourage it; hecklers tend to have a lot of enthusiasm but not much wit," he says. It's the bitter voice of experience of a man who has faced the slings and arrows, not to mention curses and insults, of audience participation throughout the world.
"I've got the sort of face that people feel they can talk to me when I'm working," he says, with a quiet air of resignation. At one gig at the Edinburgh Festival in the 1980s, a drunken student shifted the heckling from verbal to physical, throwing a glass at Morgan during his routine. ""Without thinking I picked up the glass and said 'Where I come from we do this properly', and smashed the glass on my forehead. There was blood everywhere. Then I introduced the next act, and they said it looked fantastic, but it really shut the kid up." Still, Morgan hasn't made it part of his routine.
Melbourne comic Sammy J, winner of the comedy festival's best newcomer award last year, got his heckling baptism of fire at his third gig, when a bottle flew out of the crowd, narrowly missing him.
"I'd only been performing for a month at that stage, so it took me by surprise," he says. "But I was even more surprised when I was in the toilet and the guy who'd thrown the bottle stood next to me at the urinal and said, 'Great gig!' I guess he really thought he'd been helping me out by chucking that bottle."
Managing thoroughly sozzled crowds, though, is an essential part of the stand-up's trade. "I had a gig at the Adelaide Fringe recently with an audience that included a group of men celebrating a 50th birthday, some really drunk teenage girls, and the remnants of a bikie gang. Sometimes gigs can be as much about crowd control as comedy."
In the old days of the Last Laugh comedy club in Collingwood, Anthony Morgan got so sick of hecklers, he put a dummy on the stage and
did an entire routine from the audience, heckling the dummy.
Adelaide comic Mickey D reckons his worst heckler is his father. "He's seen me a few times, and when he's had a few too many he tells me I'm doing it all wrong." Sadly for Mickey D, his dad also steals his beer while he's performing.
D has tackled the fierce Edinburgh Festival audiences. "I was there during the Tampa controversy, and the day after the story broke in Scotland, when I came on stage a guy started yelling 'Let the Afghans in, you Aussie c---!' "It was no good trying to explain to him that I had no influence over Australian immigration policy. British audiences are pretty tough. Their attitude is 'Make me laugh, you f---er", whereas in Australia, it's more like 'Be funny, or we'll have to stare at you'."
While Mickey D has a night-time show at the Victoria Hotel, he's doubling up with a children's show in Federation Square, and says kids can be more brutally frank than adults. "This week we had some circus street performers doing their act, building up to their finale, and a kid in the audience yells out 'Hurry up!' It got the best laugh of the whole show. "The thing about kids is when they heckle, there's no malice there."
Today's Comedy Festival picks
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Mark Watson — I'm Worried that I'm Starting to Hate Almost Everyone in the World, 7pm, Hi-Fi Bar & Ballroom ■Alison Bice in The Wizard of Bice, 7.15pm, Melbourne Town HallYoung Melburnian Bice finds in The Wizard of Oz hilarious parallels with her life
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Fiona O'Loughlin, 7.30pm, Melbourne Town HallAustralia's Most Evil Mum (right) makes wicked sport of her unfortunate family.
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Lawrence Leung … Breakdance, 8.15pm, Trades HallLeung's quest to be cool makes for some of the festival's biggest belly laughs.
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Josie Long — Kindness and Exuberance, 8.45pm,British wunderkind Long finds joy in the details of everyday life.
Melbourne Town Hall
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Geraldine Quinn — SEXDEATHBOWIE, 9pm, CookieAnother swag of songs to trash your delicate senses.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-r...180528778.html Sam Simmons
Daniel Ziffer, Reviewer
April 23, 2007
Simmons is a star in the making and if you want it weird - he's your man. Genre
Comedy
LocationFederation Square
AddressCnr Swanston St and Flinders St, Melbourne
Date5 April 2007 to 29 April 2007
Tickets$20/$18
Phone Bookings1300 660 013
Online Bookingswww.comedyfestival.com.auDetailsTue - Sat 9.45pm, Sun 8.45pm. At the Bosco Theatre tent.
COMEDY FESTIVAL REVIEW ***½
Oddball Sam Simmons gives the crowd fair warning at the beginning of his absurdist comedy show.
"This is going to be weird," he notes plainly, speaking through underwear hanging on a clothes-line.
The sometime zookeeper and Triple J DJ wears a drab grey tracksuit and leaps from nonsensical songs about moths to videos about lint. There are no mother-in-law gags or jokes about G-strings, footballers or Naomi Robson. Other shows have a surplus of those, meaning the loopy stylings here resonate clearly and hilariously.
With his intimate circus tent catching some of the overflow from the consistently sold-out Chopper show, there are inevitably a few walk-outs who can't handle the zany flicks of Simmon's smarts.
It's their loss. Simmons is a star in the making and if you want it weird - he's your man.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts-r...180528372.html
Josh Thomas: Please Like Me
Helen Razer, Reviewer
April 23, 2007
The Comedy Festival's most junior player is also one of its best. Genre
Comedy
LocationMelbourne Town Hall
Address90-130 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Date5 April 2007 to 29 April 2007
Tickets$17.70/$15.50
Phone Bookings1300 660 013
Online Bookingswww.comedyfestival.com.auDetailsTue - Sat 9.30pm, Sun 8.30pm
COMEDY FESTIVAL REVIEW ****
As it turns out, the Comedy Festival's most junior player is also one of its best. Direct from adolescent hell and schoolies' setbacks, this Brisbane lad reports back with all the quaint fury of a chilled Holden Caulfield.
If you're inured to mid-level smut, you'll probably love this gig. Thomas views his hormonal lot with wry detachment. In enumerating his sagging sexual misadventures, he shows the disconnect between manhood as it is understood and manhood as it is experienced. He doesn't hesitate to paint himself a wilting failure teeming, we are told, with an oversupply of oestrogen.
His stories are populated by real, warm people. His eye for bathos and tat is extraordinary. This 19-year-old delivers a fat-free and fiercely funny slice of suburban life.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/comedy...e#contentSwap1 Naked peacenik on a mission
Stephanie Bunbury
April 18, 2007
Full-frontal Phil Nichol.
Photo: Erin Slattery
'Full frontal nudity," says Phil Nichol with absolutely no irony whatsoever, "is something you stop doing as you grow up. And I've just rediscovered it! I've rediscovered my passion for it, you know." I'm not sure, myself, that it's so sudden. The last time I saw Nichol doing stand-up, he pulled his jeans below his stomach and pretended to pull out pubic hairs as gifts for the audience. In his new show he takes off all his clothes and dances around the stage. I do wonder, rather, where he's going with the skin thing.
Nichol comes from Vancouver. He has lived in London for years, but still has the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed friendliness instantly recognisable as Canadian. I tell him I was half-expecting him to bring out a tray of muffins during the show. "I love muffins!" he says immediately. In fact, he confides, he's been making a lot of blueberry pancakes lately; he got his mum to send the mix from home.
"That is me. The thing is, you see me on stage and think 'wild man! crazy man! takes drugs and does crazy things!'," he says. "When, in fact, I'm a homebody who lives with his girlfriend. I like cooking; I am fond of animals and I would never wish any hurt to anyone."
Anyway, Phil Nichol's award-winning new show is called
The Naked Racist, which reviewed in yesterday's
Age received a four star rating. It is, roughly, an account of a trip he made to Amsterdam "to think", although it also takes in reflections on fetish clubs, Russian dissidents and how to ruin foreplay with a bad joke. "Daniel Kitson said, in print, that he hated comedians who started a show with 'last year I went to Amsterdam'," says Nichol. "And I thought 'that's it, I'm going to start my show with that line'. But I really did. People go to all sorts of places to do some thinking. And it is a good story."
Because he went on his own, the retreat turned into a series of encounters, mostly with other wackos in bars. One was with the racist of the title, a mercenary running a so-called security company in Iraq. "You know these people exist," he says. "But you rarely meet them and they don't open up to you the way he opened up to me that night. And the reason he did that was that I lied: I said that I was American and for the war in Iraq."
Whereas, of course, Nichol is a post-Woodstock peacenik, ready and willing to strip for what's right. "I have to stand up for this," he says, "because, without being corny, not enough comedians talk about it." Of course, it is almost de rigueur these days to swipe George Bush in passing; some people have told Nichol his targets are too easy.
"But while my being naked is a bit of a joke," he says, "I think we need to remind ourselves peace is possible, because otherwise we are all losing hope; it's like the Titanic has already tipped and we're sliding down the front of it on our fingernails. You know, when the war started here, there was huge two-million-person demonstration. But there hasn't been one since."
Despite all this, Nichol doesn't see himself as particularly political. His plea for peace is straight from the heart; it's about his own longing. "The last few shows I've done have been anecdotal shows about self-discovery," he says. The previous show, which didn't come to Melbourne, was called
Nearly Gay. It was sparked into life when out-and-proud gay comedian Scott Capurro accused him of being homophobic. "That took me on a route of self-discovery that took a couple of years," he says. "I realised I was trying to prove myself, over-compensating to my gay friends and other homosexual men to prove I wasn't gay after getting myself into situations I wouldn't have gotten into if I'd just said I wasn't."
Nichol has always been a manic presence on stage; after the pubic hair routine, he told me he would do anything, play any kind of fool, to get a laugh. He is still manic, but his comic priorities have changed: these days, he wants above all to be honest. The comedian Dave Gorman, who was in Melbourne a few years ago, gave him some advice he took to heart. "He said he was a comedian for years before he realised that jokes can actually distract the audience from the point.
"It is sometimes easier to go for the gag, because you are uncomfortable with silence but then, when you do say something truthful, they don't know what's truthful and what isn't. And in this show, I need the audience to believe what I'm saying is true so that when we get to the end and I say something I mean, which is that I want people to feel peace is possible, I want them to believe that."
At one point he delivers a torrent of one-liners precisely in order, he says, to let the audience see that they are not the point. "It never gets as big a laugh as the rest of the show," he says, "because people go: 'No, we don't want to hear that. Get back to the story!' It has that effect. And the really honest gags are funnier, because there is nothing quite so funny as something someone actually said."
Doing such personal material has, he thinks, changed his attitudes in the rest of his life. "I find myself becoming more honest. I was raised in a very strict Christian family where it was hard to admit things. We were loving, but not open. I couldn't have said to my dad I was masturbating. He would have said 'what are you doing? You mustn't do that!' "
He also realised, right in the middle of a tortuous conversation with his parents in which he was trying to tell them that when he talked about "E", he meant the mood-changing artificial colouring and flavourings known in Europe as "E-numbers", that they knew more than they had ever let on. "They are not as stupid as we think. They are adults. They watch TV, you know." He had already noticed that the elderly in his audiences were never as shocked as he expected.
"So I want to do a show now about ageism. Because we just forget that these people have lived through more suffering than we do now; they have fought in wars. They are not going to be shocked by a little full-frontal nudity." Go, granny, go. The next Phil Nichol show could, I suspect, take nakedness anywhere at all.
The Naked Racist, at the Victoria Hotel, 215 Little Collins Street, Tuesdays to Saturdays until April 29. Book on 1300 660 013