Stand-up Articles (General)

[Laney]

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...179154681.html


You can't be serious: it's boom-boom time for Australia's biggest jokers
By Brigid Delaney
July 5 2003

"Stand-up keeps you dirty" . . . Merrick and Rosso have used their radio fame to drive ticket sales for stand-up shows. Photo: Dallas Kilponen

If you can make your mates laugh, now is the time to act.

Book a room, engage in some guerrilla marketing, draw a crowd, develop a cult following, get noticed by a network, have your own TV or radio show, put out a book, DVD and video - then go back to stand-up to "keep yourself real".

Sydney is going through a comedy boom, with comics enjoying the kind of career path once reserved for rock stars. The boom is fuelled by television and radio stations featuring comedians recruited from the stand-up circuit.

Rob Logan, program director of 2Day FM, says comedians succeed on radio because of the "relatability factor".

"Through their stand-up experience they can tell 'me-too' relatable stories and incorporate political and social issues and make them funny."

Kane Teague, manager of the Comedy Store, says the stand-up scene is healthier than ever, with the high public recognition of comedians generating strong ticket sales for their stand-up shows.

"We like comedians with TV and radio exposure because they draw bigger crowds," Mr Teague says. "Over the last six months audience sizes have doubled [at the Comedy Store]. People are more aware of comedy because there are more comedians on TV and radio."

Comics enjoying cross-over success include Wil Anderson, Rove McManus, Dave Hughes, Wendy Harmer, Greg Fleet, John Saffran, Peter Berner, James O'Loghlin, Dave O'Neill and Merrick and Rosso.

Comics well known through other mediums are pushing ticket sales to all-time highs, says a spokeswoman for the Enmore Theatre.

The hottest comedy ticket in town is Merrick and Rosso, who host the breakfast show on Nova FM.

All 10 of the Enmore's upcoming Merrick and Rosso shows (16,000 seats) sold out; the first three sold in just 28 minutes.

"It's unprecedented," the Enmore spokeswoman says. "No Australian comedy act have come near it with ticket sales. They're operating at the level of the Jerry Seinfeld tour."

Comedy also succeeds in introducing "the DVD generation" to theatres, she says.

Merrick, one half of the comedy duo, says: "In the mid-90s stand-up comedy was dead, killed by the internet, PlayStation and recreational drugs. But now it's red hot and there's never been a better time to be a comedian."

Merrick says he and Rosso fill large venues through word of mouth - and "because we rate our tits off".

Stand-up is also a reality check for performers who spend more time in front of a microphone than a live audience.

"It's how you get respect as a performer," Rosso says. "Also I like to swear, and I can't do that on radio."

"I like to swear, too," Merrick says. "Stand-up keeps you dirty."

But he warns that young comedians need to work hard "and laterally" to get noticed.

"I flogged an overhead projector from a university, pretending to be a student. We gatecrashed poetry seminars at Melbourne Uni and filmed it for our shows. Twenty minutes at an RSL won't get you noticed."

[unfrufru]

u adelaide people, stop putting people into barrels and pay attention to your papers

http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au...E16422,00.html

Did you hear the one about the elephant with a drinking problem?
By PATRICK McDONALD
28jan06

SO what do comedians talk about when they get together over lunch? Oh, just the usual things – like Dave Hughes having faced up to a few overs from Australian fast bowler Brett Lee, Adam Hills competing with noise from rock bands at the recent Falls Festival, and Judith Lucy's unceremonious sacking from her radio show.

Melbourne's afternoon sun is shining off the waters of Port Phillip Bay as we gather on the mezzanine floor at the Espy, St Kilda's landmark Esplanade Hotel, for a late-afternoon graze.


As well as Hughes, Hills and Lucy, around the table are the father figure of modern Australian stand-up, Rod Quantock, Rove Live and Before the Game star Peter Helliar, Sarah Ward from comic hip-hop act Sista She and the three legs of Tripod, Scott "Scod" Egar, Steven "Gatesy" Gates and Simon "Yon" Hall.

Beyond festivals, the comedians say they rarely gather as a group or even see each other at gigs, where they are more likely to share the bill with a local MC and unknown support acts.

But there's no such thing as a free lunch (the comedians reckon their mutual agent will probably subtract the bill from their next cheque) so it's down to business: funny business.

Advertiser: So, has anyone heard any good jokes lately?

Scod: Mum, when I grow up, I want to be a musician. Son, you can't do both.

Ward: Why did the street performer cross the road? I don't know. I didn't hang around for that bit.

Lucy: I've got a bad one – a man came up in a furniture shop and told me this one. Why do elephants drink? To forget.

Hughesy: We never tell jokes like this – this is amazing. I'm trying to think of one I know.

Scod: I can never remember jokes – I can never remember THOSE jokes.

Hughesy: I've got one. A man walked into his house and said to his wife ... no, that's not it. A man walked into his house with a duck and said to his wife ... no (much laughter from all). A man walked into his house with a duck and said ... (more laughter).

Quantock: How could you get that wrong?

Hills: I reckon that's why we do comedy. I can remember other people's acts but I can't remember jokes.

Advertiser: Why is Melbourne the comedy capital of Australia? What makes this city funny – and Sydney not so?

Yon: Is it just because the weather's bad so people stay in more? People go out, but they don't go out to the beach. They go out to a venue.

Lucy: I reckon there is something to that. I reckon people in Sydney go: "Why would I go to a dark room?"

Gatesy: Look at Britain. It's a miserable place, grey and cold, and that's where the best comedy comes from.

Scod: Melbourne seems to have a longer attention span. There's a listening thing that goes on here.

Helliar: Heckling is a sport in Sydney. They like to heckle more in Sydney than in Melbourne, they really see it as a sport.

Lucy: This is just a weird observation I made the year I turned 30 – nearly eight years ago. I had a line in a show where I mentioned that I'd just turned 30. The reaction was the same every night in the various cities. In Adelaide, every night, everyone laughed – clearly thinking I was 47. In Sydney, everybody clapped like it was the Oprah Winfrey show – and in Melbourne, silence. It was like "We don't give a ... how old you are. Just make with the gags, funny lady". It was weird.

Advertiser: How does the Adelaide Fringe now fit into the wider comedy circuit? There's an impression that a lot of comedians like to use it as a sounding board to workshop new shows before taking them to the Melbourne Comedy Festival, or to get reviews for publicity purposes.

Lucy: I can honestly say that I've never received a good review in Adelaide, ever. Starting off with my first review which just said "simply awful" (much laughter and applause), to my last review I got there, which was "cheap, boring diatribe" (more hilarity). I'm actually very grateful that Adelaide audiences seem to ignore the reviews, largely.

Hughesy: When you are starting off, you love a good review, because often you are not getting an audience, so that's all you've got. Then you get to a level where you're scared you don't want a bad one, because it makes you have a bad day. You almost don't want a review. Reading a good review, the joy you get from that is nowhere near the annoyance you get from a bad one.

Helliar: My second show, I had a review in The Age and the headline was: "Peter, you're funnier than this". It was quite personally directed to me. I'd just started on Rove then, in '99, and was doing a lot of sketches, so that's what they expected the show to be. It totally got to me – my girlfriend had to take the newspaper away from me and throw it in the bin.

Gatesy: There's no way we can take it personally if Tripod gets a bad review.

Hills: Do you notice how each one of us can remember exactly the words of these reviews?

Ward: You can't remember the good ones.

Helliar: After the World Cup game where we (Australia) got through in Sydney, I was at a pub watching it. As I walked out, a few people said on the way through: "Like what you do. Love what you do." Walking down the street, more people said: 'Like what you do. Love what you do. Blah blah blah." The last guy I spoke to said: "Peter Helliar – you're as funny as cancer." (Laughter). And that's the guy I remember.

Lucy: That's appalling.

Advertiser: Those lines from the bad reviews and the punters in the street: do they find their way back into your acts?

Hughesy: They become material, absolutely. No one wants to hear about the good times – people want to hear about the s...

Hills: There is actually a comic's joke, with two guys talking about another comedian: "Did you hear about Barry?"

"No. What happened?" "He got a TV deal."

"Hadn't heard about that."

"Apparently he's gone to LA and they are going to give him a sitcom, a 26-part series."

"Didn't hear anything about it."

"Really? It was just after he did that huge gala in Melbourne."

"Nuh, didn't hear anything about it."

"He did a gig in Port Fairy last week and died on his arse."

"Oh, yeah. I heard all about that."

Lucy: (To Tripod) Boy, I really envy people when there's more than one of you. It (comedy) can be obviously a very solitary thing. So, especially when you do have a bad experience, it's nice to be able to get together with other comedians.

Quantock: I mean, you put yourself forward as yourself in public and not many people do that. It takes a fair bit of resilience to cope with the worst that can be thrown at you in public.

Scod: It's part of what we do – say to people: "Look, we all have s... things happen to us."

Advertiser: Is that part of the comedian's job, to bleed publicly while others see and share the pain?

Gatesy: In song – definitely (laughs).

Ward: I think comedy is one of the last bastions of true speech and it's really exciting to be part of a community that can educate people and make people feel something.

Helliar: I tend not to educate, to be honest. We're different kinds of comedians. Rod and Judith are really different comedians from what myself and Hughesy and Adam are. I get up there and hopefully people can escape for an hour and have a laugh and I'm happy.

Gatesy: The best stuff is the "real" stuff. It took us ages to discover that, because we would make up stuff, but the things audiences would respond to was the real stuff.

Hughesy: It can be really, really simple.

Advertiser: There seems to be an increasing conservatism creeping through from the political sphere. Do you feel like you are some of the last people on Earth who can actually get up and say what you think?

Scod: It's the getting-up-there factor that makes it weird. People say what they think to each other all the time. We just need to have this weird controlled environment.

Hughesy: It is true though: If you can say things with a joke, you can pretty much say anything. You can make a point – and you are more likely to have people listen to you.

Ward: If you look at someone like Chris Rock in the (United) States, he is pretty much a political power on his own. He's got a huge following ... people really respect what he says and he can change the way people vote.

Quantock: Because there's so much anti-Bush, anti-Republican comedy, the Republicans actually put together a four-man comedy roadshow which had a lot of anti-Clinton stuff and a lot of anti-Gore stuff because people under 30 now in America get all their political information from comedy.

(On the question of live v TV comedy)

Quantock: There's no fourth wall. There are just some people who connect with the audience. Others don't. I introduced a fellow one day who was only 17 or 18 and his stuff was just vile – I cannot describe it. It was just foul and vile, and it was just awful. Nobody laughed. And when he came off, he said to me: "Your introduction to me ruined my gig." (Laughter)

Hughesy: Which brings us to self-denial.

Quantock: There are a lot of self-deluded comics, as there are singers – people who don't know they're off-key, who insist on singing. There are a lot of comedians who never "hear" the audience.

Helliar: I almost have more respect for the comedian who has done it for years and years and dies in 99 per cent of those gigs but still does it. I would have given up after 10 bad gigs.

Advertiser: What drives a person to get up and do comedy?

Quantock: Alcohol.

Helliar: Certainly, when I – and everyone besides Rod and Judith – started, it's become a much more legitimate career choice. When Rod started, there was no scene really. He started that. So I think their reasons were a bit more pure than ours. Now when you start doing comedy – and we started in the mid-'90s, most of us – there was a chance of doing radio and television.

Advertiser: There is a real career path now, isn't there?

Helliar: That's not to say we don't love doing it – it's the reason we still do stand-up. We all still absolutely love doing it. But it certainly is a more legitimate career choice.

Hughesy: You need a passion for it.

Advertiser: Is stand-up the most gratifying work that you do?

Lucy: I think so. John Cleese was on The 7.30 Report the other week and he was basically saying how he's finding it difficult to get a television show. So he's doing a one-man (live) show and he's loving it, because he says no one can tell you what to do.

Quantock: I think one of the great things about what we do is that you are never perfect: You are always learning.

Hughesy: I've never done a gig that was boring. It might have been difficult, but it was never boring. Even if I'm doing the same jokes I've done 1000 times, I'm never bored on stage.

Hills: I met a comedian a couple of years ago in Edinburgh and he said: "It takes 10 years to find your comic voice." Which I'd heard before. Then he said: "But your voice changes."

Quantock: It's a very long apprenticeship. You do get to a stage where nothing surprises you any more. I'm sure all of us have done venues where the sound system doesn't work, the lights are lousy, the sightlines are impossible, the change room is a toilet. Then you get corporate gigs where everything works.

Scod: Except the audience (laughter).

Quantock: I did an Italian birthday in a concrete backyard in Brunswick about 25 years ago. I've done things on stairways, in people's lounge rooms, under tents in backyards, all sorts of things. From every one of those gigs, you learn something.

Gatesy: I've learned more from the bad gigs than good ones.

Quantock: And you learn more from watching comedians who are no good than you do watching comedians who are good.

Ward: The weirdest gig we did was a barmitzvah and we were performers number 62 of the day – there were 85 performers.

Hills: What's nice is there are groups of performers all around the world telling the same stories.

Hughesy: I once had to do a gig at a Toorak home where the guy had just lost his job and I did this routine about being on the dole. His wife wanted me to surprise him at his birthday by dressing in his tennis clothes and carrying his tennis racquet and walking into a room full of people – like grandmothers – and do this dole routine in his tennis gear, talking about him losing his job.

Hills: I did one for the English rugby team after they had won the World Cup. There were like 1500 people in a ballroom in London and they did a Nativity scene, which was just terrible, but at one point they went: "Is that a star in the east?" And the spotlight went up to security guards holding the World Cup. The whole place went off. Just before I went on, Jeffrey Archer was conducting an auction.

Lucy: How did that go?

Hills: It was the first time I've been booed on-stage, as I've actually walked on. It was like "We've got an Australian comedian" and they just started booing – then at the seven-minute mark, they came good and the last five minutes were fine.

Hughesy: That's years of experience to be able to go through that and come out.

Ward: What's with heckling? What's with comedy that the audience all of a sudden feels like they can join in?

Lucy: A friend of mine said to me that it's the only form of entertainment that's Dickensian. You might as well be back in the 19th century. It's people hanging out with their tankards, getting blind.

Ward: But there's a point, don't you think? I was in Edinburgh at the Phat Cave, which is a late-night gig from midnight to 3am. The night we hosted, there were about 12 guys who were at some bucks' night, all dressed up in tennis outfits, yelling out: "Anna Kournikova." And the comedians they didn't like, they threw tennis balls at. Hard!

Hughesy: They are the hardest gigs I've ever done, Edinburgh late-night. When I was doing it in '99, it was advertised as "Come to the comedy abattoir, where a thousand comedians have been slain". I had about a 100 people chanting "F... off, Aussie. F... off" before I'd even spoken my first word.

(On the Adelaide Fringe)

Quantock: My first Adelaide Fringe was the year the Queen came to open the Lion Arts Centre. Then I didn't do it for a long time, but I've probably done the last four or five. We'll all admit that it's an out-of-town tryout for the (Melbourne) Comedy Festival but, equally, you can't go over there and dish up s...

Helliar: I absolutely love Adelaide Fringe. It's great fun. Adelaide Fringe is probably one of the few times when we all do get together and we can see each other's shows.

Lucy: Melbourne's a bit different if you're a Melbourne comedian – sometimes you'll just do the show and go home.

Helliar: There's something about being out of town that's really nice. Lucy: (Adopting a rock'n'roll attitude) Yeah, we're on tour.

[Spoofy]

I saw it...I spent most of yesterday typing it between serving clients, and I was about to post it when I just saw this post.... :Þ

[Renee_Turner]

Originally Posted by unfrufru

"Peter Helliar – you're as funny as cancer."

Am I the only twisted child who thinks cancer can be funny?

The worst comment I've heard was "he's just another white male comic". I told him to do a festival show and make that the title.

[unfrufru]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...E16947,00.html

R U being funny?
Race riots, the crucifixion, abortion pills ... some stand-up comics will say anything to get a laugh, writes Fiona Scott-Norman


March 11, 2006



VERY few things are as easy as they look - with the rule-proving exception of Paris Hilton, who is precisely as easy as she looks. But whether coaching your team to the grand final, painting modern art or producing more than three hours per year of watchable Australian television drama, the things that we reckon we, Blind Freddie or a five-year-old could do with one hand tied often require a deceptive amount of complexity and skill.

The ultimate example is comedy. It is so simple, necessary and ubiquitous that a good sense of humour is our primary requirement in a life partner. There are four comedy festivals running across Australia during the next few weeks and, for most of us, a night out without a good laugh is as unsatisfying as coming fourth at the Olympics.

On the other hand, as the actor Edmund Gwenn said on his deathbed: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." For all that a laugh bubbles up as effortlessly as a fart in a bath, it requires a lot of craft and thought to get the joke that provoked it just right.

Plato and Freud had a bash at explaining how comedy works, but no one understands the workings of a joke better than performers left with egg on their faces if they mess it up. Review asked some of the best local and international stand-up comedians appearing at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, Sydney's Big Laugh and Cracker Festivals, and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, for their favourite joke - and then to explain how and why it works.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is common ground. Sydney comics Tom Gleeson and Akmal Saleh both nominated jokes about the Cronulla riots and both used their ethnic origins - Tom's very Anglo, Akmal's Egyptian-Arab - for comic effect.



http://[img]http://mercury.tiser...id=1[/img]




Gleeson: "I was watching news footage of the Cronulla riots on the telly. Saw a guy with red hair and freckles saying to a guy of Middle Eastern appearance: 'You don't belong on thebeach'."

Saleh: "I live in Brighton-Le-Sands, which is where all the reprisals and revenge attacks happened. I'm married to a white Australian girl. A week before the riots I was getting text messages from the Lebs. And she was getting text messages from the Aussies. We thought, 'This is ridiculous, we can't go out and be partof this.' So we stayed home and beat each other up."

Gleeson thinks his joke works because of the underlying truth that Europeans don't belong in this hemisphere. "It exposes a certain hypocrisy. It's also funny that I'm going really hard on a redhead when I am one. It also always works, no matter what your political view is - the best jokes are the ones that don't divide the audience."

Gleeson's and Saleh's jokes work because they're topical.

"My favourite jokes are always my new ones because they're fresh and delivered with more passion," Saleh says. "The more universal the subject matter, the less it dates. Sadly for the world, but fortunately for my comedy, I think terrorism and racism are going to be with us for a long time."

Gleeson acknowledges that writing topical material can be wasteful for a comic because it has a short shelf life, but there are also many advantages.

"When a joke is topical, the subject is right in the forefront of the audience's brain, so you get an explosive reaction," he says.

Social commentary is not for every comedian: some are drawn to politics, others are not. Veteran stand-up Jackie Loeb focused entirely on light and fluffy until two years ago.

"I didn't have anything to be angry about before. I got really upset about the whole thing with RU486," she says.

"I don't think anyone has the right to control a woman's body and politicians like Tony Abbott seem to think that all women will have unprotected sex with 20 different men and just pop an RU486 in the morning. I don't mean to sound sexist but I think I'm about to: if men could fall pregnant there'd be an abortion express lane at Coles."

According to Loeb, this joke, her current favourite, gets an amazing reaction. "The women howl with laughter," she says. "I think it's because there's truth in there: the boys look after the boys. I do like shocking people. It's a fine line because I don't want to alienate anyone, but I have the power to say things that people don't have the opportunity to express. It's a release, a catharsis, that's why this works."

The allure of a "hot" topic is that if you hit an audience just right you can get a tremendous response. Rachel Berger cites a religious joke she did years ago as her favourite because of the reaction. "I'm Jewish," she says. "I grew up in a deli. Every Easter, around Good Friday, some kid would remind me that the Jews killed Christ. I'd explain that it was the Romans who killed Christ and that my parents were there, but they did the catering. I never really believed that Christ was crucified; I think he was just trying to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture.

"Whenever I did that joke, a Christian would come up to me after the gig and say, 'It's OK, we forgive you Rachel'. And inevitably a Jew would appear and whisper in my ear, 'Why are you reminding them?'

"Part of the joke is the emancipation of laughing at our own fears and from relieving the audience's guilt. It comes from me exposing my vulnerabilities, coming from a race who have been persecuted for thousands of years. Everyone in the audience has their own demons. It's like AA - 'Hello. I'm Rachel and I'm full of fear'."

Not all jokes are as deep. Several comics gave one-liners as their favourite and explained that they were structured as simple examples of leading the audience in one direction, then reversing the audience's expectation and surprising them with the punchline.

"I had my own apartment but it became too expensive. So now I'm sharing a place with some old buddies. My parents." - Arj Barker.

"I grew up black and Jewish, which means that I'm proud, yet I feel guilty about it." - Rain Pryor (Richard Pryor's daughter).

"I'm so excited about the Commonwealth Games ... being over." - Corinne Grant.

"When I was 14 I lost my virginity to a 36-year-old woman wearing a Yoda mask. I knew it was wrong at the time, but hey, I really, really liked Yoda." - Sam Simmons.

"I've noticed people looking at me in public, in the supermarket. They keep on staring at me and eventually they'll come over and approach me. And ask me to get out of their trolley." - Damian Callinan.

This was the first one-liner Callinan ever wrote and he's found that it's become more effective since he appeared on Skithouse and got a TV profile. "The art of good stand-up is getting people to believe that what you're saying is true so they'll come on the journey with you," he says. "It seems more plausible, now, that I'm going to big-note myself."

Another comic who has found that fame helps sell a joke is American Maria Bamford, who had her own TV special in the US. "Once you're on TV, oh my God, the difference in the audience is like night and day, because they've come to see you," she says. "You don't have to accustom them to your style."

Bamford's style, which relies a lot on her characterisations, can verge on the absurd: "I'd like one of those home-decorating shows to come into my brain and do some work. Say, you know, 'There's a lot of things in here that are pre-1985. Let's move it out. A lot of fear in here. The fear of cats. Is that a fear of the musical or actual cats? OK, let's toss it out. Fear of failure? You know, that might be useful, keep it. Fear of death by suffocation by balloons. You know, that's taking a lot of space, do you need that?'

"If someone is passionate about something, it tends to be funny. I think this works because I do have a lot of fears and anxieties and the joke comes from a genuine desire to have my brain revamped in some way. And it's two things you don't expect to find together. And I think balloons is a funny word."

Most comics agree on the importance of common ground with the audience. This is certainly true for Joe Avati, an Italian-Australian comic who has made it big with ethnic audiences in the US.

"When they caught Saddam Hussein, my grandfather said he thought he must be Italian," Avati says. "I asked why and my grandfather said, 'Because he had $US750,000 under the mattress when they found him'.

"It works because it's a stereotyping of elderly Italian behaviour. For my audience, which comes from that sub-culture, it's as though my jokes are written specifically about their family, their mum and dad, their grandparents. That makes it personal, which makes it funnier."

On the flipside, one of Rod Quantock's most successful jokes hinged on him having nothing in common with his audience at all. "I was performing in a nightclub to an extremely young crowd and these young comedians were getting up trying to connect with the audience by saying, 'Did you see Desperate Housewives last night? Did you see Big Brother?' Then it got to my turn and I came out and I said, 'So, did anybody watch Compass the other night?'

"I think this works because the punchline is unexpected, but it's exactly what people think I would be watching. And if I had control of the remote in my own home I would be. There's a vulnerability there because I'm admitting my own mortality - that experience was the first time I'd felt old. I felt the chasm of struggling to fit in. And the joke also exploits our expectation of the vacuousness of young people's lives."

The final word has to go to Roy Chubby Brown, renowned as the bluest comic in the UK. He's been tossing out one-liners for more than 40 years and has a cult following. He has a couple of favourites in the classic mould: "Eh, did you read about that bloke got mugged in the library? Why didn't he whisper for help?" And the line he opened with at his first working-man's club four decades ago. "Good evening. My wife's got two c---s. I'm one of them.

"The rules of comedy should be there are no rules," Brown says. "If saying f--- gets you a laugh, use it. I believe in freedom of speech. And what works depends on your audience. I was entertaining road sweepers and van drivers, the clever stuff never got a laugh with me. And now I'm famous for the character I developed. But you know what? We all get known for the one thing, none of us gets all the gifts, no one gets everything in one package." Catch comedy at the Adelaide Fringe until March 19; Cracker comedy festival, Sydney, until April 9; Big Laugh Comedy Festival, Parramatta, March 28-April 9; and Melbourne International Comedy Festival, April 12-May 7.