Pack of Jokers

[Munchkin]

Pack of jokers
By David Smiedt
Sun Herald 31/10/2004

From the Melbourne University revue to the airwaves of Triple J, Australia's comedians have long found inspiration in numbers. Here, we profile eight of the tribes that have produced Australia's finest and funniest.
In the brutally simple equation that is comedy, either you slay them or you die. The comedian faces the audience with just their material, their courage and a desperate hope that the crowd will be kind. It takes a lot of confidence to be a comic. Comedians need to be able to withstand both hecklers and that sinking feeling when the material that seemed so funny in the lounge room falls as flat as the Nullarbor onstage. Usually, only other comedians can understand the pain.

So that's why gangs of like-minded comics at the early stages in their careers often began to work in groups, where there's no fear of failure or judgement. This is the womb in which a comedy tribe gestates.

Often forming with no more than a gig or two in mind, comedy tribes - think Newcastle's Castanet Club, Melbourne's D-Generation or the Fast Forward crew - have had one hell of a funny effect on the Australian comic landscape. It's from these eight tribes that some of our most hilarious stars have emerged. The only common denominator is a lack of rivalry between the clans.

"Our community is small and we generally have all worked at the same venues for years," says The Comedy Company's Mark Mitchell. "All of the teams who emerged [in the late '80s to early '90s] were different so any sense of competition was diluted. We admired each others' talents and thought in terms of teams rather than pretenders to our crown or theirs."

Comic Mikey Robins agrees. "Getting hung up on who is having a hit will send you mad. If you've been a comic for a while, you realise that it all evens out over five or 10 years. I will have a beer with any comedian in any pub in Australia at any time."

With this in mind, we raise our glasses to Australia's best-loved comedy tribes.


Tribe 1: The Jays

From the moment it launched onto the airwaves in 1975 with Skyhooks' You Just Like Me 'Cos I'm Good In Bed, radio station 2JJ (it added another J when it switched to the FM band five years later) announced its presence as a hard-rockin', rule-breaking station designed to make exasperated parents use the phrase "Well, in my day..." Comedy has been part of its formula since day one and, although they hailed from a smorgasbord of tribes, the performers who found their way to a national audience through the network include Doug Mulray, John Clarke and John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver (aka Roy Slaven and H.G. Nelson).

One of the reasons the station's influence has been so profound is that it is government funded and therefore not founded to turn a profit. As a result, the Triple J comedy ethos was never subject to the commercial stations' paranoia that unless the jokes were dumbed down so everyone got every one, listeners would seek entertainment elsewhere on the FM dial. This creative freedom produced material that could balance silly and cerebral and performers who were given time to grow into themselves.

"There is a culture of encouraging people to find their voice," says Mikey Robins, who began hosting the station's breakfast show with Helen Razer in 1991. "They kept us on air for our first year when we weren't much chop. It's now happening with The Chaser guys [on Today Today], who sound better every week."


Tribe 2: The Wogs

Frustrated by the sparse, stereotypical roles on offer for a young, classically trained Greek actor in 1987, Nick Giannopoulos and stand-up comic Simon Palomares wrote a fringe show with a title they felt described their predicament: Wogs Out Of Work.

Monaro jokes galore and characters that prompted "Ohmigawds" of recognition spawned a multimedia beast that would fill Melbourne's Athenaeum and Sydney's Enmore theatres for 10-month runs apiece, introduce Mary Coustas's Effie to Australia and give rise to the TV sitcom Acropolis Now (co-created by George Kapiniaris). It would also lead to The Wog Boy, which had Australian film's most successful opening weekend and grossed more than $10 million.

Through characters such as a cantankerous Greek widow and a gel-laden suburban Adonis, Palomares and his cohorts were able to comment on Australian culture with that most powerful of comic commodities - distance - which made the familiar feel alien and vice versa.

"For the ethnic audiences, it mirrored life at home," says Palomares. "They lived in this alien world that nobody could possibly understand and suddenly they were in a theatre full of people who felt emancipated because everybody had shared the same experience."

Hung Le, a Vietnamese stand-up who was part of the Wog-A-Rama show, says, "One of the most potent side effects of what you might call ethnic comedy is that it combats prejudice. We now have performers like Akmal Saleh - an Arab comedian."


Tribe 3: The D-Gen and beyond

The shows were meant to be extracurricular diversions on the road to qualifying for other careers but a string of revues at Melbourne University from 1982 to 1984 were such hits that they had various cast members reassessing their futures. They also brought together a group of performers, including Tom Gleisner, Rob Sitch, Mick Molloy, Michael Veitch, Magda Szubanski, Marg Downey and eventually Tony Martin, who called themselves The D-Generation.

After a sketch series on the ABC, The D-Generation Goes Commercial was screened by Channel Seven and introduced Szubanski's Lyn Postlethwaite character (who said love, who said pet, who said love). The D-Gen went on to conquer FM radio in Melbourne and scored another television success with The Late Show. In 1994, Martin and Molloy broke away from the ensemble to run their eponymous drive-time radio show on the Austereo network. It included such stunts as trying to see how many times they could get the owner of Shed World to use the word "shed" in conversation and extracting a confession from Rose Hancock Porteous that she ironed her underpants.

Meanwhile, Gleisner, Santo Cilauro, Jane Kennedy and Sitch satirised the world of current affairs television with Frontline. Through the Working Dog company, the core members of The D-Generation have produced feature movies such as The Dish and

The Castle - films so warmly received by many Australians that "they went straight to the pool room". The troupe also breathed new life into live television through The Panel and continued to spoof Australian culture with shows such as Russell Coight's Outback Adventures, starring Kath & Kim's Glenn Robbins in the title role.

Robbins maintains that one of the primary reasons behind The D-Gen's ongoing success is the atmosphere its members have consciously created. "Because Working Dog is such a non-competitive environment, you know that if you go out on a limb and fall, someone will catch you."

It's all about "good product and creativity - not money", he adds. "It's simple: if they like the idea, they take it further. For example, when Tom Gleisner approached me to do Russell, he said, 'Let's go film some stuff and only if we like it do we take it to the next stage. If we don't, we don't.'

"You immediately relax - there's none of that pressure to be funny by Thursday night. You roll the camera and see what happens."


Tribe 4: The Castanet Club

In the mid-1980s, the lure of live rock had many a Newcastle publican envisioning their establishment filled with thirsty patrons. The bands hired to play these makeshift stages were often not the skilled musicians they had promised they were and there were only so many times an audience would stand for Smoke On The Water in one night.

One of these bands was the Castanet Club and one of its members was Steve Abbott (better known as the Sandman). "We were terrible musicians and covered up by apologising - which is where our humour started. We developed a self-deprecating style of performance by accident," he says of the group he describes as "a mixture of art school, rock and theatre".

Despite Abbott's insistence that the group gained a following in large part due to the solid supply of parking near its gigs, the Castanet Club's charm was its imperfect characters who were the antithesis of the hard-nosed, too-cool stand-up comedians who were packing them in at the Comedy Store in Sydney.

Angela Moore's Shirley Purvis and Sandman were as flawed as the audience, so they struck a chord even when the performers flubbed theirs. Other Castanet clubbers included Glenn Butcher, Penny Biggins and disco and lounge music-obsessed DJ Maynard.

"When I started on Triple J, I had been doing Sandy for 12 years onstage," says Abbott, "so I had done a lot of preparation in using disappointment as a wonderful fertiliser and failure as a means to success." Newcastle was "like a laboratory," he

explains. "We worked in isolation. We were able to make a lot of mistakes but not under the scrutiny of a national audience."

The Castanet Club eroded as members such as Mikey Robins and Abbott moved to Sydney to work on Triple J and Glenn Butcher joined the Full Frontal team in Melbourne, while others simply ditched the erratic showbiz life when mortgages

and children came along.


Tribe 5: Melbourne stands up

"Traditionally, there were certainly more gigs in Sydney where comedy was only on at the venue to justify some obscure clause in a pokies' licence," notes native Melburnian Wil Anderson. "So there was no door charge, no real stage, the green room was a toilet, the microphone was a rolled-up newspaper and they didn't turn off the dogs from Dapto when you were performing. Therefore, you had to do the sort of comedy to get that audience's attention."

For many comics, this translated to an in-your-face style of delivery with rapid-fire punchlines. Or in the words of Adam Hills, "Hit 'em hard and hit 'em often."

In the Victorian capital, however, the audiences had been schooled through mixed-bill theatre restaurants where they might have seen character-based sketches, traditional stand-up and musical comedy numbers on the one night. What's more,

by the late '90s, Melbourne was hosting one of the world's leading comedy festivals and was also home to a number of venues where new comics could try out their material and find their stage legs. Anderson notes the weekly line-up at one such venue, Elbow Grease, in 1999, would frequently include himself, Rove McManus, Merrick and Rosso, Corinne Grant, Peter Helliar and Dave Hughes.

"Often there would be 10 comics on the bill and when one would do new material, you'd feel like you had to follow suit," says Hughes, who co-hosts the ABC's The Glass House with Anderson and Grant. He believes this was not only an inspiring atmosphere but also the perfect combination of healthy competition and mutual support: "This environment laid the foundation for further collaboration."


Tribe 6: The Comedy Company crew

In 1988, the unthinkable happened one Sunday night on national TV. The Nine Network's 60 Minutes was edged out of the No. 1 slot by The Comedy Company. However, as happened to Rove McManus's Rove Live more than a decade later, the show only came about after the Seven Network got cold feet and Network Ten picked it up. Anxious to dip a toe into a burgeoning comedic talent pool, Seven had put out a casting call for a skit show to be entitled The Eleventh Hour. Among its characters were Glenn Robbins's havoc-wreaking Uncle Arthur, Mary-Anne Fahey's Kylie Mole, whose single So Excellent went platinum, Ian McFadyen's David Rabbitborough and Kim Gyngell's Col'n Carpenter.

"It wasn't like the D-Gen," says Gyngell, who has just released The Very Best Of Colin Carpenter on DVD. "We had no real history or expectations of each other. We all had to get to know each other and be supportive of each other." There was, he says, a "visceral joyousness" in the studio when The Comedy Company was starting to kick in. "We had huge studio audiences and it was exciting. They related to it like they do to Australian Idol now. The feeling in the room was just dynamite."

"The key to the show's success was the degree to which it lionised the commonplace and familiar," says Mark Mitchell, whose Con the Fruiterer even enticed then PM Bob Hawke to appear in a sketch. "Above all, our approach was affirmative. It was all about celebration rather than carping criticism or elitism."


Tribe 7: The Vizard gang

Two members of The Eleventh Hour troupe were not invited to make the journey to Network Ten for The Comedy Company. One was Peter Moon, the other Steve Vizard, who subsequently negotiated with the Seven Network to start a sketch series called Fast Forward. The cast eventually included Michael Veitch, Jane Turner, Magda Szubanski, Rod Quantock, Geoff Brooks, Steve Blackburn and, later, Glenn Robbins and Gina Riley.

"The thing about Fast Forward that was different to most shows is that the majority of the cast were also writers," says Moon. "In the end, it was your arse on the line and there was no one else to blame."

Among Moon's best-known characters was the lecherous Victor Rasputin, who co-hosted Good Morning Moscow with Sveta Pavlova (Jane Turner) and assaulted her weekly with flirtations such as "Sveta, I'd like to stretch your limo sometime." (To which she would routinely reply, "Victor, you are a very unattractive man.") He also played the giggling kung-fu guru to Steve Vizard's student and could barely make it through a sketch without breaking up when improvising names for his charge. These

off-the-cuff remarks and the cast's often futile efforts to control themselves in the face of them became one of the show's best-loved attributes.

By the third season, burnout became a problem for the cast, who had only a week to write and perform each show. In addition, many of the cast

felt they were beginning to repeat themselves and decided to extinguish Fast Forward. The new blood and fresh ideas that followed in its wake took the form of Full Frontal, which saw Eric Bana, Shaun Micallef, the Castanet Club's Glenn Butcher and The Comedy Company's Kim Gyngell join stalwarts such as Jane Turner, Gina Riley and Glenn Robbins.


Tribe 8: Kids of The Comedy Store

In 1981, Sydneysider Rodney Keft (who preferred the stage surname Rude) returned from performing in the United States and placed a classified ad seeking talent to perform at a new venue called The Comedy Store, located beneath the ritzy Jamison Street nightclub in the city's CBD. Keft had a hunch that the raw, interactive and observational stand-up style of comedy that was booming in the US would go down a treat with young local punters. He was right.

Among those who responded to the ad and took their place on the Store's cramped stage with only their put-downs for protection were George "I'm Tuff" Smilovici, Vince Sorrenti, Ric Carter and Austen "How much can a koala bear" Tayshus (aka Sandy Guttman).

Taking to the mic with material based on daily life, speaking the language of the streets and inviting the audience to have a go if they thought they were funny enough, these performers blew apart traditional notions of joke-based routines.

When the initial raft of performers hung up their mics, absconded to the more lucrative climes of corporate gigs or went on to work in television or radio in the early 1990s, a new generation took their place. With them, came a change in attitude.

"By the '90s, audiences had gotten over the novelty factor of being able to come along and hurl abuse at the comic to constitute a good night out," says comic Adam Hills, who launched his career at the Store and has been nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe three years running. "Management recognised this and sought performers who gave a gentler and more intelligent bent to Sydney comedy."

In recent years, the headline spots have included Triple J's Adam Spencer, Sarah Kendall (who was nominated for this year's Perrier) and the team behind The Chaser and CNNNN. These performances were topical, low on innuendo and used cabaret techniques that were forbidden by the first generation of stand-ups. As Hills says, these comedians "brought a bit of heart to what they do".

[Munchkin]

[article continues]



1899

Sydney's Tivoli Theatre burns down and rebuilding costs force the owner to use local talent instead of imported US acts.


1912

Bert Bailey adapts Steele Rudd's On Our Selection for the stage and over the next four years a million people turn up to laugh at Dad and Dave.


1916

Vaudevillians supreme Stiffy (Nat Phillips) and Mo (Roy Rene) debut at the Princess Theatre in Sydney. George Wallace emerges from the vaudeville pack as one of Australia's first comic stars.


1932

On Our Selection is released as a film. It plays around the country for three years and in some cinemas runs six times longer than their previous best-attended film.


1942

Actor and comedian Slim DeGrey stages a comedy show for fellow Australian POWs in Changi with the blessing of their captors.


1947

Roy Rene's McCackie Mansion - featuring the phrase of the day, "Cop this, young 'Arry" - makes its radio debut as part of the Calling The Stars program.


1954

Sydney's Phillip Street Theatre stages its first revue, starring Charles "Bud" Tingwell, Gordon Chater and Margot Lee.


1955

Melbourne poet, artist and actor Barry Humphries debuts a creation known as Edna Everage.


1957

In Melbourne Tonight is launched with Graham Kennedy at the helm. Along with sidekick Bert Newton, Kennedy made live television (skits included) seem effortless and - despite the odd infamous "seagull call" moment - is still acknowledged as the king of Australian television. Who else, after watching a belly dancer roll a row of 20-cent coins from head to tails would remark, "That's nothing. On a good night, she can change a 20 [dollar bill]."


1965

The Mavis Bramston Show - a series of satirical skits starring Gordon Chater, Carol Raye and Barry Creyton - goes national and is an immediate success.


1966

The hit sitcom My Name's McGooley, What's Yours? is launched and the cast includes Judi Farr, Noeline Brown and John Meillon.


1972

Grahame Bond's Aunty Jack debuts on ABC TV and eventually introduces Norman Gunston (Garry McDonald) to the nation.


1975

2JJ is launched and Gary Reilly and Tony Sattler begin the station tradition of comics hosting the breakfast program. The Last Laugh venue opens in Melbourne, providing a spiritual home for the city's burgeoning cabaret scene.


1979

Suburban sitcom Kingswood Country, starring loudmouth bigot Ted Bulpitt (Ross Higgins), is broadcast for the first time.


1981

Australia's first stand-up club, Sydney's Comedy Store, is opened by Rodney Keft (Rude).


1983

Bitingly topical skit show Australia, You're Standing In It catapults a new generation of irreverent comics such as Mary Kenneally, Rod Quantock, Geoff Brooks and Steve Blackburn into the public's consciousness.


1986

The Melbourne Comedy Festival is born. Hey Dad...! debuts and becomes Australia's longest-running sitcom, lasting until 1994.


1989

Rival skit team Fast Forward debuts and battles The Comedy Company and the stand-up/monologue/music-based Big Gig show for a slice of Australia's TV comedy pie.


1992

The D-Generation launch the Logie-winning Late Show, which seduces audiences with a blend of pop-video parodies, skits filmed on location and cringeworthy moments from the Countdown vaults.


1994

Hmm. Mike Moore, the host of scarily familiar fictional current-affairs show Frontline, is introduced to the nation.


1996

Comedic current affairs quiz show Good News Week - which was based on the British hit Have I Got News For You - is launched on the ABC with ex-Doug Anthony All-Star Paul McDermott, Mikey Robins and Julie McCrossin.


1999

Hey, Hey, It's Saturday, hosted by Daryl Somers, comes to an end after 28 years.


2004

After being passed over by Channel Seven, Rove McManus takes his show to Network Ten in 2000.

In April 2004, he wins his second Gold Logie.

[unfrufru]

i don't actually remember the guys from the chaser doing the comedy store. could be just me though

[Spawn of Satan]

I remember Anthony Ackroid being on gnw when it was launched, julie was a later addition.

[Gutter Monkey]

native Melburnian Wil Anderson

WTF??? WHen's the last time that Wil was even physically IN this state, let alone living here? And the only room that gets mentioned is Elbow Grease? No offence to Ged (hey, I had some good gigs at EG, and I was probably attended as a punter more times than anyone) but when I think of Victorian rooms that's not top of my list.

[unfrufru]

nah wil used to be a melbourne guy then he turned all trendoid

[Gutter Monkey]

Originally Posted by unfrufru

nah wil used to be a melbourne guy then he turned all trendoid

USED to be. Ain't no more.

[smuffy]

What about

Tribe 9? ABC TV.

You have:
Doug Anthony All Stars (Perrier nominated)
Wendy Harmer
Jean Kittson
Andrew Denton
Anthony Morgan
Scardies
Lano & Woodley (Perrier winners)
Greg Fleet
etc

Why did it appear that the only comedy on the ABC was on Triple J or came from Good News Week? *shakes head*

[Leishpod]

I dunno if he's there very often - but he does share an apartment in melb with someone, well, he did last year *shrugs* maybe he still goes back and forth a lot?