MICF 2008 Articles

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/nation...760669097.html


So, this uber-nerd walks into a strip club …
John Mangan
February 17, 2008

"Rudd has this uber-nerd quality," says Lorin Clarke, who is bringing her show, Greatness Thrust upon Them , to the Comedy Festival.
Photo: Craig Sillitoe

SO FAR everything has fallen neatly into place: ALP leadership bid, election campaign, Ruddslide, and last week the triumphant Sorry Speech. Now though, says Paul McDermott, it's time for Kevin Rudd to wake from the dream.



Australia's comedians may have spent last November's election night shredding boxes of instantly obsolete Howard and Coalition jokes, but with the Melbourne Comedy Festival just around the corner, they now are training their blowtorches on the new guard.
"For 11 years it's felt like the country's been run by an old man who won't let anybody else hold the remote control," says McDermott, whose revived Network Ten show, Good News Week, will be taping a special edition at the festival.
"Everything that could have been said about Howard had already been said. I really hit the bottom of vulgarity … even attacking his wife as the wearer of the pants. I didn't know where else to go. Now, it's good to have some fresh meat out on the slab."
And, he says, it does not matter that we don't know anything about Kevin Rudd. "Who cares what he stands for? We can still just make jokes about his hair. Personally, I keep imagining him as a young boy in lederhosen, slapping his thighs."
Instantly recognisable bushy eyebrows and patriotic green-and-gold tracksuits are all very well, but Comedy Festival director Susan Provan says political comedy benefits from a good shake-up.
"Comedians need to be challenged by new personalities," she says. "The conservatives were in power for such a long time that a lot of them thought comedians only make jokes about their side of politics, but now they'll see that nobody's sacred."
Lorin Clarke, who is embarking on her second Melbourne Comedy Festival with the show Greatness Thrust upon Them, agrees the change of government is refreshing for comedians.
"Rudd has this uber-nerd quality," she says. "He's like the kid who always studied really hard for his exams, and anything different from Howard is going to be fun to play with."
Still, last year's federal poll did present challenges for comics dreaming up their shows well ahead of time. Somehow, those with a political bent had to election-proof their plans. The result is a string of shows — such as Greatness Thrust upon Them, Mark Watson's Earth Summit, Dave Callan's Daylight Savings for the Doomsday Clock and Tym Jeffery's A Bolt Short of Climate Change — which look beyond domestic politics to more global issues.

"Climate change is the topic on everyone's lips," says Callan, a Triple-J presenter. "We need to have a rock to live on. I've been doing a lot of reading on it, on carbon emissions and developing nations and the tentacles of industry, and oddly, you can make it funny, even though a lot of it is very tragic."
Jeffery says he's been working on his show since before the election. "The environment is a big issue, but the fact that we've got a new Government with new policies and attitudes gives it a new edge. The way attitudes on both sides of politics worked with the environment last year has given my show a bit of a different feel."
Peter Garrett, Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull also are chipping in to provide fresh comic fodder, but with the winds of change blowing through Canberra, will John Howard be the forgotten man of this year's Comedy Festival?
"Look," says McDermott, "I'm still doing jokes about Menzies, so no, I don't think so. It will be like the Sorry Day in Canberra, you know that photo of all the prime ministers together? Howard will make his presence felt by not being there. His absence will be as annoying as his presence."
Meanwhile, Provan says there really will be something for everyone at the Comedy Festival. A side-splitting show in Mandarin by Shanghai comic Li Dong Fu, for example, might be right up the new PM's alley.

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/green-gags/2008/03/13/1205126112674.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Saving the Earth is no laughing matter, except in the eyes of a comedian, writes Joanne Brookfield.
It's one thing to see a film and feel moved by it; it's quite another thing to start a movement. But this is exactly what happened to British stand-up comedian Mark Watson when he saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's call-to-action climate-change documentary.
"It wasn't like having a revelation from God but it was kind of a semi-revelation from a very influential human," says Watson, who is in Australia to perform his show, Can I Briefly Talk To You About The Point Of Life, of his conversion to the climate-change cause.
Despite all the media coverage about global warming in recent years, none of it had been particularly meaningful to Watson. "So much of the public face of environmentalism is about polar bears, melting ice or abstractions of nature, which, if you are a city boy, is just one among hundreds of other equally worthy causes," the 28-year-old says. "It's more difficult to get close to nature in Britain, really, because it's a small country and it's quite hard to get away from other people, so it's quite easy to go through life without ever connecting with nature."
Gore's film, however, made it personal and specific and that's what connected with Watson. "The film does make you feel quite empowered in a way. At least it makes you feel like it's worth doing stuff," he says. "But yet, having thought all of that, my second thought was 'I'm crap at all of this, I don't really understand any of it'." Watson says he took some comfort in the realisation he wouldn't be the only person to feel this way - that is, keen to help but not quite sure what to do. "So I thought it would be nice to have a green movement that wasn't too hard-core and that rather than getting bogged down by the hopelessness of it all, just try to sort of 'have a fair go', as they say in this country."
So, a couple of weeks after seeing the film in London, Watson's online green movement, Crap At The Environment, was born. Through a MySpace site, plus blogs, events, stunts, personal experiments and so forth, the idea is to replace some of the tedium and intimidation associated with environmentalism and replace it with fun, helping those who are "crap at the environment" to become good at it.
Watson was adjusting his life to greener ways, continuing to tour as a comedian and working on his Crap At the Environment campaigns, which include a book. Due for Australian release in April, it chronicles his attempts at doing good and similarly encouraging others. "It's a cross between that, charting my personal experiences and also an amateur's guide to the subject," says the prolific Watson, who already has two published novels to his credit. Then, in a twist of events that he never imagined, which involved Melbourne and the Australian Conservation Foundation, Watson actually met the man who had inspired him in the first place. And studied with him.
Last September, Watson was among 150 volunteers in Melbourne who Al Gore personally trained to be climate-change speakers. "It was extremely engrossing," he says of Gore's workshop. "It was two to three days of hard-core lectures about environmental science so it could have been incredibly boring, but he does have a way of making it interesting and he's a very, very compelling speaker."
Gore, slide by slide, talked them through his lecture, so the popular stand-up now has the responsibility of presenting his own, not-for-profit climate-change lectures. Watson, who has been warmly embraced by local comedy audiences and was nominated for a Barry Award in 2006, describes Melbourne as his "spiritual home", which is why he has chosen to present his first Earth Summit here as part of the Comedy Festival.
Though he's obliged to keep to the facts, as a comedian, Watson, who shies away from terms such as "activist" and "eco-warrior", will take a few liberties with the material. "I have to maintain a delicate balance between having enough command of the facts to make it educational, but still making sure there's one or two laughs, so it's a big challenge."
But, as he says, he's up for it. Maybe he's not so crap at the environment after all.
Mark Watson's Earth Summit is presented by the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, in association with the Australian Conservation Foundation, on Saturday, March 29, at 4pm. Main hall of the Melbourne Town Hall. All tickets $10. Book through Ticketmaster 1300 660 013 or comedyfestival.com.au




HOW TO BE LESS CRAP AT THE ENVIRONMENT
Although very much committed to a greener way of living, Mark Watson admits it can be difficult at times "because you are constantly backsliding. It's like any new regime, it's never easy." The answer, he says, is to focus on the small things that are easy to achieve and which will also make a difference. He suggests:
- Using public transport where possible or walking. "Especially in Australia where it's so nice. If I lived here I'd never drive anywhere."
- Switching everything off at the plug, rather than leaving appliances in stand-by mode, using energy-saving light globes and going outside to play sport rather than watching TV.
- Using a microwave: "They use much less energy than a proper oven."
- Looking for locally sourced and produced stuff and engaging the services of environmentally sound businesses. For example, Watson's comedy-show posters were made by a printer who uses recycled paper and organic ink.
- Watson has stopped flying within Britain when he tours his shows, using buses or trains instead, and when travelling between festivals here does the same. "I went from Adelaide to Melbourne by bus. I really enjoyed it. Look for things like that, where you can make a trip out of it."
Watson acknowledges that we're all time-poor, so while we might not be able to do everything, there's always something you can do. "If we all do tiny things, they will add up," he says.
See www.myspace.com/crapattheenvironment

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/perfectly-frank/2008/03/13/1205126112548.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1


Perfectly Frank
Melinda Houston
March 16, 2008

Frank Woodley.
Photo: Simon Schluter
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Comedian Frank Woodley plays the eternal innocent better than anyone but, as Melinda Houston discovers, he's firmly in control of his story.
On the one hand, it's a case of what you see is what you get. If you reckon that, in real life, comedian Frank Woodley would be sweet, smart, funny and self-effacing, you would be right. On the other hand, is anyone - especially any comedian - really that straightforward?
Supporting the argument for the affirmative, plenty about Woodley makes sense. He likes to tell people he's nine years old: a leap-year kid, born on February 29, 1968.

"I love the fact that he's a leap-year child; it just suits him so well," says Woodley's long-time comedy partner, Colin Lane. "He's rubbery-limbed, he's a little bit of a noodle, a bit of a dickhead."
Tom Gleisner, who first met Woodley on the pilot of Channel Ten's Thank God You're Here, says: "There is without doubt a childlike quality to Frank.
"I think it's a genuine curiosity of the 'I wonder what would happen if I stuck that up my nose?' variety."
Woodley says that being the youngest of seven is probably a big part of his enduring kid-ness.

"I've heard people suggest that the youngest is often more of a show-off," Woodley says. "On the one hand, my desperate attention-seeking feels fairly integral to my personality. But you never know with that stuff. I'm sure there was a kind of a 'look at me' thing going on, being the youngest."
And a family that size inevitably has a certain, shall we say, carnival atmosphere. "I see my friends now who have one or two or maybe three children. They're so involved and so caring and careful with their kids. And I think about my mum saying to us: 'If you're going to fight, go outside'. Not 'why are you fighting?', not 'who started it?' - none of that. It was chaos. Almost a jungle. But I loved it."

The way he tells it, young Frank Wood (he changed his real name to stage-name Woodley a few years ago) - living first above his parents' milk bar in Glen Waverley, then later in a house in the neighbourhood - had precisely the childhood that would set him up for a life of death-defying clowning. Jumping off the roof. Riding the garage door up and down. Riding his bike as fast as possible and then trying to stand on the handlebars. And if his earliest ambition was to be the next Harry Butler, his true vocation wasn't long in revealing itself.

"I do remember, when I was 15 there was a festival in Clayton. And I dressed up as a clown - not as a full-on Bozo, but I stuck on a red nose and put on an old bowler hat and I went down to the Clayton festival - 15, a 15-year-old - and just clowned around all day. That's weird, isn't it? I have absolutely no idea why that happened. It just seemed like a good idea at the time."

It's particularly odd given that the family has, according to Woodley, absolutely zero history of performers or entertainers. The closest anyone came - and it's so unusual it became part of family lore - was the night his father was chosen as an audience participant at the Tivoli.
On the other hand, he says his family are all extroverts. "Nobody's shy in coming forward. We're enthusiastic."

Yet for an enthusiast, and someone who clearly doesn't mind a chat, Frank can be less than frank. He is often both cautious and diffident. Gleisner says Woodley strikes him as someone who absolutely doesn't need to be the centre of attention: "A refreshing trait in a comedian".
Adam Hills, compere of the ABC music quiz show Spicks and Specks, agrees. "I can't imagine anyone talking about Frank without saying what a lovely bloke he is, what beautiful energy he has, what a great person to be around," says Mr Nice. Naturally they've crossed paths a number of times over the course of their professional lives, but Hills only really got to know Woodley in the Spicks and Specks Green Room.

"He's a very giving person. He's very gentle, self-effacing," Hills says. "And that's what makes him such an amazing comedian. He's very sensitive. Comedians are all quite prone to getting wrapped up in ourselves. When you find someone who's so genuinely giving, that person really stands out."

Hills has been a fan since the days of Woodley's first comedy project, Found Objects, and is watching the solo Woodley with great interest. "In Lano and Woodley he was always the put-upon one. And you need that in every duo, the one who controls things, and the stooge. Now he's solo, what he has to develop is that control aspect."

Well, maybe he's working on it. Woodley seemed to enjoy talking about his childhood, and did indeed seem all those nice things people say he is. On the other hand, he then forbade us - very apologetically and politely - from speaking with his family. And while he was at it, forbade us - very politely, and very apologetically - from even mentioning their names. (He also assured us that his wife prefers to be referred to as "the wife" rather than by her actual name.)

Is there a dark side to Frank Woodley he doesn't want us to discover? Is there an Evil Frank who appears only in the company of his family? Are all his siblings actually in witness protection? Do they actually exist? Maybe those charming childhood tales are all part of an elaborate fiction. Who knows?
It's all very mysterious. And it makes the following potentially enlightening anecdote go something like this...

"There's me. XXX. XXX. XXX. XXX. And XXX. My oldest brother, XXX is, like, 17 years older than me. So it's spread out." The eldest three siblings - assuming they actually exist - were adults by the time young Frank was talking but he had, he says, a close and formative relationship with the next-in-line, his brother XXX. (Whose existence has been confirmed.)

"XXX would look out for me. But he also would bully me," Woodley says. "It was sort of his job. I remember XXX pinning me down and dribbling on me or something, making me cry. And then he said something about me being immature. And I said, 'Well you're so mature, aren't you. You're Victor Mature. You're Victor Mature. Aren't you Victor?' And I started taunting him by calling him Victor. He'd grab me. He'd pummel me. I'd plead for forgiveness. He'd let me go. I'd get just far enough away to be out of his reach and I'd say, 'Have you got that out of your system - Victor?' And it'd all start again."

That anecdote - true or not - will ring loud bells to anyone familiar with Woodley's professional oeuvre. Colin Lane has described Lano and Woodley's act as "true tales of adolescence". "And there's definitely some stuff in The Adventures of Lano and Woodley," Woodley says.
"Like, a sequence of showing-off at the pool. That was definitely part of my history. XXX would do a back-somersault off the top tower of the pool. And that would make me think, 'Maybe I can go and do that'."
Which may or may not have happened, of course. Since XXX is unavailable to confirm or deny.

Anyhoo, there comes a time when everyone must leave their family - real, fictitious or re-created - behind. And that's about where Woodley is right now. Having turned 40 (in trips around the sun, if not in birthdays) he's not exactly in crisis, but these are interesting times.

"I'm actually feeling pretty good. But because me and Col have had this parting of our creative lives, I'm probably in a bit of a...not a panic, but a bit of a (insert ear-piercing panicked screeching and mad hand-waving here).

''I'm excited, but there's a bit of fear and apprehension there as well. I don't really know if it's going to work, or how well it's going to work."
The regular spots on Spicks and Specks, Thank God You're Here and, most recently, Good News Week, have been welcome. And he's about to launch a solo show as part of the Comedy Festival.

"It's really exciting to be doing something where I am out of my comfort zone. There are some aspects of the show I'm going to explore that I couldn't explore with Col because it just didn't fit."
It's hard to imagine the show, Possessed, fitting anywhere but in the unusual mind of Frank Woodley. Essentially it's about a man who falls in love with the ghost of a woman who's possessing his body. "I don't know what Freud would say about a play about a man who falls in love with himself as a woman. But I am going to be playing the romance sincerely - giving that part of the story a certain integrity."

It's hard, some might say impossible, to imagine how such a thing might be realised. To everyone but Woodley. "It's just doing what I want to do," he says. "I've just set out to do the best show I can make and therefore I will enjoy doing it the most. I'm lucky in that the thing I want to do the most is quite different to what most comedians are presenting."

"It's not luck," says Woodley's long-time friend, actor Craig Goddard. "He's an incredibly skilful, creative, brilliant bastard." Goddard and Woodley met in a Carlton share-house 20 years ago - a house that at times accommodated 10 people including Woodley's original comedy partner, Scott Casley, and the woman who would become the wife. (Let's call her XXX.)

Goddard's aware that Woodley comes from a large family, and has met a couple of his sisters and the much-mentioned brother, XXX. "They didn't fight," he says. "They seemed to love each other."
Goddard says that while the years are - very slowly - catching up with Woodley physically, essentially he's the same person he knew way back when: incredibly interested in things, sometimes obsessively so, enthusiastic, athletic.

"He'll talk 'til three in the morning - about anything and everything," Goddard says. "And 20 years later, he hasn't shown any signs of stopping. I think that's the thing I like most about him. That I can be enthusiastic with him. He'll dissect and unravel and rave about something for ages."

And the thing you like least about him? Goddard laughs. "He asked me not to say anything bad about him." That's funny. Because, well, there's the whole "don't mention the family" thing too. "Did he say that?" Goddard sounds amused. "Well. That would be because they are in witness protection. The whole family. Frank himself is a trained killer. Our friendship is actually based on fear. But for God's sake don't tell him I said that." See. We knew he had something to hide.
Frank Woodley - Possessed is at the Comedy Theatre, March 19 to April 13. Tickets 132 849 or at the door.

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/the-singing-invective/2008/03/13/1205126112557.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

The singing invective

John Bailey
March 16, 2008

Melodic comedians <> for second story up front. The message is ready to be sent with the following file or linkattachments:Moose Group Shot.jpgNote: To protect against computer viruses, e-mail programs may preventsending or receiving certain types of file attachments. Check youre-mail security settings to determine how attachments are handled.
Photo: MGriffin@theage.com.au


Why are jokes funnier if you sing them? Four melodic comedians explain to John Bailey why they get away with more if they set their gags to music.

Music and comedy go together like a "boom" and a "tish". From the corny gags of vaudeville to the political satire of Keating! audiences have been laughing along to gags with a back beat. So if there's nothing new about musical comedy, why are the recipients of this year's Moosehead grants - given to shows promising innovative, original forms of humour - all united by a musical thread?

There's a twisted tribute to Disney musicals featuring puppets run amok; an absurd take on jingle-writing; a "comeback" special from a band that never existed; and a bloody tale of butchers and Broadway. This year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival is tuning up.

For Warwick Allsopp, one half of The Jinglists, it's the important role timing plays in any form of humour that makes music a natural ally. "All comedy's probably timing and rhythm within a scene or a joke, and having it either in song or having music accompanying what you're doing is another element to provide that comic timing. If we do a joke without the music it's OK, but bring the music in and it's automatically funnier."
Jordan Raskopoulos, lead singer of faux-rock band The Axis of Awesome, says that music gives comics more room to move. "Stand-up audiences are very impatient. It's 'Get to the joke quickly and make me laugh or I'm getting out of here.' With musical comedy, you can take a little bit longer to tell the joke and if the music's good, the audience is enjoying that too. You've got other things to fall back on than just jokes."

Sammy J has already bagged awards and acclaim for past festival shows featuring the skinny comic serving up comic songs from behind a keyboard. He discovered early on that music allowed him to push the boundaries of what's acceptable material. "Throughout school I wrote songs about teachers and I found you could get away with a lot more in music," he says. "I wear a very dapper suit onstage and drink from a juicebox. So when I suddenly come out and say something wrong, it really comes out of left field. Not only is it shocking, it's also not as offensive."

The Mooseheads have been around for two decades, memorialising comedian Brian McCarthy after his death in a car accident at 23. Past recipients have included Lano & Woodley, Judith Lucy, Dave O'Neil and Corinne Grant. The award offers its recipients a complete package: a publicist, advertising, festival support and the appointment of a director. "It just means we're left to focus on the creative side," says Sammy J, "which has been fantastic. I'm a self-produced, self-managed performer and for the last five festivals I've been the one getting on to journalists and sending out emails and things."

Sammy J in the Forest of Dreams follows a disillusioned Melbourne comedian who leaves his dull life to journey into a magical land of colour and enchantment - and potty-mouthed puppets. "We take a traditional Disney narrative and completely pervert it," he says. "After the test show, people have said it's quite adult. To the point where Ticketmaster are going to have a special warning that it's not a show for children. The show ends with a song called I'm Learning How to be Less of a Dick and that really sums up my character's trajectory."

Perhaps it's the ability of musical comedy to relax audiences with a toe-tapping tune before twisting the knife. This year's Moosehead recipients certainly play with darker themes. Amelia Jane Hunter and Hannah Gadsby's Meat the Musical traces the fortunes of a pair of identical twins who inherit the family butchery.

Hunter's character - obsessed with stage musicals - isn't far from the performer herself, who was "raised by a mother who had Phantom of the Opera and Porgy and Bess blaring through the lounge-room window at 2.30 in the afternoon". Gadsby, conversely, can't stand the things. "Let's just say that she lived in New York for two years and never went to see Phantom of the Opera," says Hunter.

The Jinglists plays a similar melody. Allsopp and co-conspirator Tamlyn Henderson are half-brothers abandoned as children by their mother, growing up as agoraphobic jingle-writers who haven't left their apartment in 29 years. Contrasting this bleak scenario with the superficial world of advertising ditties allows the satire to become more absurd.
"It just kind of happens instinctively for us," says Allsopp. "We both come from a music theatre background so we were brought up on a rich diet of cheese. As someone said in a review once, we're using our evil powers for good."

The Axis of Awesome's Raskopoulos agrees that playing with the darker edges of musical comedy has made the Moosehead committee sit up to attention. "When you are ruffling feathers, that's when people take notice. When you're borderline offensive, that's when there starts to be a fuss about it. Musical comedy does let you get away with a bit more, but you have to push the envelope if you want people to take notice."

Axis of Awesome Comeback Spectacular is at the Portland Hotel, Russell Street.
The Jinglists is at Bosko Theatre, Federation Square.
Meat the Musical is at the Victoria Hotel, Little Collins Street.
Sammy J and the Forest of Dreams is at the Bosco Theatre, Federation Square. All shows run March 20 to April 13.

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http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/a-hard-axe-to-follow/2008/03/13/1205126109212.html

A hard axe to follow

March 15, 2008



With so many of their rude, risky or just plain wrong ideas rejected, a troupe of comedians has gone on the truly offensive. Steve Waldon samples their revenge.
They are used to rejection, but it doesn't mean they like it - "they" being comedians, actors and other performers who have pitched ideas for TV, radio or stage, and found that the people with the money to make it happen do not share their enthusiasm.

As an illustrator, writer and broadcaster, Kaz Cooke has had plenty of success, but the mere thought of trying to sell a television program causes her bile to boil.
"What usually happens is you sit in endless meetings with men over 50 until you try to eat your own pancreas or somebody says 'Great! I love it! We love you!' and then the next week they're sacked and the new person wants new, new, new, and not you, you, you," Cooke says.

"In these meetings you tend to find yourself drowning in piffle and wanting to defenestrate yourself at the earliest opportunity."

Many performers share Cooke's sentiments, though most of them acknowledge that some things don't get made because they should not be or cannot be.

On Saturday, March 29, at Melbourne Town Hall, a bunch of them are starring in Axed!, a Melbourne International Comedy Festival show billed as "stories of the unpitchable, unprintable and unwatchable".

Nor is an irony lost on them - that a stage show about the unpitchable was successfully pitched.

"I think people like hearing about failure. It's far more interesting than success, unless you're murdering your way to the top," says Bob Franklin, the permanently bemused star of television's Stupid Stupid Man.
And when Melbourne-based comedian Scott Brennan first heard the premise, he was excited.

"What a great idea! Now I can get all those sketches that have been too rude or too wrong or too risky out there," he says.

Between other performers' anecdotes about missing-in-action comedy, Brennan will perform sketches that, for one reason or another, have not had a public airing.
He has high hopes for "my poofter sketch" - a performance that he believes has caused TV and stage producers to twitch nervously, lest they be seen to be party to a homophobic campaign.

"The problem is, people look at the content, not the message," he says. "But if you're going to do a sketch that deals with homophobia, you have to use the word 'poofter'." Brennan says the sketch is not anti-gay, it is anti-homophobia. He believes audiences are smart enough to work it out.

But the pervasive feeling is that those in charge of what makes it on to our TV screens are (mostly) innately cautious, and are not prepared to risk the financial repercussions of alienating viewers with "edgy" work.
Entertainers interpret this as a safety-first mentality among those in charge of budgets. For Cooke, that meant rejection for her much loved drawn character Hermoine the Modern Girl.

"I remember trying to get a (Modern Girl) animated cartoon series up at the ABC, years ago when it was all run by men who looked like extras in Dad's Army," she recalls.
"All they seemed to ever say was how they needed another Mother and Son. At one point I was told by a man that my character didn't 'win' enough and that meant she was a loser and that reminded him of the ending of Coolangatta Gold and the overall problem with the Australian ethos, which was why we weren't a republic.

"To this day I wish I had said 'I'm so terribly sorry, but it appears you are a colossal idiot'.
"I have stayed out of it for years but recently had a meeting with a new breed of TV alpha male who brandished his BlackBerry at me and demanded to know 'Would you call that a TV screen? That's a TV screen now.' And all along I thought it was an otter.

"From now on, if I ever have a meeting with a TV executive, I'm taking a Taser and a book to read as soon as anybody says Mother and Son."

Television has been good to Brennan, particularly over the past several years. He has worked on Comedy Inc and Skithouse and been a guest on Spicks and Specks and Rove Live.

Even so, his experience with rejected ideas has given him pause to consider not just how to "get under their radar", but something less palatable - that "maybe some ideas are just crap".
"We've all heard the reasons (things don't get made)," Brennan says.
"I had one network tell me a concept was 'too in', that it was based on the industry and therefore only insiders would get it.

"If that was the case, how does a show like Extras get made?"
Since working as Jimoein's offsider in the mid-1990s, Franklin has won fans as a character whose bemused countenance suggests that life is the maelstrom that is happening around him, without his permission.
He is bringing to Axed! details of a pilot program he championed, but that never saw the light of cameras.
"It's about the process in relation to one particular pilot, but I've been given every reason in the book when it comes to rejection," Franklin says.

"'Too gender-specific', 'too British', 'not multicultural enough', 'too dark', 'people won't watch mockumentary' and so on.
"It would be refreshing if a network just came out and said 'Look, we don't like what you do so just piss off'."
In that sentiment, he is aligned with Brennan and plenty of others for whom rejection and dejection are the same thing.
"I would say that talking about the ideas they've had rejected makes up about 90% of a performer's conversation," Franklin says.

"No matter how many times we go through the whole sorry business of hopelessly pitching a concept to a network, we still find ourselves sitting around down the pub, shaking our heads, having the same conversation.
"Invariably, a couple of years later, the network buys a show from overseas based on the exact concept you took to them, and all the local critics ask why we don't make shows like that here."

He nominates Glenn Robbins' Gary Dare, the unpleasant character he unleashed on The Comedy Company in 1988.
"That's a classic example. Glenn tried to get networks interested in a series based on Gary Dare long before the likes of Larry Sanders and Alan Partridge came along," he says.

Instead, Robbins's loveable duffer, Uncle Arthur, resonated more with audiences and critics.

That's the cruel paradox of creating more than one successful character; Gary Dare was effectively marginalised by Uncle Arthur. Robbins' triumph was also his frustration.
A decade later, Robbins got the bumbling outback adventurer Russell Coight to air, and his Kel Knight on Kath and Kim gave him another opportunity to use the persona of the well-meaning but somewhat ineffectual character whose jocular optimism is sometimes unmatched by ability.
One of Brennan's performing companions is Cal Wilson, the New Zealand comic who is co-hosting a Nova afternoon radio show with fellow comedians Akmal Saleh and Ed Kavalee, erstwhile foil for Tony Martin on Triple M's Get This.

Wilson and Brennan once pitched an idea about playing two loveable aliens, but couldn't get the costumes.
"I've got a box full of spiral-bound notebooks with jokes and ideas and concepts," Wilson says.
"The problem is, sometimes they're just a phrase or a word, and I think 'I wonder what the hell that was supposed to be about'," she says.

Like the others, Wilson believes there is a nexus between rejected concepts and ideas that have money thrown at them by delighted producers. It is the not knowing that gets confusing, she says. You think it's spun gold, the others around the table seem to have fallen asleep.
"But then, if you pitch a sketch or a show that needs an elephant in it, you shouldn't be surprised to find it's not budgeted for."

In Axed!, the audience will hear many of these war stories, but it won't all be piling blame on uncomprehending producers or accountants.
There will be tales of self-censorship, which introduce the argument about the extent to which satire and humour should, or should not, be answerable to convention or even community standards.

This is the domain of personal discretion. Rodney Rude wows them at the pub, but would send the defibrillator into meltdown at the elderly people's village.
Even the most heedlessly edgy comedy might have self-imposed limits. There was a furore a few years ago when South Park, which might be said to be defiantly scatological, apparently censored an episode featuring the image of Mohammed.

Writers on mediawatchwatch.org.uk accused South Park's creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker of hypocrisy.
"What does it say when a TV station is scared of showing an image of Mohammed standing around being normal, but is fine with showing Jesus literally being crapped on?" asked one annoyed writer.

"It shows that bosses of (network) Comedy Central are self-censoring cowards who have no respect for artistic integrity."

Whether it was the show's writers or the broadcaster who blanked out the short depiction of Mohammed, the viewers overwhelmingly agreed that degrees of offensiveness were now being debated.

I don't know whether it's funny, but I told Cal Wilson I had been given a message that I would be talking to Carl Wilson.
Which would have been quite a coup, given that the youngest of the Beach Boys died in 1998.
"I'll say hi when I see him then," Cal Wilson said. Gold.
And I asked Bob Franklin to assess an idea I had 10 years ago for an Australian sitcom - before Mick Molloy got Boytown made.

It's about a rock band that is asked to reform 25 years after breaking up, but in that time the drummer has lost an arm, the lead guitarist has gone deaf, and the bassist has become a Baptist minister.
The weekly sight gag would involve more and more blow-ups of a Melbourne street directory on the singer's lounge room wall. His car, you see, only turns left, and he spends hours plotting a route to rehearsals.

Franklin said he would play the world-weary accountant charged with making the reunion a success, but with this proviso: "If every member of the band has only one arm then I think you've got yourself a film and I'd be happy to get involved."
So I asked him if we weren't all stupid stupid men sometimes.

"You certainly are if you think I'm going to provide some pithy statement to wrap this up," Franklin said.
The problem with that, Bob, is that I get to choose how to end this story. And that's my own little joke.

Axed plays on March 29, at 3pm in the Melbourne Town Hall. Bookings through Ticketmaster 1300 660 013
www.comedyfestival.com.au
The Age is a sponsor of The Comedy Festival.

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A funny thing happened on the way Down Under

John Mangan
March 16, 2008
The year was 1996, and English comic Jeff Green was doing his first ever show in Australia. "It was in Melbourne, at the Espy," he says in his beguiling north of England burr.
"A guy called Trevor was running it then, and I did what I considered my strongest routine . . . to total silence. When I walked off I said to Trevor, 'What the blooming hell happened there?' He just said, 'We don't say "duvet", we call them Doonas'. Nobody had known what I was talking about!"
The duvet-Doona distinction is just one of the pitfalls facing any international comedian venturing across the oceans daring to impress Australian audiences.
Green, and other international comics like him who are seasoned visitors to the Melbourne Comedy Festival which kicks off again on Wednesday, have had to become well schooled in the subtleties of what tickles Australian audiences. There's a general agreement about the land that has produced comic icons as diverse as Barry Humphries, Roy Rene or "Mo", Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston - we're a bit different.

Canadian comic Phil Nichol sums up the Australian sense of humour in a sentence: "Brash, slightly surreal, maybe a little bit rude, but always damn funny.
"Aussie audiences are a joy to play to, with a loud but fair attitude towards heckling and participation," he says. "Still, last year during my Naked Racist show, I was surprised at how quickly the audience got their clothes off when asked to join my nude protest of the Gulf War."
Glenn Wool, also Canadian and also known to take his clothes off as part of his act, says Australian audiences can be full of surprises. He's had a Crocodile Dundee moment, attempting to shock his audience with a super-sized knife, only to find that someone in the audience happened to be carrying a larger blade than him. "'That's a knife!' they said, and they were right!" he recalls.

He's also found audiences can be curiously conservative, relating a time someone approached him in a heavy metal venue after a gig and complained about one of his jokes about swearing - which necessarily involved particularly colourful language.
"I can't go into exactly what I say in the joke as it is pretty extreme for a Sunday newspaper, but this chap was in a heavy metal bar having to talk over a song about oral sex with Satan to tell me how offended he was by what I said."
One Aussie stereotype that holds true is that we're a fundamentally laid-back nation, says Jeff Green, whose tireless research has included marrying an Australian.

"If you're an international comic, Australian audiences want to know what you're here for - why have you come 12,000 miles in economy with two small children, losing the the will to live somewhere over Singapore?" Instead of a barrage of punchlines, Australian, especially Melbourne, audiences, he says, want to hear a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

"You come to Melbourne with an hour of material that would work in the London Comedy Store, possibly the toughest crowd you'll get anywhere, no gaps, bang, bang, bang. So British comics come out here speaking very fast. They realise after a couple of weeks here that you've got to take your time. It's like trading the crystal meth of punchlines for the Horlicks of a narrative," Green says.
And, he says, Australians don't need the jokes mangled to fit local references - we like to hear comics do the material they'd do in their home country. "You've got fantastic Australian comics - if you want to see Australian humour you can see a Dave Hughes or Rove or Tom Gleeson."

Green says it took him about five years of touring here to realise that instead of dropping his stories based on distinctively British subjects such as No Frills groceries (like our Black & Gold) and blow-football (a popular children's game played by blowing a scrap of paper rolled up into a ball), Australian audiences would give him enough time to explain them, and then enjoy the tale.
"I'd get these faces in the audience saying, 'Tell us more about the whimsical pastimes you English participate in when you should be practising cricket'. I love it.

"I do say to British comics before they come out here that you've got more time than you realise. When the audience is quiet here, it's not because they're bored, it's because they're listening to you!"
Australian comics, too, find our audiences often more attentive. Melbourne comic Charlie Pickering, who features with Michael Chamberlin in the Comedy Channel's new series The Mansion, says British and New Zealand audiences can be particularly difficult to win over.

"In New Zealand, the moment they hear you're Australian they cross their arms and say, 'You'd better be good'. I've been heckled there about underarm bowling, which was a first," says Pickering. "Edinburgh is the most competitive market in the world, performing there was the hardest I'd ever had to work, but so rewarding.

"In Manchester, when people go to a gig, the drinking comes first. The Comedy Store in London is one of the best gigs in the world, but when I played the Comedy Store in Manchester, people were walking out during the show and I was wondering what was wrong. But they said that's normal; it doesn't mean they don't like the show, they just don't wait until interval to get a drink. I just had to face the fact that in Manchester I come a close second to a
pint."

When Green tells people in Britain he's touring Australia, their expectation is generally that Aussies favour crude humour. "They imagine you're this ocker, earthy audience, but I have to tell them it's just not the case. I'm probably less crude over here than in England," he says.
Similarly, English comic Josie Long, fresh from winning the best newcomer award in Edinburgh in 2006, found when she first toured that Australian audiences defied her expectations.

"I used to live in west London and you'd see a lot of very shouty, drunk Australians on the Tube. So I expected the sense of humour here to be very loud and drunken," she says. "But you come out here, especially to Melbourne, and everybody is very upbeat, and so beautifully turned out, looking so cool and sophisticated. Then there are the rural audiences here. I did a gig in Broken Hill and those people were mental, properly insane, so enthusiastic. And when I played in Horsham, people had brought their own food in Tupperware containers - it was a big night out."

But no matter how warm the visitors find Australian audiences, many of them will be boning up on their cultural references, making sure they're across recent local events and issues.
American comic Rich Hall has explained to Melbourne audiences that he spends his evenings in his hotel room going through the death notices in the newspaper and then going through the phone book crossing out names.

Not everyone will be that thorough, but Phil Nichol says even a comedian like himself, whose show is very much about his own personal experiences, can't help the occasional Aussie reference. "It's always fun to ingratiate yourself with the locals by knowing local culture and using local people in the punchlines," he says.
The message then to international performers wanting to charm local audiences: be yourself, take it easy, but at the same time, make sure you sort out your Doonas from your duvets.
The Age is a sponsor of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

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Not giving up their day jobs

March 11, 2008
Waiting to hit the big time, budding comedians still have to pay the bills, writes Daniel Ziffer.

THEY could be serving you lunch or programming your PC. And you could become fodder for their stand-up routine.
Most comedians can't support themselves with their calling, turning to the often dry world of "real" work to fund their dreams.

The stars of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival are teachers, community workers, or retail assistants by day, revealing their passions on stage at night.
Dave Adams and Ernie Austin, from musical duo ElbowSkin, have worked in high-end restaurants in Port Douglas, Broome and Melbourne. Currently they're at The Court House in North Melbourne.

"We've been very lucky with the people we've worked for," Austin says. "If you're going to run a business well in hospitality you've got to know that people often have other aspirations."

You can normally find Austin front of house, with Adams working the bar.
At the moment they're in Adelaide - working in a restaurant each day, performing every night - having fled their Melbourne jobs to use South Australia as a test for their Adelaide Festival show.

It's part of a process which begins in job interviews, when the pair outline their long-standing comedic plans.
"(The Court House) are probably in all sorts of bother because both of us will be gone for 20 days," he says, laughing.

Or not: the last two restaurants Austin has worked in, Langtons and Upper House, have closed.
"I brought 'em down," he jokes. "So if you want a Court House experience, book now."

Nelly Thomas has performed twice at the Edinburgh Fringe and five times in Melbourne's festival.

Her audience recently expanded by one - eight-month-old, three-toothed daughter Rose - and now Thomas has a new job "for the next, what, 30 years or so".

As she mixes work with the Raw Comedy talent competition and prepares for 20 performances of ... Is Not A Yummy Mummy in MICF, Thomas says she's had it easy.
Comparatively.
"Because you're home during the day, by the time I need to leave she's in bed," Thomas says, which removed the dilemma of how to care for her baby.

"Sure I feel like I'm basically in a coma from tiredness and I'm not going to pretend it's easy, but we try and balance it all and hope she doesn't turn out a serial killer."
Hours spent labouring are put to use on stage, comics say, with moments of monotony used to refine jokes and segments. Call centre and cafe work is popular with performers due to its flexibility. Repetitive tasks often fuel routines based on their, at-times, numbing nature.

But not all employers are happy for their workers to splay open the inner workings of their business. Several artists contacted by The Age were not allowed to discuss their work and comedy in the same breath.
Project manager Dave Bushell works for IT firm Vital Software and defines his job as "negotiating with developers and spending a lot of time looking at spreadsheets".

The pressure of office work often conflicts with the demands of his comedy: writing a
festival show and running a room with Ross Noble.
"It limits me in a certain regard, because I'm making more money from my day job," he says. "During the festival it's even more difficult. I tend to take a little bit of leave just so I don't screw up my job and my show."
However, the job has its advantages. On interstate work trips Bushell books gigs - "just to stop myself staring at the mini-bar and crying" - which most struggling comedians could not afford to attend. And the day job creates reams of material.

"Often, in the industry, IT sales guys are called Road Warriors," he says. "Like they're in Mad Max and wearing leather and spikes. Really their job is driving to Melton and talking to a guy in a rubber factory about their customers."
Community worker Justine Sless is another comic who uses their daily work experiences to drive their night-time show. It's Not About the Prawns discusses her 10 years in the community sector, a field which Sless feels leans nicely towards comedy.

"There's a lot of wank, a lot of toss in the community sector," she says. "It's a chance to channel what I think is funny ... and run a parallel with my own life."

Comedians take a huge financial risk in putting on a show. Most of the festival's 300 shows are self-funded, with a production in a small-to-medium venue costing between $5000 and $8000, producers suggest. First-time performers can expect to lose between $2000 and $3000.

Sless says the risk was significant, but since performing in the Raw Comedy talent quest three years ago she can't stop.
"I was addicted. It's my drug of choice," she said. "Comedy is just the bees knees, it's just brilliant."

Making the step to being a full-time comedian is something which eludes most festival performers. The necessity to eat, clothe and house themselves curtails the desire to make a permanent stand behind the microphone.
For Sless, creating a comedy career beyond low-paying, five-minute slots at comedy nights is an elusive goal.
"When you're parenting and you've got a day job? It's about developing an idea, putting it out there," she says. "But it's very hard."
Behind the computer, Dave Bushell is still preparing to make the jump from secure employment.

"To make it really happen, you have to devote all your time to it," he says. An inevitable fall in income and lifestyle would follow, but the current demands of mixing work and passion are just as difficult.

"Comedy just encroaches more and more on your time," he says.

"Booking gigs, going interstate, running rooms. Even though I haven't been exactly standing out in the rain trying to sell tickets, it's the doing it well that takes the time."
The Age is a sponsor of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

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Language of laughter

Stephanie Bunbury
March 15, 2008
Advertisement
Des Bishop, who will be appearing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, found fame after leaving his delinquent ways behind in the US at 14 for a fresh start in Ireland.

DES BISHOP was in a fair bit of trouble, mostly with the bottle, when he was 14. He had been expelled from the Catholic school he attended in New York and knew he was only going to get further mired in trouble at the local high school. So he was the first to leap at the idea when an Irish cousin suggested going to a boarding school in Wexford.
"I was like 'yeah, anything'," he says. "I'd never been to Ireland in my life, but I wanted away. I wanted a total geographical cure to the issues of my little 14-year-old life. My parents laughed at first, but they looked into it and it wasn't complicated or expensive."
Within five weeks of that first suggestion he was in a new country; he would never live in America again.

As the starting point for a life in comedy, it's certainly a dramatic story. Bishop is now 33, clean as a whistle, and talks on and off stage with the energetic intensity of the convincingly recovered. When I see him in Dublin, he has a huge, happily rowdy audience hooting about the habitual lateness of the Irish, the theatrical bitterness of the Irish and the bizarre grammar of the Irish language.

"People say, 'Oh yes, he's doing that I'm-living-here-but-I'm-from-somewhere-else material," says Bishop, "but that was a unique experience, coming to another country without your parents. That formed a lot of my early material. Because Ireland in 1990 wasn't like it is now. It was somewhere between the Third and First Worlds. There was 15% unemployment. It was the end of the bad times, but the new times hadn't started."

Bishop is a household name in Ireland, thanks to two television series in which he immersed himself in other people's lives for months on end. In the first, he worked a succession of low-paid jobs while living in the sorts of miserable bedsits his pay cheques would cover, an idea adapted from historian Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed.

In the next series, he ran three-week comedy workshops in some of Ireland's roughest, most disadvantaged towns.
A third series, in which Bishop sets about learning Irish to the point where he can deliver an hour-long gig in his new language, is due to air soon. He lived in beautiful coastal Connemara, where Irish is still used every day, to do that, which was certainly a step up from life as a hospital porter in Dublin. He did, however, undertake to live there for more than a year: nobody could accuse him of lacking commitment.

Immersion, he is convinced, is the only way to find out anything worth telling. "It's not so much it gives you a right to talk about things, because you will always be an outsider," he says. "Even if you live in a place for a year, you can't say I'm now part of this place. But it is very easy to observe a place from the outside and comment on it. It's a lot more powerful, I think, to be able to say 'this is what I experienced', because then you can mirror what is going on through stand-up. Which is what I always do. It's my preferred way of getting a point across: turning it into a funny story, trying to give people that little click in the mind about what's going on."

In Ireland, that almost always means a riff on the Catholic Church; Bishop doesn't disappoint. His old school principal went to jail for sexual abuse of students and, although Bishop had no idea this was going on while he was at school, he felt he didn't want anything more to do with the church. He and his fiancee decided they didn't want to get married in one. "So then, obviously, you get drilled with questions from the parents, and it made me really look into this question: Is it OK just not to believe, you know?
"So that is where a lot of that material has come from: my own journey away from belief. Because my own experience of Catholicism was not actually negative. In New York, although we went to Mass, it was light-hearted. There was the community side of it, which people kind of dismiss in this day and age, this concept of people coming together on a Sunday. I just don't know why they have to give you a belief system to go with it."

But Bishop has his own articles of faith, that's for sure. The first half of his Dublin show was about his year learning Irish. He won't be using much of it in Australia, he says, but it is a remarkable thing to watch 1000 people on a Friday night laughing at jokes about grammar. Irish children learn the language for 14 years, he says, but most leave school with no more than its rudiments.

He wants to spread the word, quite literally, that it is both enriching and easy. "All I want," he says earnestly, "is that people have something to show for their 14 years. Because, at the end of the day, it is actually an amazing thing to have the language that made this place — and is being lost. If they taught it properly, you would have the language by eight or nine, so it wouldn't be an issue."

He now raps in Irish. He interviewed Gerry Adams, in Irish, for the program; bizarrely, their exchange was centred on a jovial play on the future conditional tense. For him, one of the language's most interesting aspects is that its structure does not lend itself to telling jokes; the verb and its object come at the beginning of the sentence, so that what comedians call "the reveal" is spoilt the minute you start.
"But what works really good in Irish is storytelling," says Bishop. "I think it's really interesting that most Irish comics tend to be storytelling type of comedians. And most of the comedy I've written in the Irish language is story-based because it's the easiest thing to do in the Irish language. From a geeky comedy point of view, it's really interesting."

He has the zeal of a convert. He knows it. "But only because it has been one of the best things I have ever done in my life. I didn't really think it would mean that much to me, but I can't believe how amazing it feels to be able to speak another language, particularly one that has a particular relevance to your life." Of course, you don't need it. "But when you speak it," he says, "you feel something that comes down to identity — not a nationalistic identity, but a cultural identity, a deeper sense of belonging … Whether you like it or not, part of who you are is where
you're from."

Bishop's own identity is thus in question. "I'm some sort of hybrid," he sighs. "Because they don't accept me here as an Irish person, but I'm certainly not American." His accent is too Irish and his politics way too far to the left to fit easily back into Queens. "The kids I grew up with, most of them ended up being firemen, policemen, court officers: city jobs," he says. "Most of them would be considered centre in America, but over here they would be considered right-wing, you know, quite hard in their views. I get on great with them still, but we would clash totally politically, particularly since 9/11. I don't feel I fit in too much with them."

He remembers, growing up, how the local Irish-American community openly supported the IRA; quite recently, during one of his daring moments at a gig in Boston, he reminded them how keen those firemen used to be on terrorism. And yet … he still loves baseball and there is a peculiarly New York style of jokey mutual insult, he says, that feels very familiar whenever he goes back.

"But it's more of a memory of childhood. It's not enough to think that's my home any more."

Stephanie Bunbury is a senior Age writer.
The Age is a sponsor of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.