Athletes have pre-game rituals. What does your pre-show ritual look like?
When I started stand-up, first gig, I was obviously incredibly nervous the first time I got up there – one of my knees was shaking. I didn’t know I had to hold the mic in front of my face. I was flailing and talking with my arms, and they’re going (pointing to the mic), ‘No, no, this thing.’
Luckily, the first gig went well, right? And I had a Milo bar before I did that first gig. Then I was like, ‘Alright, I guess to do everything the same, I’m just gonna keep doing that.’
So for the first dozen gigs I was inhaling Milo bars right before the gig, until eventually I was like, ‘Before I get diabetes or something, I need to figure this out.’
But one day I’d forgotten the Milo bar, and the gig still went fine. I was like, ‘Oh, thank goodness for that,’ because I don’t have the budget for my Milo bar.
How did you first get into stand-up comedy?
There was an open mic at the Embassy Hotel in Brisbane. Six months before that, I signed up for an open mic. Then the week before, I went and watched the open mic, because I’d never seen an open mic before. So I was like, ‘I want to see what this is like.’
And then I saw someone die really hard. Since then I’ve seen that a thousand times, from myself and others, but this was my first experience firsthand. This guy had five minutes. I don’t know where he is now. I’d like to find him. And then he did four minutes of just silence. Just nothing. You could get room tone if you were in an acting studio.
Then he turned on the audience. He was like, ‘Screw you guys, I’m better than you, I’m smarter,’ all this stuff. Clearly didn’t endear the audience any further. And then while he’s going off on the audience, one guy in the front just leans back, and then in a moment of silence he just goes, ‘Enough.’
And then that kind of percolated through the room in silent agreement. I was like, ‘That’s the most brutal thing I’ve ever heard.’ He didn’t swear at him, he didn’t curse him out. He was just like, ‘Enough.’ He’s just putting down a rabid dog. It was brutal.
He didn’t swear at him, he didn’t curse him out. He was just like, ‘Enough.’ He’s just putting down a rabid dog. It was brutal.
Then I went home and immediately cancelled the open mic I had. I was like, ‘I’m not ready for that level of personal and emotional rejection. Screw that.’ So it took me six months after that to forget it, and then try again.
That’s intense. One-on-one rejection is one thing, but a room full of people is different.
Yeah, because your caveman brain can’t tell… because our brains haven’t changed in thousands of years. If you’re in front of a room of 50 people, it thinks that’s all of society. It’s like, ‘The whole tribe is here.’
So us comedians that have gotten over the fear of public speaking, we’ve forced our brain to realise there’s eight billion people. So no matter how much you die in front of these people, you can still get McDonald’s on the way home. Your survival is fine. But it’s something you have to consciously wrestle with, because your brain, your caveman brain, is like, ‘No. What are you doing? You’re going to get us killed.’
What’s the craziest thing that has happened to you at a show?
Nothing too insane. When I was in Perth, someone stormed the stage and tried to take the mic out of my hand while I was doing a private gig. Private corporates can be either the most, you know, like eight in the morning and everyone’s in suits, and everyone’s terrified to laugh because they’re sitting next to their boss. Or it’s boozy. They’ve just finished their company party and everyone’s had a bottle, and they’re all one monolith, right? So they’re like, ‘We all work in this place.’ It’s very easy for them to go out of control.
And this guy definitely had seven too many drinks. So he just walked up on stage, started reaching for the mic. In a normal gig, I could just go at him or get him thrown out or whatever. But here, everyone in the audience knows this guy. They go to picnics with him, they work with him, they have to see him beyond today. So I can’t alienate the people as easily as I could have if I’d just gotten rid of him.
So I have to be cracking jokes to the people while trying to usher this guy off the stage. It’s a balancing act.
Sometimes that happens even at a club gig. If someone’s heckling you up the front and you go off at the person, no matter how terrible the thing they said, if you’re in a room of 200 people, maybe 20 people heard what he said. And the other 180 people are going, ‘Why is he yelling at this guy?’ So it becomes a tricky balance. You have to establish what’s going on and get the crowd on side.
There’s a whole audience politics to it, right?
Oh yeah. Because ultimately, your biggest weapon is the crowd. If someone yells and interrupts, everyone else that’s there, that has paid tickets to see the show, they’re automatically on your side. But that is a finite resource. You can’t, you know, if someone coughs and you go nuclear at them, there’s going to be pushback. So it’s kind of a trade-off. It’s a fine line.
What do audiences tend to misunderstand about comedy?
Well, a lot of people think laughter is the best medicine, you know, but my cousin really shouldn’t have skipped out on the chemotherapy. I’m kidding.
But I don’t know. I think audiences are pretty savvy when it comes to comedy. But what I have noticed a little bit more in Australia, perhaps, is: in a group of, say, 100 people, if you walked out to the street now and polled 100 people and asked them if they had ever been to a live comedy show, what percentage do you think we’re getting saying, ‘I have’?
Four or five percent?
Yes. Right. So when you are in a show, or when I go to a festival or whatever, I might be the first experience these people have of live comedy. So in terms of how it works, even the fact that they’re sitting in this group dynamic and you’re having this very unusual one-sided conversation where I do all the talking and their thing is to either laugh or not laugh. It’s like a binary response and an involuntary one, but also it’s a social conditioning thing.
So a lot of times in America, in the UK, it’s a much bigger part of the cultural fabric to go watch live comedy. So audiences are more trained in being an audience. It can take a moment to kind of distinguish to people: ‘Hey, you’re in a live setting. You’re not on your couch watching Netflix and the comedian’s over there.’ It takes a moment to establish that. And that’s always interesting.
Have you ever had to kill a joke you loved?
Well, I think there’s a couple of ways that can happen. One of them is time passes and your comedic voice shifts, right? Without sounding too artsy or wanky about it. If I wrote a joke when I was 23 years old about being single and being on Tinder or whatever, and now I’m many years married and I’m in a different space. So if I’m talking to the audience and I go, ‘Hey…Back when I was single…’ it’s like, ‘Oh, when was that?’ That was like seven to eight years ago. It starts to be a little bit, you know.
And then the reference might be dated. It might be an app that people aren’t even using anymore. A joke that could have been working solidly five years ago: there could have been cultural shifts around it. There could have been shifts in my life around it where it doesn’t make as much sense coming from me.
Like you look at, say, Hughesy. If Hughesy tells you a joke, you know exactly who Hughesy is as a character and as a person. So when he’s like, ‘My kids were doing this…’ immediately you’ve read all of the personality traits and all that. If he tells a story that’s completely 180 to who you believe he is, that kind of breaks the reality of what’s happening, right?
So establishing a voice, an angle from which you’re coming, that’s part of the battle as well. Because if I tell a series of jokes that independently make sense, but together they’re all contradicting each other and they don’t make sense as a whole, then 40 minutes into the show you’re going, ‘Okay, I’m enjoying these things individually, but I don’t know more about this person.’ And actually some of these things are at complete odds with each other, possibly only in the service of this joke. Which is fine, but then I am as unfamiliar with you as I was when I walked in the room. So each joke has a higher burden of effort, a burden of proof, to make it work.
So it’s consistency. If the character stays consistent, the audience already has that context?
Yeah, exactly. And the audience doesn’t need to be familiar with me. If they’re with me for a festival show for an hour, 30 minutes into it I’ve told them a lot of things about me. So at the 40-minute mark, if I tell a joke, they’ve recently absorbed a lot of information that can colour in the background of what I’m describing.
Has anyone ever given you advice that annoyed you at first, and then later you realised they were right?
Yeah. I’ve thought about this. Mostly when you’re new, you’re very eager, right? It’s that Dunning–Kruger thing where you’ve written your first five minutes that go okay and suddenly you’re like, ‘Why am I not getting Netflix on the phone? Why isn’t the whole world trying to…?’
So I think a big part of that is when people pulled me aside and said, ‘It’s cliché, but it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.’ Take your time. Sharpen your tools. Know when to push and when to sit back. Because if you’re pushing all the time, you’re pushing people away and maybe losing opportunities by turning people off. But at the same time, if you’re sitting back all the time, then you’re missing opportunities.
So it’s a tricky balance in the industry, to figure out when to push for something and when to hold back.
Was there a moment when that advice clicked for you?
I don’t know about a particular moment, but when you’re new, you write fairly dirty, right? You write racy gags because a lot of comedy is about building tension and releasing it. And when it comes to taboo topics, the tension’s built in. So all you have to do is kind of take the needle and pop the balloon.
But then what happens is a lot of the time, whether it’s working with networks, working for TV, or working with corporates, working clean is quite important. It’s a handy skill to have. And early on you have this inkling of being like, ‘No, I’ll say what I want to say. I won’t change what I want to do.’ But you gotta look back and think, hang on. The only things I find funny aren’t only these taboo things, right?
So I think an important thing is not taking it as an affront to your ‘I want to say whatever I want to say.’ It’s like: sure, but out of the 80,000 things you find funny, what are the things that work for this gig, for this client, for this… da da da. Understanding that takes time.
You see more of that risky material at open mics than in full-length shows…
Yeah. Exactly. And if you follow some of the comedians that are labelled as more edgy or offensive or whatever, they’re performing Netflix specials to theatres full of adoring fans of theirs that already are on their side. That’s a little different from getting up at a local open mic to strangers who didn’t even know a show was on. They’re halfway through their parma, and you’re like, ‘Ah, here’s this horrific gag,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m trying to eat with my family here.’ It’s a big part of it.
Is there a line you personally will not cross, even if you know it would get a big laugh?
Yeah, it’s interesting. What can happen, especially when audiences aren’t exposed to comedy at the level to which, if you’re a comedy-obsessed mega fan or a comedian that absorbs a lot of content, there is sometimes a lower threshold, a lower bar, for what is hacky and unoriginal. You can see unoriginal gear getting laughs and getting play in the room.
So it can be very tempting to then go out there and make jokes that are steeped in stereotypes, which might not be things you personally want to hear, or even things you don’t like. But you’re going, ‘Look at the play it’s getting in the room, and look at the reaction it’s getting.’
I’d rather tell a gag that gets a 7/10 response that I find more interesting, more compelling, more thoughtful, than something that in this particular room might get a 9/10 response, but is not something I want to put out there.
I’d rather tell a gag that gets a 7/10 response that I find more interesting, more compelling, more thoughtful, than something that in this particular room might get a 9/10 response, but is not something I want to put out there. It’s not the direction I want to take the craft.
How do you decide what to talk about on stage?
I’ve found like, say, a year in, four years in, eight years in. You start out by going, ‘What do they want to laugh at? What are these people that have come here? What will make them laugh?’ That is where it’s tempting to fall into those traps of doing the most stereotypical base-level stand-up. And you’re going, ‘I’m getting play here. I might get bookings.’
Then you go from ‘What makes them laugh?’ to ‘What makes me laugh?’ Then you’re going, ‘Alright, what do I find funny? And how do I use the language of stand-up to translate what I find funny to them?’ And then you graduate to ‘What do I want to talk about?’ Now it’s not even about what’s funny anymore. It’s what am I interested in talking about? And then I can add the jokes in later.
I want to talk about what it was like for my dad to move countries. And how weirdly, talking to my dad or my grandpa, generationally, is so much more challenging than if I was talking to someone who’s my age but politically the polar opposite, right? Because we’re in such a media-heavy context. If I met someone who’s a 32-year-old person who’s super racist, he hates me, but if I hung out with him I’d probably be like, ‘You watch Breaking Bad? How good was that?’ If we didn’t talk about race, I’d find it easier to talk to him than when I’m talking to my 90-year-old grandpa and our worlds are so fundamentally different.
Alright, this is something I find interesting. This is what I want to talk about. Then I might go, ‘Alright, how do I play it out?’ Then you start adding in the jokes on the scaffolding of what you want to say.
Before we wrap, what should people know about the show and the tour?
Yeah, I’d say: watch the special. I’ve already taped the show I’m touring, so if I’m not coming to your town, don’t stress. I’ll be putting out that show after I finish touring it. I’m just hoping I think of a tag to a gag that’s better than what’s already in the can. I go, ‘Oh my God.’
But I toured it. I ran the show a fair bit before taping it. So I like the situation it’s in, which is exciting, because often when you’re going to festivals you’re turning up with a show you’re still working on. But this one is closer to the finished product.
So I am excited to take it to Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and then I might do another encore in Brisbane.
