Getting the Chop
Like putting a frog in water and increasing the heat slowly, so it doesn’t notice until it’s boiled to death, when you get the sack from a job, you never see it coming. This time, I got the arse from my job over a difference of opinion with my employer: I reckoned I was good and they reckoned I was shit. So, I’m looking for some work to alleviate my cash-flow problem; as in, it isn’t flowing at all, it’s a dried-up creek stalled by the beavers of industry.
I’m looking on Seek, but a life spent being a comedian doesn’t give you many practical skills in the job market. Every workplace has a funny bugger to talk to at the water cooler, but that’s not why he was employed. The only job I’ve appeared to have any qualifications for is that of a paintball referee. I could just see myself informing a blood-lusting bogan that he was cut down like a daisy, and maybe having to draw a curtain around a badly injured player and put him out of his misery, one paint pellet at a time. Of course, when players disputed my decisions I would incur their wrath, which would make my paint-spattered homecomings all the more amusing for my family.
The last time I was on the dole (not as long ago as I would like) I was required to do a course in writing a résumé. I hadn’t seen so many depressed people in a room since I’d last gone into a McDonald’s. I had fun putting my two cents in (five cents with inflation), but the fellow in charge, who looked like an emaciated Bruce Willis with his head stuck in an elevator door, told me that the course would be every day for two weeks. I told him that I had to look after the kids while the Breadwinner went to work so I was out of there. He then took me aside and asked me to come back for the afternoon session, because ... well, I spoke English. I did go back, because I suffer, in the words of Mark Little, the Aussie curse of politeness; hell’s bells, I even made it easy on the bloke who gave me the sack. Skinny Bruce Willis thanked me, with that knowing look in his eye that said I would be back.
The job I really want, I’m already doing. Every Friday night, three of my oldest comedian buddies and I gather at the Maori Chief Hotel in South Melbourne and do a show called The Chat, which we podcast. Unfortunately, podcasts are free and no one has yet worked out how to make them produce cold hard cash, which is one of the reasons for my cash-flow problems. So, we do it for nothing. At first I balked at the idea of working for free, but in the end we all wanted to do The Chat for the same reason we started in this industry: it’s fun. I didn’t need to do many shows to realise that comedy is not only great therapy for an audience, it’s therapy for the performer. Nothing makes you feel better than a good, hard belly laugh. Nothing.
The Chat is also about doing comedy the way we believe it should be done, by the funny people. In particular, we’re doing it without some former sales representative, promoted to a managerial position, telling us what to do. We are all the original members of The Cage, a breakfast radio show that’s turned into a franchise (the House of Ms hasn’t seen fit to recompense Tim Smith for using the name, either). This was the 6am to 7am slot on which management let us do as we liked and we found our chat produced organic comedy that was exciting and original. The bloke in the column next to this one told me that he used to listen to it on the way to directing his movie and that it was the best work he’d ever heard from any of us. We even had one of the big bosses calling to contribute to our phone conversation topics. Word from above was that they were trying to determine how to make the rest of the show work the way the early shift did. Management’s solution? Sack me.
And, yes, I made it easy on the bloke sacking me that time, too.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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