The Semi-Mental Bloke
Ladies and gentlemen, please drink up your intellect suppressant and welcome our next psychological case study to Narcissists Anonymous. He’s going to share with you some lightly connected thoughts about things that I’m going to blindly recommend. Please bang your hands together, like a patronising school assembly for adults, as you prepare to be partly responsible for the performance trajectory of Guy Blokeman!
Another Comedy Festival and I’m not cynical at all. I’m just as fresh-faced and optimistic as I was back in 2003, when I did my first show at the Butterfly Club, dressed in my nan’s sky-blue seventies ski suit. In one bit, I read from my Grade Seven diary about a girl I had a crush on. One evening, that girl came along. After the show, I said hello awkwardly, still wearing my ski suit, saturated with sweat. She smiled kindly. Her boyfriend looked at me like I was a wasp. They say humans can’t remember anything about being a baby because it was so traumatic that our memories have suppressed it. That’s how I feel about my early twenties.
And now we enter the mirth pit, with the sparkly-eyed manicness of people who have spent too long mining their own souls to fuel these artificially constructed refrains of humour. The reward for this adulthood of sacrifice and instability? To be judged by strangers brandishing the power to validate or dismiss the relevance of our emotional truth with lilting laughter or scarring silence.
I’ve always thought of comedy as the poor sucker of the arts community. For starters, the psychoanalytic structure of the form itself is flawed – ‘There’s nothing funny about someone trying to be funny.’ Secondly, it’s the most technically difficult of the art forms – trying to make strangers laugh for a sustained length. Thirdly, the audience is permitted to heckle! When I think of the amount of times I could have sworn at an actor,‘You’re not convincing,’ or at a waffly muso, ‘Jack Johnson called, he wants his chords back. Yes, all four of them!’ Fourthly, comedians are the only artists who are starved of a basic mental function to fall back on during difficult times. For a humourist, the sense of humour is the very tapped vein at the heart of their craft. After a bad gig, they find that there is simply nothing there. When one loses the ability to laugh at oneself, life becomes infinitely darker. I believe this is the reason for the cliché of the depressed comedian.
Fifthly, unlike musicians, who can not only get away with but are encouraged to keep playing their old stuff, comedians are constantly under demand to produce new material. This pressure creates unnecessary anxieties in the performers’ minds. They are often paranoid there might be people in the audience who have heard their stuff before. (Also, in music it is the norm to wear your influences on your sleeve; if anything, it gives you more credibility to say you’re into early Rolling Stones or The Velvet Underground. In comedy, if you are anything like anyone else, especially Bill Hicks, you’re a dirty copycat try-hard wannabe.) Sixthly, comedy isn’t cool. Despite things like Boosh and Flight of the Conchords, comedy as a genre is usually placed last for media coverage, behind movies, music, books, art and theatre. Unlike in the UK, where people go to see comedy the way they go to see films, there’s no infrastructure here for comedians outside the Comedy Festival. Apart from the big names appearing on TV and commercial radio, there’s a general wasteland of sporadic comedy rooms and one-off theatre shows. This also creates a lack of critical debate; while music is analysed beyond all space and time, comedy is rarely lauded as a culturally valid art form.
Seventhly isn’t a word.
Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Local comedian.
Local comedian who?
Exactly. Get a publicist.
Okay, okay, how about this. Early next year, we pack out the MCG. Every comic in Australia gets one minute to entertain the crowd. The crowd are all fitted out with voting devices, like the worm in the political debates. At the end, the top 20 percent is allowed to do the Comedy Festival. The bottom 20 percent is legally required never to perform stand up ever again. The middle 60 percent writes for Hey Hey It’s Saturday, which Channel 9 has decided to make a twenty-four hour, round-the-clock show with Daryl at the helm (except between the hours of five and eight am, when he’s briefly replaced by Agro).
‘There is nothing to fear but fear itself, and fucking up a stand-up routine.’
– Mary MacKillop
Two nights before my first ever Comedy Festival show, I had the most profound and vivid dream. In it, I am sitting in a lounge room watching the Muppets on TV. Chris Martin from Coldplay is on. He’s playing a sweet, sombre song but is dressed as a clown. He also has a bunch of cockatoos tied to him. They start flapping and he is slowly lifted off the ground. He looks worried and keeps glancing to his manager at the side, as if to suggest this isn’t part of the act. The camera follows him as he’s being lifted higher and higher. He is terrified now and signalling frantically for someone to get him down. He is taken up near the roof of the studio, where there are two candelabras on the wall. The cockatoos fly into them and catch on fire. I turn away at this point and burst into tears. I walk into the kitchen to tell everyone what I’ve seen but there’s no one there.
Justin Heazlewood performs as The Bedroom Philosopher and will be touring nationally August 12 - September 5 in support of his album ‘Songs From the 86 Tram’. Click here for a full list of dates and booking info.
Back
