SHAUN MICALLEF'S ONLINE WORLD AROUND HIM                        Back          Home
	Anything for a laugh Author: By Meredith Wilkie Date: 04/02/2001 Words: 2587 Publication: Sun Herald Section: Sunday Life Page: 12 Insurance law's loss was comedy's gain, then Shaun Micallef decided he could act. So, where to from here for the small screen's anti-clown? He has an awkwardness about him. Something that when you're watching him on screen makes you cringe a little. Slightly embarrassed for him. He doesn't look like he quite knows what he's doing. But, of course, that's all part of the charm. "The comedy I do is very straight," Shaun Micallef says, "it relies on foxing the expectation that I'm going to be a newsreader or a barrister. I'm not clowny, I don't think." The anti-clown, perhaps? "Anti-clown..." It rolls out on his mellifluous voice, "I like that." He's an enigma, friends and colleagues say - but an enigma who is completely normal. Not ordinary, just not out to prove anything. Sensible, but ready to take risks, like chucking in his legal career in Adelaide to write comedy in Melbourne for $150 a week. A comic writer who fronts his own comedy show, The Micallef Program, yet who also took on a straight drama role on SeaChange. It seems like a split personality, a yin-yang effect, depending on which way the camera is pointing. There's the considered, terribly nice ex-insurance lawyer side, and the slightly loony, self-confessed nastier side with the rather black sense of humour. At high school, Micallef's favourite subjects were, conversely, geology and drama. "I did, I really did like geology!" he says, "I was able to draw the strata very nicely, things like information about shale or geosynclinal rifts for some reason just stayed in my head. Drama, I didn't get a chance to do that much but I did love it when we did it. Certainly, the limited drama that I did do was about getting a laugh from my classmates. Probably because I was a boring geology student." Growing up in the Adelaide suburb of Clovelly Park, he never seriously entertained a career in comedy, despite his weekend adventures to Marx brothers films and his affection for The Goons and Jerry Lewis. (He interviewed Lewis earlier this year, realising a dream he's had since he was five.) While his three younger sisters were off learning ballet and tap, Micallef waited in the car reading comic books until they were finished. In fact, he would have liked to have been one of the Marx brothers. But not Groucho or Chiko, Marco, Gummo, Zeppo or even Manny (he died young) because that would take away what that particular brother contributed. There would have had to have been a seventh. Shauno. "I reckon that would have been a pretty cool deal." Micallef's maternal great-grandmother came from Ireland at the age of 20. His father arrived as a 15-year-old with his family from Malta. "It's a Maltese surname and Irish everything else. Shaun Patrick, even Micallef sounds a bit Irish," Micallef junior says. Mind you, it's actually pronounced "Mica-llef", but the young Mica-llefs always put that down to their father's accent and answered to the Australianised version, anyway. "Micallef," he says with a nasal strine, "don't you understand your own name, Dad? Speak Austra-ian!" Dad worked for a company that sold Volvos and mum at the Bank of Adelaide. He even got along with his sisters. The slight mispronunciation of his surname and his poor ball skills (he had to wear specs from grade one) seem to have been his major childhood traumas. That and he can't remember any family holidays, "I can only remember getting there and leaving. I can never remember the holiday, ever. But getting there's half the fun they say, leaving must be the rest of it." A bit like his law career, really. After high school, Micallef says, he fell into law because he got the marks to get in. "We were encouraged to pursue what you were capable of pursuing rather than necessarily what you wanted to. I didn't know what I wanted to do, really, so it just seemed like the most sensible thing to do. In my first year, I took it very seriously and studied quite hard. Then I discovered university revue and didn't take it very seriously at all, and discovered alcohol, didn't study very hard at all and just passed." The Footlights University revue also introduced Micallef to Francis Greenslade (who appears in all three series of The Micallef Program) and Gary McAffrie (who ended up co-writing the show). "The first time I saw Shaun, he was pretending to be a small iced coffee carton, auditioning for some show," says Greenslade. McAffrie says, "I'd heard reports he was a witty raconteur, as they say, and bon vivant, so when I met him at law school, I encouraged him to come and do some schtick with us because we were always looking for people who could make people laugh." When Micallef graduated from university, he got a job as general dogsbody to a criminal lawyer. "I say I did insurance law because it sounds terribly dull but it really wasn't that dull and I used to do other bits and pieces as well. I did a little bit of minor small-time stuff in the Magistrates Court but criminal law never appealed to me. It all seemed a bit seamy and seedy and it was a little bit hard to forget about it when you went home." He ended up doing insurance law for 10 years. Partly, it was the sensible thing - he was married and wasn't really sure what he wanted to do. "I was one of those kids," he laughs, a little embarrassed, "I was at home until I was 26 and got married." While McAffrie left Adelaide for Melbourne and a career in television, Micallef and Greenslade did cabaret acts and theatre sports (which Greenslade says they were very bad at) and Micallef did a short stint on radio SAFM. He was now spending all his spare time writing, including a little for the ABC's Big Gig. In 1993, his wife, Leandra, (also a trained lawyer, now the part-owner of a cosmetics company) drew an "X" on the calendar and said he had to make up his mind by that date. After that, she said, it could never be mentioned again if he didn't do anything about it. So, they packed their bags and at the end of the year moved to Melbourne to give it a serious go. He was 32. "I felt, well, if I was 40 or 50 and hadn't tried to make a living out of writing, I saw myself as a bitter man, one of those ones who would sit back and look at the television and go: that's not funny, basically just criticising." "He rang up," says McAffrie, "and said, 'hey, I'm coming over to Melbourne, will you be my friend?' I think those were his exact words." So, McAffrie introduced Micallef to a few people, including Andrew Knight (co-creator and co-executive producer of SeaChange) who was then writing and working on Channel 7's Full Frontal. "The first year of Full Frontal, Gary McAffrie kept on throwing his [Micallef's] name in front of me and showed me some of the scripts he'd written and a couple of them were just appalling," says Knight. "Then I started getting desperate and not being able to think of a single idea myself, I went back over some of them and thought yeah, these are tremendously funny. I got him over just on a basic retainer and within six months, he was so good I gave he and Gary the show." Micallef gave himself some acting roles, including Milo Kerrigan (the all-purpose expert), documentary presenter David McGann, and Fabio: The Most Beautiful Man in the World. "There was freedom and opportunity to learn in an ensemble cast where the camera's not on you all the time so I could make my mistakes - and I made plenty - and it wasn't fatal, whereas if the camera was just on me or it was my show or the series hinged entirely upon my performance then I probably would have been out of there within six months and that's it, back to the insurance." The flip side was he felt he didn't have enough control over his work. "I didn't have any hand in the shape of the show," he says, "what they cut out of it, even though I used to go to the edits and argue my point." There was also the constant repetition of characters and gags, "that's what Shaun and Gary hated about Full Frontal and all these sort of programs," says Knight. "You get a character and to sustain a 26-hour series it's: Do Nobby! Do it 26 times! Because that's what the audience like," says Knight. "And they're like, nah, life's too short to be doing this character for too long." So when Micallef and McAffrie were negotiating for The Micallef Program, which first screened in 1998, ownership was a major issue. "I make mistakes but at least they're mine," says Micallef. "I had a hand in the theme music, I write it all, I act it all, I work with the director, he was away a couple of days so I directed it, I edit it and I try and keep as much involvement in the publicity of it as possible. Otherwise, you're just a commodity, you're just part of the assembly line. "I remember reading once about Spike Milligan, that he had a rule where he'd get up and he would sit down and he would write for at least three hours a day, whether he wanted to or not. "So if I sit down to write something and it's not inspired enough, I still force something out. I probably won't use it but there's always something you can get out of it. "Sometimes, we'll look at it and get a huge laugh and go, 'Well, we don't really want that sort of laugh or we've had too many of that sort of laugh'," he says. "So we take out some laughs. "We play around a bit with expectations. We might write some jokes that are intentionally bad jokes so the laugh comes from the failure of those jokes. To fox the audience a bit you've got to misstep a little so they don't quite know what's going to happen next." Part of his appeal is his lawyer persona, says Andrew Knight. "He's sort of Cleese-like, because he's tall and good-looking and he looks like a lawyer. The fact that he does a pratfall, he's a master of them, and can really physicalise his comedy, it really throws people." Yet when Knight was looking for somebody to play Warwick Munro on SeaChange, a part he describes as the most boring man in the world, he called Micallef: who immediately said he would take it. Part of him, of course, was made for the role. "The man doesn't drink or smoke," says Knight, a little incredulously, "and appears to be horrendously faithful!" In fact, he doesn't even drink coffee. "There's been no epiphany in my life where I've thought I'd rule these things out," Micallef says. "I don't go around preaching to anyone about the ill. It didn't really agree with me - two beers and I was unconscious." He and his wife have just bought a weatherboard Victorian in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Williamstown, where they are raising their two boys, aged two and a half and five months ("Oh right," he says of parenthood, "I'm not actually the focus of life.") and he's happy to have reached his goal of making a living from writing. "That was all I ever wanted to do, to see if I could make a living out of it. I don't really want to do anything else, I don't want to be a millionaire." His plan now is to write a sitcom. The only shows he watches regularly are Frasier and Cheers - "I'm finding those two shows really interesting" - and he has an idea for a show set in a city law firm in which, he says, he'll probably play a bastard. Whatever he goes on to do, it'll be in the industry - he'd like to write a screenplay, make a film. In the few nanoseconds of spare time that he has, he watches millions of movies, and has a huge collection of books about film and film stars. "I think ever since he could speak, he's wanted to be a comedian," Francis Greenslade says. "He once told me he used to have credits at the end of his dreams." My favourite sketch An excerpt from Shaun Micallef's favourite "bit" - the Submarine Mission. We pick up the action after a mutiny by the crew and a large explosion. Captain: Mr Abolominium, batton down your overcoat. Dorp, get some sponges. Carrie, invent a fluid made of oxygen that can be poured into the human lung. The captain leaves.Cut to corridor. Pandemonium. Sailors rush about. Abolominium is following after the captain. Abolominium: I'm coming with you Captain. It's a special moment as they stride together. Abolominium: I'm going to the toilet and it's on the way. Abolominium peels off to go to the gents and the captain peels off in the other direction through the door to the engine room. The engine room. There are explosions and lights and smoke and fire. Captain: Damage report? Fred: Things are broken and burning. Captain: We need to put out these flames immediately. Fred spies a fire extinguisher on the wall next to the porthole. He removes it and attempts to smash the glass in the porthole. The captain doesn't notice this at first and is speaking into the hose on the wall. Captain: Stand by to launch torpedoes. Quick cut to torpedo room. Pruitt is being squirted in his head from the hose. Pruitt: Standing by, sir. Zomomin enters the engine room. He has a note. Zomomin: Captain, we just got this message from Base Command. The war is over. Captain: It's over when I say it is, sailor. (into the hose) Fire! Cut to stock footage of torpedo being fired and a ship blowing up. Dissolve to captain's cabin. The crew have gathered for a celebration. Abolominium: This is our way of telling you we're sorry for the mutiny. Pruitt here has written a poem. Pruitt: It was six years ago, sir. About a tree. Dorp: Three chairs for Captain Micallef! Captain: Thank you. But the real thanks should come from our engineer, Fred Smith. Fred: I learned a valuable lesson today. Don't set fire to the engine room of a torpedoed submarine - it really doesn't help matters. Cheers and good-natured back patting from the throng. Carrie: (entering) Captain, the First Lord of the Admiralty is here to thank you in person. A magnificently plumed naval dignitary enters with a vast concorde of equerrys. First Lord: Thanks. They leave. Captain: Fred, get back in the engine room and full steam ahead. Fred: You mean...? Captain: Of course not. You filthy pig. Fred looks hurt. Everyone looks disgusted with him. Captain: (voice-over) Final entry. Captain's Log. The sea is a cruel mistress. And so is... Cut to a still of a perfectly harmless looking suburban housewife. Captain: (voice-over) ... Mrs Betty Twill of Bolivar.