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Who's Afraid of the Next Big Thing?

The Eye, 2 December 1999

 

YOU MAY HAVE SEEN HIM ON THE ABC OR POPPING UP ON THE PANEL OR PUSHING A PRAM BY THE WATER. AND WITH ANDREW DENTON LEADING HIS FAN CLUB, YOU CAN EXPECT TO SEE A LOT MORE OF SHAUN MICALLEF, LAWYER TURNED CLOWN. BY CRAIG SHERBORNE.

He's the new middle-aged man on the block. He's a quiet-living, grey-haired bespectacled guy who practised insurance law for 10 years in Adelaide but chucked it in to write and perform comedy routines in Melbourne.

He didn't do this because he hated being a lawyer. He liked being a lawyer. He was not unhappy with his life. He was not having a mid-life crisis. There was no great upheaval when he decided on the change. He simply said to his wife that he'd like to give it a go and she was very supportive.

He is not a sad clown. He is a contended clown. He is not racked by drink or drug addictions. He was never abused as a child. He never lived in abject poverty.

His father worked for a company that sold Volvos. His Mother is a loans manager at the bank of Adelaide.

He likes to keep in good shape. You can see him most mornings walking at power pace along Beaconsfield Parade near his Port Melbourne home, his arms exercised by pushing ahead of him the pram containing his infant son. And not your ordinary pram, but one of those three-wheeler, dragster-shaped things, for the new age dad who wants a work-out. He's not aiming to be rich, he just wants to be comfortable.

He has just attended his grandmother's funeral. He does not speak of her as having died, but having "passed away". He's as middle class as a four-wheel drive and Timberland loafers.

But stick a camera in his face to take a photo and Shaun Micallef stares into it like Narcissus into water.

He takes off his glasses, purses his lips a little, arches one eyebrow. He wants to make that almost angry, slightly goofy expression that says, "contemporary comedian".

The ABC must think we need a laugh. A particular kind of laugh - sketch 'n' stand-up comedy laughter. This spring it rolled three shows in that style. Backberner, O'Loghlin and The Micallef Programme, all with men in good suits as their stars.

The nerdy O'Loghlin topped the ratings with 180,000 viewers. Micallef was 10,000 behind. But the word is out that Micallef is the one to watch. There is something special about him, not in the handicapped sense, but in the talent sense.

Comedy of poor taste, rudeness and a bit of vulgarity is in fashion. It always has been. Micallef's work contains all that as well as a bleak/sicko quality that the audiences who are described as "intellectuals" love. Not that his comedy is profound. Micallef himself admits that.

"I just want to be funny. There's no underlying sub-text. No axe to grind," he says.

Even so, he's got a knack for satirising Australian manners and tweeness. There's no way Micallef the comic would allow one of the guests on his show's interview segment to get away with a euphemism like "passed away". The guest would be made to get to the bare point and say "died".

Barry Humphries playing Edna was good at doing that type of thing. So was Gunston. But their work could pack a malicious punch. Especially Edna.

Micallef the man doesn't like the idea of being considered malicious. He's too nice. So nice he feels he has to defend Humphries. "There's a lot of affection in his other character, Sandy Stone."

But Micallef the comedian has another beast altogether. In one skit, he accuses a blind character who insists upon being called "sight challenged" of not being blind at all because he has 5 percent vision.

"He's tactless I think rather than malicious," Micallef the man says. "A lot of the characters I play or a lot of what I find funny is about failing but getting away with it. When you can almost see the crumbling inside of somebody. That comes from the work I did as a lawyer, standing up in front of a judge and thinking 'I wonder if he can tell I'm a complete fraud and don't know what I'm talking about'."

So how far would he go to get a laugh?

He can't imagine a boundary. "Gary [McCaffrie, his co-writer] and I try to mine areas that haven't been mined before. But we're not out just to shock. There's no self-censorship."

Andrew Denton, TV comedian turned radio jock, likes the sheer stupidity of Micallef's comedy.

"Not since Gunston and maybe The Late Show have I genuinely laughed at anything like I do with Micallef. It's black humour and I really like black humour. But you know what I really like about Micallef's humour most? It's just stupid," says Denton. "I have a motto: 'Fortune follows the stupid."

Micallef didn't just appear from nowhere. He's been drifting around the comedy traps with his offsider Francis Greenslade (a regular actor on his TV show) since the early 1980s.

They met at Adelaide University and appeared in Footlights reviews together. So did McCaffrie.

In fact Micallef was writing comedy at secondary school. "I wasn't good at sport. I had specs from grade one. On the weekends I used to watch the matinee movies, Marx Brothers films. Then my mother introduced me to The Goons. I thought that was the most fantastic thing."

Other influences crammed his imagination: The bug-eyed, frizz-haired Marty Feldman and his Comedy Machine TV Show; Morecambe and Wise, Sgt Bilko, Get Smart.

In Micallef's show, a parody of The Two Ronnies flashes up subliminally between segments. "It's like a memory button. In The Two Ronnies at the end of one of their sketches you'd cut back to them sitting together ... my comedy was the product of what I laughed at as a child rather than what I've suffered through as an adult."

But The Goons radio show is most important to him and its manic absurdity pervades his own style. Denton considers this a blessing. He contends there are two schools of comedy: "There are those who like The Goons are get it. And those who don't. Those who do would like Shaun because he's just funny, he's stupid."

Funnily enough, given Micallef's penchant for the comic absurd, Monty Python doesn't figure as high on Micallef's love-your-work list. "I missed Monty Python completely. I got to them in the end through Life of Brian and the books and records."

Books and records on comedy Micallef has plenty of. Inside the tidy rented townhouse he shares with wife Leandra (ex-lawyer, part owner of a cosmetic manufacturing company), and opposite the pianola and Chesterfield suite, his books are stacked in a tall bookcase against the wall in the lounge. Hundreds of books, spines emblazoned with the names of the greats: Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, W.C Fields, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Cary Grant, Red Skelton, Noel Coward, Peter Sellers, John Cleese, Woody Allen. Biographies, autobiographies, you name it.

His modest CD and record collection continues the theme - Chaplin soundtracks, Fawlty Towers recordings - before the crooners and croakers take over: Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, David Essex, Elton John. And the Sex Pistols. He likes the Pistols. Of course he does. What boy from a comfortable middle-class home in the 1970s didn't like punk rock and especially the Sex Pistols?

But David Essex? Must be his wife's.

Micallef had two goes at making a career in comedy, though the first try was more a toe-in-water attempt.

In 1989 he took leave from laywering for a year to do stand-up with Greenslade wherever they could get a gig. He played at dives where the pay was a plateful of food, met the likes of Jimeoin for whom he would later write material, then went back to Adelaide to the insurance law business.

The second attempt was in 1994 and was more a boots-and-all effort. He job a job writing for Full Frontal for a pittance a week and began polishing his performing skills, working on a persona he could slip into, much as an actor does.

The rest is yet to become history. But if Denton is any judge, it will. Writing. Micallef loves it and hates it. But he has to do it - after all, it's his living now, or a big part of it. And he has to make it funny. He relies on methodical know-how. His lawyer roots at work once more. "The training I got as a lawyer to construct an argument and cross examine, helps the writing because I approach it in a very methodical way."

He is a slow writer. He gets daunted by having to fill up the blank page. At the moment he's got plenty of pages to fill up. He's writing a situation comedy. "I want to have a crack at it like every other comedy writer in Australia," he says.

What's the sit-com about?

"People say write about what you know. So, having been a lawyer for 10 years, I'm trying to tie that in. I've nearly finished a first draft that sorts out the characters. But the writing was hard and I just get sick of it."

There's one other thing he finds daunting. "Whatever we do here, we are going to be compared with a show like Seinfeld. That's a show that has set the bar very high. A show that took over $11 million a show to make."

When he finishes the script he'll try to sell the project to the ABC. "There's more of a chance to get it made how you want it made there I think. I've got some ideas about how the show should be shot." He also wants to write a screenplay before he dies, again like every other comedy writer in the land.

Off on another tack entirely, Micallef would like to have a crack at playing Shakespeare's Richard III on stage. He think it's a funny role. A comedy villain. "I always thought I'd set it in a cold war environment."

We live in benign times. Most people are doing okay. There's the East Timor bother, the ephemeral parade of tragedies we glance over in the daily news but, on the whole, things aren't too bad. Maybe that's why there's a lack of tough political comedy in Australia. There isn't enough material for comedians to get their teeth into.

Micallef's show pokes fun at the parliamentary style of politicians, particularly John Howard and Peter Costello and their repeated use of the words, "at the appropriate time". But that's about it. "You just have to look at those in power, who our prime minister is, who our cabinet is," says Micallef. "They are pretty benign. They're not passionate about what they do, let alone encouraging passion against them or for them."

What does a professional comedian who is good natured and benign himself do in such circumstances? He makes mischief and silliness of course. And in Micallef's case does it with a bit of bite and says he's only acting.