SHAUN MICALLEF'S ONLINE WORLD AROUND HIM                             Back               Home
SHAUN SOLICITS LAUGHS By Colin Vickery Herald Sun 25 August 1999 HE DOESN'T really look like a funny person. In fact, the silvery hair, tall frame, good looks and resonant voice give him more the air of a solicitor. Which is exactly what Shaun Micallef was until 1994. He spent most of his time dealing with motor vehicle insurance cases before he quit his Adelaide job and moved to Melbourne to take up a six-week writing job with Full Frontal. For writing one minute of comedy a week Micallef got $220. Six months later, he began making appearances on the show and one of his characters, the battered boxer Milo Kerrigan, became a hit. "I've got a straight delivery and straight face so people are surprised when I do something that comes out of left field," Micallef says. "I'm sure that makes people laugh more than if I looked a bit weird." Micallef, 37, spent 2 and a half years with Full Frontal before going solo in 1998 with his comedy series The Micallef Program on the ABC. His second series, renamed The Micallef Programme, follows the line of the first as an imaginary tonight show hosted by the funnyman. The show features humorous interviews peppered with surreal sketches featuring Micallef, along with colleagues Wayne Hope, Francis Greenslade and Roz Hammond. "There are not as many sketches in this second series and the ones that are there are a lot shorter than people are used to seeing on Fast Forward or Full Frontal," he says. More sketches are being filmed on location and shot in one take, placing the emphasis on performance rather than editing skills to make people laugh. The reason for the changes, Micallef says, is he wanted to break away from what he saw as an increasingly tired sketch comedy formula. "The old style has been going since 1989. I thought it was time for a change. "This series is more about characters and performance, and there is a lot of ad-libbed banter that helps to make it seem very real." GONE, too, is Milo Kerrigan, seen to have run his course as far as Micallef is concerned. Describing his comedy style as a mix of physical and verbal, Micallef's boyhood heroes were Abbott and Costello and Jerry Lewis. The only Australian comedy performer to influence his work is Barry Humphries. "I've never done that laid-back Aussie character because I'm not like that, and don't write that way."