Fear of the Mike Sunday Life March 31 2002

Standing in the spotlights, before a hard-bitten audience, and leaning into the microphone, the rookie comedian learns to do or die.


The only think missing is a voice. Trouble is, the comedians in the wings are dumbstruck.

Tonight is amateur hour. Undergrads in long shorts and cross-trainers are dry-heaving in the loo. Single mums are pacing, climbing the curtains - childbirth was a picnic compared to this ordeal. Public servants are "omming". A telemarketer called Shane is writing cheat notes on his hand. Lauren slaps her cheeks. The whole troupe has gone troppo. Clinicians know the syndrome as "ampliphobia", or fear of the mike.

Triple J presenter and comedian Wil Anderson has overcome his own Mike-phobia. "My whole life's just about Mike, otherwise I'm just a crazy person talking to myself. Without Mike I'm just an annoying guy. The mike helps me convince people that comedy is a career option. The number-one commandment of the mike is that you're always in control. No matter how funny the audience can be, you're the one with the loud shouting stick."

Telling gags in front of strangers, complete with mike and spotlights, is not for the squeamish. Talent quests, such as tonight's Raw Comedy attracts the brave, the barmy and the ill-advised, with just a smattering of the gifted.

The competition venue, the Comic's Lounge in North Melbourne, resembles an RSL with a pair of chattering teeth supplementing the eternal flame. It's hot and low-key with a cruel green sign marked EXIT visible from the stage. American humourist P J O'Rourke would call the decor "budget Mafia". Stuck on the walls, the Who's Who of comedy stare down in fey sufferance. Live and sweaty, Dave O'Neil starts to tenderise the crowd before the amateurs take over.

O'Neil and the microphone go way back. "I was in a band called Captain Coco before I did comedy, so I was used to mikes and standing onstage, but I had never really, like, spoken before. In the early days, before I went onstage, I used to feel sick in the stomach. Nowadays, I get a little bit nervous before going on, but it's a hundredth of what I used to feel. Once you get on, and get laughs, you're fine for the whole night."

Tonight the lounge is playdough in O'Neil's hands. He raves about raves, and shawarmas, and Centrelink, and selling drugs to finance your kids' schooling. "Dads," he says, "who's got a dad?" The crowd is silent. "Oh shit," he says. "I forgot. It's the orphanage."

Sponsored by Triple J, Raw Comedy is a nationwide driftnet set to snare the funniest fish from each State, letting the others flop and choke in its wake. More than 500 wannabes will venture from those wings, testing mettle and schtick; most will burn in the heats. Boys next door will die. House-painters will die. Novelists. Teachers. Duos dressed as Klu Klux Klan members in paisley pillowcases will suffocate in public. All but the gifted will bleed.

O'Neil explains the Raw Comedy rules. None of the 15 comedy acts tonight has earned more than $500 from being humourous. None can hold the stage for more than five minutes, roughly four minutes too long too many. A fairy-like bell will chime in the darkness to deadline the punchline.

'Yeah, please keep laughing. I forgot my second joke. No, no, really I have. So anyway, when I was fourteen, I rode a motorbike or, more to the point, I crashed a motorbike, missed the ground, went flying through the air and down a well. Don't laugh - it's true. I'll show you the scars.' - Matthew Woodley, Act One.

Squashed in the mosh pit, the audience doles out compassion, if not a titter, as the emotional scars deepen. Comedy is ruthless, and Mike's not helping: booming every memoir to the room, keening feedback, tripping the nomads, playing tricksy with his stand.

But even the best stand-ups know first-hand the horrors that Mike can invoke. Billy Connolly, the so-called Scot of the Anarchic, is a quivering mess on page five of his biography, 'Billy', too frazzled to face the hordes at the Hammersmith Apollo. Pamela Stephenson, his squeeze-cum-shrink spies, on her wrecked fella backstage. "I don't fancy witnessing his death by 4,000 excitable Londoners," she writes.

And then he's gone, she writes, "a blinding circle of light assaults him, and I see his face change to a fighting calm." What Stephenson sees from the wings is "a beautiful armistice, achieved in the first few disarming sentences... There is always such peace for him out there in the spotlight, probably the only place he's truly happy."

Is that the drug? Is happiness the Holy Grail among the stand-up brigade? Drew Rokos, a former winner of Raw, and last year a winner of the UK equivalent, So You Think You're Funny, does stand-up for the pay-off of sleeping in. "Getting up at 10 is a pretty good lifestyle. Though every night your arse is on the line."

At last count, scanning the Australian clubs and media and festivals, there are close to a thousand arses on the line every week. Comedians are the town criers of our generation, the village idiots who infest the airwaves, the chat shows, the peak-hours, the big- and small-p panels, the column centimetres, the crazy breakfast radio crews. Nowadays, you can't say something unless you spin it drolly. An argument is a "routine". Prose is "material". But does this trend explain the stand-up mania, the foot-shooting urge to conquer the mike?

Tanya Losanno, a Raw recruit due up soon, was always the clown in the family, as though stand-up was the pre-ordained career she was powerless to, well, stand up to. "It feels like taking some mind-altering drug," says Losanno. "You're just so high after a good gig. It's the best feeling in the world. And yeah, when it isn't, my little sister has to tear me off the toilet floor."

Enter the fatalists. Before the bell rings, the performers must win the darkness over. On the Jerry Seinfeld index of public fear, we dread public speaking over dying. Strange as it seems, we'd prefer to be booked into crematoria over auditoria: a vote for dying in dignity, and not on our feet. And never in front of strangers.

'I'm part of the freak generation - my parents are still together. Um, what else can I say? Let's have a look at my little note here (pause) oh yeah... my parents have always been encouraging. The encouraged me to follow my dream providing it didn't cost more than $20, or involve leaving interstate.' - Michael Lukasi, Act Two.

Most contestants wilt in Raw's glare. One or two bloom.

'I plan to stay healthy and single, and when I hit my 70's, there'll be heaps of widowed chicks. It's not much, but it's a plan. Hey, if you haven't had sex since 1980, does that make you a retrosexual? [Laughter, applause] Well, does it?' - Justin McGinley, Act Four.

A few acts later, Tanya Losanno sets the room rippling with her airport routine, giving three strategies to those of us who can't muster tears when seeing people off.

'Here's how you do it. You can say, "Please, I can't look at you or I'll start to cry." The other thing to say is, "Just go, go before I start" and push the person towards the plane. Or lastly, put your hands on your chest and say, "I'm trying to be strong."' - Tanya Losanno, Act Seven.

Tanya finished with a nightclub stomp, then waves the crowd goodbye, ironically close to tears. Tonight, she's beaten the demons. She and Mike have made a beautiful thing together.

Offstage, off the hook, she confesses her chequered microphone history. "I come from a huge Italian family, so I was always asked to MC weddings. With stand-up it's completely different 'cause I'm in front of people I don't know. With my family it was never an issue - I knew they loved me regardless. But when I first did stand-up, I was petrified - but that's almost what keeps me going."

Comic surrealist Any Kaufman, the man behind Jim Carrey's 1999 film 'Man on the Moon', rated silence as the essence of comedy. 'Rove Live' host Rove McManus isn't scared of the silence so much. Silence, he reckons, means they're paying attention.

Years ago, before Wil Anderson went hand-in-hand with Mike, he encountered those eerie hushes in the Esplanade Hotel at St Kilda (aka the Espy) trialling gags in the open-mike afternoons. "Silence can be a worry. I get nervous if I'm a couple of jokes in, and I know they haven't gone as well as they should... and there's a little tumbleweed rolling across the stage, and everything seems to go into slow motion, like you're in a car accident, and you're just, 'Oh-oh.'"

That's when the courage kicks in. Bill Bailey, one half of the Rubber Bishops before defrocking into a solo career including a role on the British sitcom 'Black Books' (currently screening on ABC-TV), glimpsed the abyss that all comedians fear, and nearly lost his bearings. After shambling along at a London club with 10 minutes of raw material, Bailey copped the heckle, "Oy, tell us a joke."

"A fairly valid request at a comedy club," recalled Bailey on ABC Radio recently. "And then I realised, to my horror, that I didn't actually have any jokes. I don't know jokes. I don't collect jokes. I don't actually like jokes. Then I thought, what the hell am I going to do?" Bailey had the bottle to improvise. He made up a joke. He trusted the mike, and charmed the darkness.

Tonight, aside from O'Neil mumbling between brackets, every routine is scripted to the comma. Impro looms as that bridge too far. No exceptions, each tyro's objective is to meet Mike, and survive.

Thinner than a 'Changi' extra, Andrew Bertram describes Prince Harry on LSD as he must have done to his bathroom mirror a thousand times before, refining his rant to an edgy patter. Andrew Brown mimes a security guy coming home from work, and finally getting the chance to slouch.

A look-alike for Axl Rose - surely a hurdle for giggles - reckons Centrelink is the best place to pick up chicks. "You're unemployed. She's unemployed. That way you start level." And then the tragedy sinks in - we're seeing an aspiring comedian who doesn't have a day job he can keep.

"There's no school for comedy," as Anderson puts it. "When people start work as a lawyer, they don't expect you to walk into court and go like, 'Objection' and stuff like that. The only way you learn about comedy is on the stage."

This public torment, also known as education, continues into whiskey hour. Popular topics covered by the curriculum are sex, aeroplane food, hip-hop, answering machines, childhood, singlehood, dogs, drugs, sex, McDonalds, Centrelink, infomercials, Jabba the Hutt, bomb disposal, Jesus, Eddie McGuire and sex. And, little by little, September 11.

'A few months ago it was pretty freaky, yeah? We thought it was the end of the world - we had September 11, the anthrax scare and Nikki Webster releasing another single.' - Melissa Crotty, Act 12.

aughter is scattergun. Oddly enough, the more likeable the comic, the funnier their material seems. In one case, a claque of mates tries to trigger guffaws for a less than charismatic dweeb, but the plot is transparent, and silence resumes its reign. A distinctive silence. That studied hush which consumes a young boy watching an ant hill as he ponders how to destroy it.

Yet of any culprit, Mike is the man most collusive to the downfalls. He seems to resent the clammy, cleanskin hands that wrestle him all night. He sibilates in the wrong spots, or catches stage whispers better left implied. He crackles and spits in the draughts of hyperventilators.

Temple throb, jaws knot, hands scrabble the air for purchase. So lurid are some of the deaths, you can't tear your eyes away. Tom's death has a swan-like nobility. A bald guy flatlines from the moment his name is pronounced by God in the flies. Others stand breathless after the deadline and wonder how the firing squad missed.

By and large, the funny ones win. Justin McGinley streets his rivals for playing a neurotic dag. Tanya Losanno gets the nod for introducing several new phrases - "boob jiggle", "snot laugh" - into English, while Matthew Woodley's monologue is nimble and resonant. All three have the chance to win a rubber chicken, plus a ticket to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, at the Raw Grand Final.

With Mike in his paw, Dave O'Neil has the final word. "I once got sacked from my job as a PR consultant. Yeah, I know, me. True story. The company was going broke, and I wrote a song about the board and went into the boardroom and played it to them, unannounced. I mean, most normal people would bring a rifle into work, I brought my guitar. I played this sarcastic song and my immediate boss said, 'You should do stand-up - you've got balls.'"

LEARNING TO LOVE MIKE Wil Anderson: "At Raw, some of the people who seize up are those who really want to do comedy. So when a couple of things go wrong, because they want it so much, they get desperate for a Mike relationship. They're not acting cool enough.

"Early on, me and Mike played it cool. I had no desire to spend my life with Mike. I played hard to get with Mike. If it didn't work, I didn't care. I was seeing other Mikes. I'm seeing other amplifying equipment, other radio mikes, mikes on sticks, handheld mikes, cordless mikes... I'm a mike slut."

Dave O'Neil: "I like to take the mike out and wander about a bit. You feel the mike becomes part of your body after a while. The mike is your friend. You have to learn to trust it. After all, the mike is just a messenger, and you don't shoot the messenger.

"My worst gig was a Christmas party for a car dealership. It was in a concrete disco. Everyone was in fancy dress. The microphone was attached to the DJ booth and you could only move so far away. You had to kind of lean down to the mike. There was no lights on me. It was just really bad. Those nights can still happen."

Sue-Ann Post: "I didn't really understand the world of comedy when I first launched in. It's a weird thing, but thanks to the Mormon church, I didn't have a fear of getting up in front of lots of people, because I'd been doing [witnessing] since I was five. Not that I recommend that training to the aspiring comic. That's just something I managed to pull out of the wreckage - open-mike nights are much better.

"But you always have to have that fear, otherwise you get too cocky, and that's not pretty in a chick."

Drew Rokos (winner of Raw Comedy 2000 and the UK's So You Think You're Funny): "Getting to know Mike... it's just like women really. Getting to learn where everything is. How to hold it. How the stand works. It's all a bit intimidating to start with. The cord gets all tangled against the stand.

"It seems obvious now, but you always move the mike stand out of your personal space, off the stage, get the focus on you. Always hold the mike so you can hear your voice resonating around the room. No point telling a great joke if people can't hear you."

The Melbourne Comedy Festival 2002 runs into April 21. For more information, go to www.comedyfestival.com.au. Raw has its National Grand Final at Melbourne Town Hall on Sunday, April 14.

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