Comedian Wil Anderson is tired, and it's not just because he sets the alarm for 3:45am so he can make his breakfast radio shift on Triple J. As is Anderson's way of late, he not only has radio to contend with, but he's also planning a new show of standup, called Jagged Little Wil. "To be honest with you I could do with some sleep," Anderson admits. "I'm really at that point where I realise that about five days out from a show opening, that I now officially don't get to sleep again until about March. Actually Rip Van Winkle, when he went to sleep for a hundred years, it was basically so he could prepare for a Sydney Opera House season. So I wished I'd done that. But instead I followed the inspirational words of Jon Bon Jovi - 'I'll sleep when I'm dead'. Pretty much in any aspects of my life I like to follow the inspirational words of Jon Bon Jovi. Like I don't go to the doctor, I just rely on people's love to be 'Bad Medicine'."
hey honky
Wil Anderson story by Mark Neilsen
The thing is, he brings his busy schedule upon himself doing all that he does. Not only is there radio and standup, but Anderson also works on ABC TV's The Glass House. Presently the show hasn't returned to air for 2003 so things are a bit more relaxed for Anderson, if you can say such a thing. But even though it's busy, the thing is Anderson loves all his jobs just too darn much to let one go.
"Well if I had some really shit jobs, I'd happily give them up. Don't get me wrong, I don't actually have any great love to have 15 different jobs, it's just that they're all really quite good jobs that I love doing. Like if I was a jizzlobber, I'd pretty easily give that up," Anderson says (and if you don't know what a jizzlobber is, you're too young). "I wouldn't just go, 'you know what, I just love the world of a jizzlobber so much that I'm just going to keep dedicating to that despite other various commitments'. But as it turns out, I get to do stuff that's really good fun and really hard to say I won't do that any more."
A major part of his working life for the next couple of weeks will be his new stand up show Jagged Little Wil. Anderson admits he's still fine tuning what will actually appear in the show. "I get the impression it might change a fair bit night to night in that I know I'll talk about what's happening in the world a fair bit at the moment with the war and all that sort of stuff, and that's going to be changing every day. It looks like that is all going to go completely pear shaped in the next week or so, so I imagine you'll hear a bit about that, and our good friends the Raelians, and a whole bunch of that sort of stuff," he says.
"I guess it's something a bit...not serious, like about a few more media things than maybe I have done in the last couple of years. The last couple of years they seemed to have been quite fun, light, funny shows, where as this one, just in feel at the moment, it's till pretty funny, but it seems the topics I'm dealing with and where I'm finding the comedy from this time are a little bit more serious. It seems like this year I've been writing some stuffabout the laws they're thinking about bringing in about burning the flag, I've been writing some stuff about Dr Philip Nitschke's death machine and it seems to be about some more serious things than it has been in the last couple of years."
Anderson believes his looking at more "serious" topics comes from his feeling that it is what people are interested in at the moment. "Last year becuase of September 11 and stuff, it seemed like nobody really wanted to see something too serious, because the world seemed such a dark, horrible place, and you just wanted to be entertained. Purely entertained. This year it feels like now after people have done that for a while, it feels like people want to get back to debating issues and thinking about things," Anderson begins.
"Like if this war had been a year ago, then I think tehre would have been a lot less debate. You wouldn't have had these opinion polls saying 60 percent of Australians don't support blah, blah, blah. Because the mood of the world right then was so one-sided, but it's back to now and there are a lot of gray areas now, which I think is a lot more fascinating. I think people have had a real break from thinking about this stuff and now are keen to hear about it again. I know that my interest in that, I was skipping those pages for a long time.
"Now I'm starting to get back into it, just in conversations with friends and stuff I've noticed you're back to talking about stuff like that. It's back to wanting to talk about serious, like I'm not saying...There will be no test at the end of the show, you know. There's no 'War in Iraq is an unjust war because...discuss in 1500 words'. It's going to be jokes. I hope it's going to be a show you completely appreciate based on it making you laugh for 70 minutes. And I've got this stupid thing to do at the start, which I won't give away too much for this one, but it is the most rediculous start to my show that I've ever had. If you're ever a fan of white boys rapping then...I won't give away too much, but Eminem better look out, that's all I'm saying."
It won't be like Homer Simpson rapping and Bart and Lisa telling him to stop because he's so bad and telling him never to rap again will it?
"There might be a bit of 'Please don't do that, please don't do that'. There really might be a bit of that. Compared to me, Vanilla Ice looks pretty hardcore it's sad to say."
What about snow?
"Even Snow! Even the Informer himself might look like Ice Cube compared to a bit of Wil Anderson white boy. I don't think there is anyone whiter than me. I think I may well be Australia's whitest person."
Wil Anderson performs at The Playhouse in the Sydney Opera House from January 28 to February 9.
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