RISKY BUSINESS

ANNOUNCING, "Mum, I'm going to be a comedian," is a risky approach to making the olds proud. But Wil Anderson and David Hughes have chosen a road their parents judged was so far from mainstream, that it's strictly four-wheel-drive only. Anderson, a former journalist with the Australian Financial Review, and about to perform in his first Melbourne Comedy Festival, says his parents were worried. "They said, `Oh, my God, how are you going to eat?' Even going away to Canberra to be a journalist was strange to them," Anderson says. Hughes' parents were similarly worried when he started doing comedy in Perth three years ago. "Mine don't understand. They were embarrassed that I was just making a fool of myself in front of people," he says. Anderson says: "I said to my parents, `Look, I'm going to do this for a year and I'm probably not always going to be able to pay the bills."' The plight of struggling artists is well-known, and comedians are no different, according to Hughes. "I'd always wanted to do comedy," he says, "so I just got up in a small club in Perth and did five minutes. You don't get paid. "And I basically died in the arse. Oh, I was really embarrassed. You think about doing it for so long and then you do it and I was really scared. No one was laughing. "Then I thought that if I don't do this next week I'll never do this again. So I just went back. I didn't really love it, but I walked off with my dignity." Anderson's first few gigs are fresher in his mind, but he can also see the funny side. "The first gig I did was at the Espie (the Esplanade Hotel). I'd gone before and thought, `If I see some people I think I'm funnier than, I'll give it a go. And I got up and it was just incredible, it just went really well and I thought, `Man! I'm unreal, this is easy!' "I had another gig the next week and I was just thinking: `I'm Mr Comedy, I'm Mr Saturday night.' And then the MC didn't turn up and the bloke who runs the place said to do 15 minutes to warm the crowd up. And Oh! There is no louder sound than silence. These people were staring at me going, `You have absolutely no talent at all."' Since those early days, they have both relaxed, which they say is the secret to being funny. Hughes' Festival gig, Facing Reality, is based on himself and his misfortunes. "People can relate to that sort of comedy if they think it is coming from somewhere close to the truth," Hughes says. Which is weird, Anderson says, because his show, Diet Life, is all about Hughes' life, too."No seriously," Anderson says, "My show has tap dancing. There's dancing girls." "It's going to be," Hughes says, "a little Riverdance.""Yeah," Anderson says, "it's Riverdance with elephants. You see, the elephants, they don't have upper bodies.