W i l A n d er s o n
“...ya know what your show is about mate? It’s what you reckon about stuff, why you reckon it, and why you reckon you might be wrong about reckonin’ it!”
“Well, a particular reviewer said that once,” recalls Anderson. “I’m not too sure, to this day, if they were trying to be a smart arse!” he laughs heartily. “There’s similar things in some ways, but as every comedian will tell you, the one thing that every single comedian in the world is jealous of, when it comes to rock stars, is the idea that if you have a good song, people want to hear it over and over and over again. Whereas if you’re a comedian, you never come out on stage and [hear] - ‘dude, do klim is milk spelt backwards from 1999! We’ll all sing along and hold up our lighters!’ No. So, it’s always about new stuff.” Wil is smack bang in the middle of a tour that is taking him across almost the entirety of this wide brown land of ours. And, as he has been for many years, he is giving audiences a rollicking-good time. “I’m kind of in the middle of it, actually. I’m doing the Sydney run of it at the moment. It started in February. I went to Adelaide; it’s been to Brisbane, New Zealand, London, Ireland. And then when Sydney finishes it gets to the more interesting parts of Australia! I’ve got a bit of a random schedule, because we do Gruen during the week. So basically it’s places I can get to on the weekend. I’m going to Townsville, Port Macquarie, Newcastle, Canberra, and smaller places — Nowra, I go Sale, which is where I’m from. Some of them are massive, and some of them are little. A lot of them
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Rock Star Comedy Wil Anderson has been described as the ‘rock star of the comedy world’. However, as Anderson tells Rod Whitfield, there is a marked contrast between the lives and careers of a famous comedian and a high profile musician. are weekend trips.” Punters who come out to Anderson’s live shows can expect, among other things, more swearing than they see on television. “That’s the warning I like to give to people… in the past, if people came to see me do stand-up, they had a pretty fair idea of what they were going to see. Whereas these days you do get some people who are like ‘oh well he seems lovely on the television’. And then they come to the show and they’re like ‘ooh, he doesn’t say fuck that often on Gruen!’ “Stand-up comedy is what I do for a job. So basically it’s the ‘true’ me; the most fun me I guess, in many ways. The show itself was summed up by a punter when I was doing my Queensland run, and I hadn’t really put into words what the show was about… This guy came up to me, in the roughest, proper Queensland accent and went ‘ya know what your show is about mate? It’s what you reckon about stuff, why you reckon it, and why you reckon you might be wrong about reckonin’ it!’. And I was like ‘that’s exactly
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what the show’s about!’. I wouldn’t have summed it up that way. I would have said it was about the complexity of modern decisions, and how we all live in an ambiguous and grey world, and everything needs to be absolute but most of us are hypocritical. But you know what? I reckon he said it well!” So that also begs the question, how does Wil keep his comedy fresh? “I guess that’s the hardest thing,” he muses. “Because, as we joked about at the start, comedy audiences are voracious audiences, they always want new material. I do one tour a year, so I write a new show every year. I tour nine months of the year and I have three months where I don’t tour. And that three months is my writing and conceiving of the tour time. So that’s the most important time… I could sit down and write an hour of jokes that I can use and references that would amuse people enough for them to enjoy themselves and they wouldn’t complain and want their money back. But I don’t really write with that in mind. I write [thinking] that I’ve got
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to say this stuff for nine months; I’m going to say this stuff 200 times. What would I be interested in talking about every night for nine months. Because the minute I’m not interested, then the audience won’t be interested either.” It’s a long way from a tiny rural Victorian town to touring Australia and the world, hosting TV shows and the myriad other endeavours Anderson has on the go. “I’m a country Victorian, originally,” he says, “born and raised on a dairy farm down in East Gippsland. My dad lives on the road he was born on; my grandfather built the road, and it’s called Andersons Road, named after [him]. My brother’s back on the farm as well. But I’ve lived in Sydney for 11 years, I guess. I came up here when I started doing the Triple J Breakfast show. Then the next job I got was doing the Glasshouse, which was out of Sydney. We did that for six years. Then the next job was at Triple M, doing the radio, and that was out of Sydney. Now I’m doing Gruen which is out of Sydney. It seems like I came for a weekend and stayed for a lifetime. I get, from all my Melbourne friends, ‘when are you moving back?’. Now it’s a bit more like ‘are you ever moving back?’.” Wil Anderson performs at the Civic Theatre, Newcastle, on Thursday October 27, and the Glasshouse, Port Macquarie, on Friday October 28.
reverb magazine issue #063 — October 2011 29