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haun Micallef and I have reached an awkward point in the interview. There appears to be a problem. “I don’t think I was interesting enough,” Micallef says, furrowing his brow in an expression that he practically owns; quizzical, mildly confused. It’s too late to stage the interview again. It will need to be a quick fix. “We could make something up?” I say. “Sure, OK, let’s do it!” Micallef says happily. He puts a crooked finger to his lips, his face totally animated and childlike. The purely off-the-cuff anecdote that follows is detailed, absurd and fantastic. It is embedded in this interview and I will not spoil the suspense by pointing it out. “If there’s any fear I have in interviews, it’s that I’m not interesting enough,” he says. “I don’t go for the sad clown, or Andrew Denton’s whole ‘walking the black dog’ depression thing either, so that’s out. But I should have learnt my lesson about lying ...” Micallef has only done it once before in an interview and the made-up historical fact still follows him around. He’d mentioned that his big break in comedy came when Steve Vizard called him for legal advice – until the age of 32, Micallef was a solicitor in insurance law in Adelaide, a desperately unfunny combo – and appreciated his witty telephonic asides and offered him a gig. An unlikely story, and it turns out, a false one. The truth is they had never even spoken at that point (and nor did they for the first two years he worked for Vizard) and his break, on sketch-comedy television show Fast Forward, came purely because he had a mate from uni, Gary McCaffrie, working on the show. Boring old nepotism, then. But with this spicy last-minute fairytale sprinkled into the mix, Micallef is visibly relieved. “We’ll see if anyone picks it up,” he says cheerfully. All good and well for Micallef, but now, on paper, it is time to vent my dissatisfaction. Because before the interview I had become quite attached to the sad clown idea, I was running with it. I had planned to write an illuminating piece on the depressive nature of comedians using the word “dichotomous” at least once. I’d watched interviews with Jim Carrey and Robin Williams, I’d brought a battery of supporting quotes from Joan Rivers and John Cleese. My notebook was full of excellent questions. They were all, in the final result, useless. The problem was simple and apparent from the minute we sat down to a cup of tea. Shaun Micallef’s bloody well happy, isn’t he. And worse. He is sincere. The very last thing you expect from a comedian, perhaps after contentedness, is sincerity. Later, Micallef admits the same. “The great fear of a performer is that if you lower your guard or show what you’re really like that perhaps people won’t like you.” Being well liked has never been a problem for Micallef: he is renowned for brilliance and probably mild obscurity. His ironical, patently British sense of humour – heavily informed by a now long-dead vanguard of comics such as Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Tony Hancock – has seen him rather exiled in the Australian comedy landscape as a John (Cleese) among the Jerries (Seinfeld and Lewis). The contrast worked wonderfully on sketch-comedy programs Full Frontal and Fast Forward and peaked with satirical news program Newstopia, Micallef’s “favourite show ever”. Micallef’s shows were indeed commonly good but “never popular”, he admits. Until now. The program he currently hosts, Talkin’ ’bout your Generation (TAYG), a “gentle family quiz show” populated with comedians, is a ratings smash. It has so far landed three Logies, including one for Micallef as best presenter. “It suggests that perhaps I’m not ratings poison,” Micallef says. Shaun Micallef’s life, as it is to be told here in a long, lazy conversation with a comic, delves into the
mechanics of humour and the art of happiness. It addresses why he’s happy, how in God’s name it’s possible, who he’s happy with and where all this damned satisfaction is leading him.
occasional ripper, such as the following: “Even if I’m scripted to say something, because I’m running the show I can do what I want anyway. If I don’t want to do it, I just won’t do it, or I’ll ‘forget’ to do it.”
AM: You have spent much of your time on television as a satirist on the fringes of mainstream popularity. Does the fact that you are now a silver Logie winner for Network Ten come with any kind of cringe factor?
Your timing as a comedian seems impeccable. Last night, even when a joke was irredeemable, you appeared to wait until the second when the previous unfunniness was part of a grander comedic design.
SM: “It’s a Logie for best presenter, too,” Micallef adds with a visible grimace. Perhaps the same one that he wore in 2005 when a student from Flinders University asked him about the “cost” of working at the ABC. Micallef quipped that “a left testicle” was the admission price, “as well as your soul”. What about the commercial networks, the budding journalist inquired. “You have to give half your brain and leave the other half at the door,” Micallef said. It seems Micallef’s mellowed since then; there is no such vitriol today. The hand that feeds is given a gentle nip with sarcasm but there is to be no biting. “I never thought of myself as a TV presenter. I thought I was an actor, or a comedian or something. Yeah, it’s sort of funny, to be honest. There’s a line coming up in the next Generation where I sit next to my Logie and say, ‘As the most popular person in the history of television, I recommend you go to the website’. There’s another line about how great my humility is, too. I think there’s a bit of mileage in winning a Logie comically. If I need to be arrogant, it sort of fits. It’s a funny old process, the TV Week Logie Awards, they mean a lot to the people that vote for them.”
“If the punchline or the pause before the punchline is on a beat, then the beat is quite long.” Micallef says, adopting an academic tone. Comedy is somewhere between an art form and a science to him, that much is clear. “You can come in on the end of that beat. It isn’t just a moment like that,” he says, making a 10-centimetre space with his fingers. “It can be this,” he says, holding up an air ruler. “There’s quite a bit to play with. I listen to Frank Sinatra and think, boy, you are really leaving it to the end before you’re coming in with that final line. If you’re a good performer, you can stop time a little bit. You can play around with the natural expectation of timing that the audience is used to.” You talk often about the mechanics of humour; does your understanding of the nuts and bolts make you funnier? “It helps me as a writer,” he says. “I honestly don’t think it helps me as a performer. As soon as you become self-conscious of the process of a joke, I think you end up disconnecting from it and you’re not in the moment any more. The worst thing you can do as a performer is
“I’m an extra wavIng It off. I’m wearIng a brown cardIgan, I’m the only South amerIcan natIve wearIng a … cardIgan” Clearly a lot of people voted for you and TAYG. It’s considered by the network to be a fairly safe, family-oriented show in the vein of Hey Hey It’s Saturday, but in the “endgame” of the recording I went to, there were references to a crystal meth lab. Will that be cut? “It was in the ‘Family’ show too, wasn’t it? (Indeed it was, with Amanda Keller’s young son, Oliver, on set, as well as Josh Thomas’ older brother and Charlie Pickering’s mum, set to air on Sunday, August 15.) It probably won’t survive the edit, but it’s actually not a drug reference,” Micallef says, hopefully. “It feels a little more abstract to me. If you refer to something looking like something … That’s the thing about Generation, it’s two things at once. It’s a comedy show subverting the idea of a quiz show while still being a quiz show, so it’s eating its cake and having it too. We can get away with more than Family Feud, for example.” What are the limitations in terms of lines you can’t cross? “No, no! Nothing! I’ve not ever been told not to do anything, which is really good!” Micallef says earnestly, like a kid in primary school telling you he doesn’t even have a lights-out time. Despite his self-deprecating charm, a result of quaint Hugh Grant modifiers such as “quite”, “rather” and “reasonably”, there is still an
watch yourself perform as you perform. I do it and can’t get out of the habit.” My best mate was also born of Irish and Maltese parents. His father was Irish and his mother was Maltese. He described it as being born to “a chainsaw and a potato”. How would you describe your experience of childhood and that ethnic mix? “I had the reverse,” Micallef says, laughing. “Mum’s Irish and dad’s Maltese. He was always the straight man. He was very formal and very polite and we all made fun of him. We all had laughs at his expense and we only realised much later that he’d been in on the joke. My mother was an inveterate joke maker. She likes silliness and is big on puns. “Our family did amazing things when I was growing up,” Micallef recalls. “Dad wasn’t always conservative. When I was about eight, he took my family on a holiday through Europe. My uncle knows the filmmaker Werner Herzog and he was making Fitzcarraldo in South America at the time. So on the way back we went via South America and I was an extra in the movie! Look in that initial crowd scene when they’re taking the steamship over the mountain. I’m an extra waving it off. I’m wearing a brown cardigan, I’m the only South American native wearing a brown cardigan.”
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