Last year, Standing There Productions spent one amazing month in residence at Arthur and Yvonne Boyd's property, Bundanon, on the Shoalhaven river in New South Wales. It was a most productive, instructive and creative month and every now and then in the months since one of us will sigh in the middle of a production meeting and say, "Ah, Bundanon". Although, being Australians, we have of course shortened this for our own convenience and can now be heard at regular intervals saying "Good old Bunders" when the spirit takes us, as it so frequently does.
You can imagine, then, the joy with which we received the news that Standing There have been blessed with a second residency at Bundanon, this year, during August. It's like all our dreams have come true. Not only that but it's an enormous privilege and we're already preparing projects for what I'd like to call Part II: Bunders Returns.
Every year, at about this time, and for about a month, I receive emails from persons known to me personally, with the following subject headings, "COMEDY FESTIVAL - THOUGHTS?" or "COMEDY FESTIVAL RECOMMENDATIONS" or even sometimes "HOW DO I EVEN READ THE COMEDY FESTIVAL GUIDE MY BRAIN IS EXPLODING PLEASE HELP".
Now, when it comes to arts festivals, I am very good at recommendations. I know what people are likely to enjoy and what's going to freak them out, piss them off, or bore their whole face off. I know what the safe picks are and what is likely to leave you feeling like you've been on a roller-coaster, naked, being chased by a bear. If that's what you're into? Fine. If not, I can recommend a bunch of other options.
But comedy is different. One of the things I found fascinating when I first started working in comedy is how people feel like they can contribute. People come up and suggest jokes. They tell you, straight out, when they don't think you're funny. It's bizarre - given nobody would approach a plumber and tell him they don't like the way he's used a piece of hose, or even criticise a writer/performer telling their tragic life story on stage - but that's the great thing about comedy: it's accessible. It's universal. Everybody does it. Everybody appreciates it. And everybody knows what they like.
Different strokes, as they say. I know an academic - very clever, most sophisticated - to whom the funniest thing in the world is Eddie Murphy's laugh in the Beverly Hills Cop movies. Can't get enough of it. Nothing clever or witty about it. It's just an open-faced teeth-baring laugh and it kills. How the hell am I supposed to predict that?
I have thought of writing an official disclaimer to hand to people after they ask this question. You may consider this it.
I know what I find funny. That's about all I can tell you. That and: if it involves audience participation, I will be the one in the back row behind the tallest person I can find. Weeping.
Some people write alone, some people write in a kind of group-workshop/brainstorming kind of scenario with junk food and cigarette breaks and too much coffee and arguments about pacing and occasional violent outbreaks of the giggles.
Today? Me? Funny you should ask.
I've been working in a lovely room in Bendigo, from which I can observe - and be observed by - a giant lazy kangaroo lying on its side in the sun. The kangaroo's major concern is lying about for hours at a time twitching flies away from its huge beautiful ears and chewing occasionally on whatever it can find nearby.
This is kind of cheating though because a version of the following appeared in the last edition of the Australian Big Issue, which you should buy religiously from now on as I am appearing in it regularly and you wouldn't want to miss knowing the ins and outs of what I'm watching on the telly.
Erhem.
They say the newspaper is a dying breed. That’s the term they use. Breed. Like it’s Darwinian. Like the newspaper is a humiliating combination of genetics that can’t survive in today’s world – the fourth wall’s version of that sheep a few weeks back that was born with a human face. The Internet, on the other hand, is depicted as a triumph of genetic engineering, a gleaming specimen of perfection belying (as we know from science fiction films) the fearsome and ever-present possibility that we may have created a monster. We genetically engineer things for a reason, but – like Labradoodles or those wrinkly see-through cats – sometimes they turn out a bit weird.
As a metaphor, the dying breed can be found almost anywhere. The phone book, it has to be said, seems a bit silly now. When I was a kid, if I wanted to call a friend, I had to know how to spell the friend’s last name. I had to know – or guess, from his appearances at various recorder concerts – the friend’s father’s first name. Did he look like an Ian? Had I heard someone call him Max? Maybe the listing was under the mother’s name? Did she look like a feminist? How can you tell? It was baffling. Now, if I want people’s numbers, I get them to prank me at parties, and I add their names in later, the only flaw in this system being that sometimes I forget the person’s name by the time I leave the party and they have to go into my phone as “interesting party conversation” until later.
The street directory is a dying breed, too, although in my experience it is still very useful for those times you need the person in the passenger seat to write in a birthday card on the way to a party and there isn’t a surface to lean on.
Watching old TV shows over summer I witnessed dying breeds all over the place, including an old TV cliché: the Romantic Moment Woo. The Romantic Moment Woo was a feature of TV shows filmed in front of a studio audience. Just as two main characters leaned in for their first kiss – the drama pinging with electricity so that you had forgotten you were watching television at all – the studio audience gasped in pantomime surprise and, in unison, let out an enthusiastic wooooooooooooo! The woo lasted the length of the kiss, with the rather Brechtian result that the two kissing lovers were often afflicted inexplicably with a case of the giggles. I don’t think the Romantic Moment Woo has been replaced yet. Perhaps it’s an extinct species.
Okay, I admit it. This page – once so full of the joys of the world, so bursting with stories of its adventures, cantering into your virtual bedroom with its skirts about its knees and throwing itself on your bed with a tantalising “you will NOT believe this” – has been somewhat silent of late.
This is not (about this you can be certain) because it is seeing somebody else, or because it has grown bored and taken up smoking pot and playing videogames and drinking cheap whisky from a recently retired vegemite jar. The reason for its absence is this:
Once, in 2005, Rita and Stew and Paul (Superman) Daniel and I set up this site at one of those moments when it was either time to get a website or time to start walking around with sandwich boards like those miserable people in Bourke Street who stand outside that jewellery shop, staring into the middle distance and listening to death metal on their iPods. We needed the website for many reasons then. Mostly because we were producing theatre and the occasional video, and we loved our audiences so much we wanted to keep them even after they left their seats and wandered out into the night time.
And so this page lived on. And I loved it. And then, recently, a few things happened. They are (edited highlights) these:
1.I quit my Real Job. The Law Talking Job. It was excellent for a range of reasons but I had to finish up because:
2.Standing There Productions is working on a couple of projects, both of which are very long-term and both of which we are contractually obliged not to speak about.
3.I know. How exciting is that.
4.Thing is, the projects are exciting, but they’re not as exciting as being contractually obliged not to talk about them might indicate. So please do not expect the opening ceremony of the Olympics to be produced by Standing There Productions. Although we’re not – I’m being told by our legal department – prepared to rule that out.
5.We do not have a legal department.
As a result of the above scenario, I am now what they call a freelance writer. I looked that up once. It used to have something to do with swords. I intend, more or less immediately, to purchase a cape and claim it on tax.
Really though, what freelance means is that I jump from project to project, including, sometimes, working for Standing There Productions on what may or may not be the opening ceremony of the somethingorothereth Olympiad. Rita and Stewart do the same.
At the moment, if you miss me (my secretary will have to sort through the comments you post below, obviously, but I will try and answer you all individually) you can find me in the following:
MEANJIN – a gorgeous literary magazine available in bookshops and via subscription here – contains an essay this month about Australian theatre. It was written by me. Meanjin is very exciting. I got all tingly when I saw it in print.
THE BIG ISSUE – I have been writing occasional pieces for The Big Issue for a while now, including one I will post here when I have a moment. Starting next week, however, I am the television columnist for The Big Issue, which means you all need to watch television and tell me what you think of it so I can call it research. Already, I am trying to figure out how to work the 8 hours of Will & Grace I once watched into a column so I don’t need to feel as though that glorious, shocking day was a waste.
THE COMEDY FESTIVAL – I am directing Colin Lane’s festival show this year. Looking forward to another festival – my first for 2010.
Meanwhile, Rita and Stewart are still, well, awesome. I will tell you about their glorious achievements when I have access to the endless list of projects they are variously involved in, some of which have been nominated for - and won - awards.
For the moment, though, consider this page BACK. Fresh-faced, bright-eyed, wearing a brand-new frock and fabulous shoes and not caring what anybody thinks of it as it twirls in the middle of your metaphorical bedroom and welcomes you back, once again, into its pudgy, sun-browned, long-absent arms.
Here is a list of things that re-energise me, apparently, if the past few weeks are anything to go by:
1. Ace friends. There really is nothing like the love and laughter of people you adore when you've been locked inside writing for weeks (nay months) on end.
2. The sea. If I lived near it, I'd use it as a mental refresher towelette as often as possible. I DARE you not to feel better about the universe, and more equipped to attack a metaphorical blank page when:
- your hair is wet
- your feet are sandy
- you've gone from cold to warm (shower? socks? hot cup of tea? Brilliant)
- you've squealed involuntarily
3. Dancing with old friends. Special mention goes to the bollywood dance we all memorised for Mel and Prash's wedding and, as always, to the Bus Stop, the robot, the moonwalk, and whatever you call that thing the Two Tims did with the aid of several props and a full-length window.
4. One of you winning an award. I have to say, this last one falls into the category of Very Refreshing Indeed And Also Pantwettingly Exciting Just Quietly.
In case you hadn't heard (I mean, HONESTLY, how out of touch are YOU?)... Standing There's Stewart Thorn has won a cinematography award for Sunshower (a music video by the Little Stevies) at The Australian Cinematography Society's Victorian and Tasmanian State awards held last week in Melbourne. The video was also one of three music videos nominated for an IF award in Sydney. Congratulations to Stew, and to Robin (who directed the clip) and the Little Stevies. Yay for everyone, basically.
See how easy it is to shift gears and make a writer want to write again? Kind of embarrassing isn't it!
I suspect I’m not alone in wondering, while eating my popcorn at the movies, “What is the real rate of brides being left at the altar in the wider community?”
Personally, I haven’t experienced nearly as many almost-weddings complete with storm-outs and punch-ups and drunken weeping as the history of cinema seems to indicate I should expect.
You know what else there haven’t been a lot of? Accidents resulting in amnesia. I do not – off the top of my head – know anybody who was in an accident as a result of which he or she started a new life in another town only to suddenly remember every devastating detail years later while holding a pepper shaker of enormous hitherto unremembered personal significance and staring out the window at Family Number Two frolicking gleefully in the backyard.
None of the twins I know were separated at birth. Not nearly enough of the people with whom I am acquainted have gone beserk in boardrooms and turned up the table and had to be escorted from the building by security. On the few times I have been to a forest at night, I have listened very hard but I have not heard a single creaky noise or the faintest hint of a cello.
This is okay. I do not miss these things from my life. What I do wonder, though, is where on screen are the Real Life Clichés I do experience? Where is the one-hour stretch right in the middle of the movie where our protagonist – maybe on the way to being dumped at a wedding – can’t find her car keys but in the process of looking finds a photo album from the early nineties and a folder full of receipts she swore she had sent to her accountant and vaguely remembers accusing the accountant of having lost? Where are the scenes where – not due to self-esteem issues or a devastating break-up but just because it’s in the fridge – someone accidentally eats three quarters of a cake in one afternoon including the “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” plaque and part of a candle? Are there as many people doing these things in films as there are in real life? I posit that there is a notable disparity.
There are reasons these moments don’t make it into film and TV. They’re in stand-up comedy routines (what is with that?) and they’re in books (such a true narrative voice) but they’re not exciting enough to make it into a two-hour narrative. Shame.
Unless there is a film about an absent-minded cake-eating crime-fighter at war with her accountant that I don’t know about. In which case, please, can someone let me know?
A version of the above originally appeared in The Big Issue, which is an excellent magazine that you should go out and buy immediately for a range of reasons only some of which are to do with the fact that I am possibly in the upcoming edition as well.
