Newsletter: Liminal Space / Care Less
Come on a journey as I explain how I survived Christmas and share some good news.
“I Was On My Way Into the Show Tonight…”
Let’s get warmed up with some bite-sized portions.
“Did somebody say KFC?” The most unbelievable thing about this ad campaign is that anyone would ever say “KFC” outloud. It is, at best, whispered softly and shamefully to yourself as you scroll through UberEats wondering what food might make you happy.
Last newsletter was written from a sickbed. This one is with the sniffles. The tail-end of being sick a second time in a month. Truly the best gift for Christmas.
Add-ons at cafes have gone too far. I ordered a mushroom toastie at a trendy Melbourne cafe and cheese was an additional extra. Is it truly a toastie without cheese?
Hello to my subscribers old and new. It’s a genuine thrill to get a new notification that someone has subscribed to hear what a comedian / director / coach has to say. I would love to know what inspired you to subscribe. Pop it in the comments!
I had the most ordinary mushrooms on toast yesterday. The waitress came round to ask me how everything was and I beamed with delight. “It’s great!” This is the cafe equivalent of having lousy sex and your partner rolling over and saying, “How was it for you?” Maybe my New Year's Resolution should be to stop lying to waitstaff.
“I Should Tell You a Bit About Me…”
The warm-up bits.
The Liminal Space
My wife and I left Sydney for Melbourne at the end of November with a mission to stay with friends while we house-hunted. The goal was to find a place by Christmas. How hard could it be? What rental crisis? We should easily be able to find a reasonably priced apartment in a trendy suburb of one of the most livable cities in the world, after all, we’re the main characters.
As the weeks wore on, after many inspections and just as many rejections, we began to wonder if we didn’t look good on paper. Maybe it was an issue with our dog? It made no sense to me that despite Victoria having laws against pet discrimination that you still have to list your pet-status. So they can still choose the dogless tenants. They don’t need to tell you why you were rejected. It’s like a date telling you that it’s your personality when you know it’s your face.
The unfortunate byproduct of the house hunt is that without a place to hang my hat, my brain has felt like it’s been in liminal space for the past month. The liminal space. My wonderful friend Laura Hughes introduced me to the concept in her excellent 2023 festival show. It’s a space where you are neither here nor there. Almost like your feet don’t touch the ground. This hasn’t been helped by sleeping in four different beds since we left NSW. I’m incredibly indebted and grateful to all my hosts but I must pass on the feedback that I’m yet to encounter a guest pillow that was a bag of old socks and tin cans.
The liminal space has meant that my brain has been in orbit for weeks. People have asked me how I feel being a Melbourne resident but I’ve had to remind them that I don’t live here yet. As people posted their 2023 reflections my brain couldn’t comprehend that we’d passed a threshold because I was still sitting in the waiting room beginning to wonder if my name was ever going to be called.
It was three days before Christmas when we got offered a place. It was the same day I was pitching to Eleanor that we should start lying about our dog. “We can say we just got one. What can they do? Discriminate?”
The lease is signed. A perfect place for us. Much cheaper that Sydney and in one of those trendy suburbs that we’ll tell people about any they’ll say, “That makes sense.” We move in on the 5th of January and I am so excited that after more than five weeks, my feet will finally touch the ground.
Care A Little Less
Despite a sinus infection I felt just well enough to attend Christmas festivities. I hardly drank (my oldest brother insisted I have guinness because they’re medicinal) and still had a great time. Give me a medal. I really wanted to have a great time because getting sick a few days before Christmas made me picture how shitty it would be to miss out on everything. All the family was flying into Melbourne and despite how tiring Christmas can be for an anxious person, I decided I didn’t want to miss out.
I spent a great deal of my sobriety as Safety Officer. I gave myself this role because with little kids and drunk adults, somebody has to do it. The bulk of my role involved calling out instructions from the couch across the room.
“Can we get the dog away from the dartboard?”
“No bow and arrow inside the house.”
“Don’t shoot the fire with your water pistol.”
“Let’s not chuck the christmas gifts across the room.”
“Don’t climb the tree. It’s just been raining.”
It’s worth admitting that the S.O role is rarely useful for actually stopping an incident and more so I can smugly say, “I told you so” afterwards.
Then there are the smaller, less dangerous warnings like playing a boardgame with your nine-year-old nephew and reminding your brother that we have to let the nephew win so we can avoid a Christmas-canceling temper tantrum. I struggle with boardgames at the best of times but they become a whole lot more boring when you realise you’re just pretending to play. I want to see a casino run by nine-year-olds where the house always wins.
Mum told me I should stop worrying too much what everyone else was doing and just relax. She must have noticed me sitting at the edge of the couch, holding all my tension in my jaw. How can I relax? If I close my eyes my nephew might start a fire in the living room. Sure it might just be my anxiety talking but where’s the gap between paranoia and diligent supervision?
It was sort of like the anti-Uncle Ben advice that he gave to Spider-Man. Instead of ‘With great power, comes great responsibility’, it was mum reminding me to chill. I think it was also a classic mum thing to recognise that people need to make their own mistakes. A kid needs to learn that the pointy end of the dart is not to be messed with. My brothers learned that and I bet my middle brother still has the scar to prove it.
I wondered why I was so keen to keep my head on a swivel. It wasn’t just because I was anxious and tired. I think it was because I’m the baby boy of my family. Our role is to save Christmas in all the movies. Well maybe just Home Alone. Christmas is such a heightened day. Everyone is so tired. The hosts are often putting in such a huge amount of work that is never properly appreciated. For such an important day there’s such an air of “LET’S JUST GET THROUGH THIS.” I’ve witnessed arguments, accidents, kitchen upsets, and seen how they’ve marred the occasion.
I’ve had to mediate, I’ve had to clean up, I’ve had to wait patiently as people argued in the next room, I’ve had to go on walks to let off steam. I’ve also been the shitty one. Once I punched a wall because mum intervened on a souffle that I was struggling to get right. She started mixing when the recipe called for folding!
So of course I wanted Christmas to go well and my mucus riddled, on-edge brain chemistry, made it a top priority, and it did go well! Was it because I kept my eyes-peeled for danger or because I stopped caring by the middle of the day? Who can say?
“Let’s Get Stuck Into The Show Shall We?”
Some chunky bits now that you’re settled in.
Year 10: The Aussie Hip-Hop Phase
Last newsletter I told you about how my early high school years were built around music. Let’s continue that musical walk down memory lane.
The year was 2004. I knew I had to escape my “mates” who I hung out with in Year 8 and 9. We had little in common and I had to spend recess and lunch on guard for their ‘pranks.’ Pranks like turning my schoolbag inside out when I wasn’t looking, throwing my bag in a tree or a bush… it was a lot of schoolbag-related bullying.
You might be thinking that these guys don’t sound like very good friends and you’d be right. It’s tricky to identify potential friends in high school. One of the guys who became one of my best friends to this day bullied me on msn messenger. I remember being added to a chat where a bunch of guys called me a bunch of slurs until I decided to block them and leave the chat. If you had told me at the time that I was going to invite one of them to my wedding, I would have shrugged because boys are weird in Year 9 and I was very used to it.
When I tell people that I made my closest high school friends by freestyling at a party, they cringe. I suppose they’re picturing some sort of 8 Mile scenario where I win a rap battle and with it, everyone’s respect. The more accurate tale is that I sat at a snack table and rapped about what was on offer. I rhymed Cheezels with measles. The simpler version of the story is that I was funny. Suddenly I had cachet. It was probably the closest I’ve come to having a High School Movie moment where the dweeb has to impress the cooler kids so he be welcomed into their group.
When I arrived back at school and made the transition to hanging out with a new crew I was given a new challenge in the form of a mix CD. I had never heard of The Hilltop Hoods (Adelaide locals), The Herd, or Certified Wise but my fifteen year old brain felt that I better get to know them if I wanted to have anything to talk about at recess the next day. Cut to a montage of me absorbing all the lyrics as best I could.
My wife tells me I have a great ear for lyrics. It’s because my central nervous system thought my life depended on knowing all the words to The Sentinel by Hilltop Hoods (I still do.)
Fortunately I quite liked my Aussie hip-hop experience. It wasn’t just a means to a (fri)end. I don’t listen to much any more. It coincided around Year 11 and not feeling like I always needed to be what my friends were into. It didn’t mean I was developing my own taste, I realised I should be listening to the music that my crushes were into.
Comedy Pet-Peeves Improv Edition: “Names are Overrated”
Every month I discuss an element of comedy that irritates my pedantic brain.
I talk so much about stand-up that I sometimes feel like I’m neglecting another of my loves, improvisation. I love improv. If you’re in Adelaide and Melbourne, you can come see me perform in The Newlyweds at the upcoming festivals.
Improv, like many crafts, is all about learning all the rules so you can then throw them all out and do what you want to do. It’s very easy of me to peer over the fence at the rookies and say ‘Not like that!’ when they’ve got to learn for themselves.
But I’ve always been a teacher and coach that knows how to differentiate between what can be taught and what can be experienced. I want to plant a seed, provide food for thought, so the next time you’re on stage you can consider this: names are overrated.
All your improv teachers have made such a huge deal of getting you to name the other character in the scene. It’s entry-level improv. It makes sense. You’ll often hear a teacher call out “Give them a name!” from the sidelines. It’s great to give a character a name but it’s only the beginning. The issue arrives because too many rookie improvisers stop building their characters once they’ve been named as if the work has been completed. “Great, we’ve given our characters names, now the scene can start. Now we can do stuff.”
Names are absolutely useless when there’s no character to go with it or sense of a relationship. I watched a jam recently where each performer’s opening line was naming the other player:
“Hello Gary, nice to see you.”
“Hi Mary, it’s nice to see you too.”
The scene continued into an argument as it often does when you’re starting out (no shade) but with no strong sense of who the characters were to each other.
Players are putting so much importance onto names that they’re forgetting identity. The names they endow each other with (“Bob”, “Dad”, “Mum”, “Sis”, “Timmy”, “Sally”) come with absolutely no weight. These are names that are so quickly forgotten because they are First Draft Nothing Names inspired by previous improv scenes they’ve watched or been in before.
Consider names that may also double as a juicy offer for your scene partner. A title like “Captain” gives status. A nickname like “Bonecrusher” gives backstory. An unusual name like Julius or Hercules will likely inspire conversation. A pet name like “Honey” or “Buttercup” gives a relationship.
Truly though, I challenge you that the next time you’re in a scene to give all the attention to the relationship over names. You’ve likely heard the advice to avoid doing scenes where the characters are strangers to one another. Consider how often we use the names of people that we already know. Don’t think about names. Think about identities. Think about relationships. Remember that most of the Chicago-style longform focuses on relationship for good reason. Relationship is the heart of storytelling. The more you focus on naming your characters as a ‘box to tick’, the more you ignore connecting your characters and connecting with the audience.
The Comedy Writers Group: Thanks for a Great Year
One of my favourite achievements of the past year was growing the CWG beyond my goal of 100 members. We are now 126 members strong.
We have some exciting things in the pipeline. In a few weeks time we’re running a Writers Retreat which sold-out after a week.
What is The Comedy Writers Group? Each meet-up on zoom I’m joined by a guest mentor to help workshop jokes with the subscribers. We have members in Sydney, Melbourne, Alice Springs, Brisbane, and more. We have introduced all sorts of different session types from group writing time, workshops, and Q and As.
Our guest mentors include Tommy Dean, Bec Melrose, Laura Hughes, Penny Greenhalgh, and myself! There are five meet-ups a month.
You can sign up for just the podcast for $5 per month or attend all the workshops for $10.
“The Comedy Writers Group has empowered me to keep writing (and more scary yet) performing my comedy in Australia. After listening to 3 podcasts, I even made the leap in applying for a fringe show despite being very new to comedy - the pod was just that helpful that I felt equipped to do so. Love the generosity of this community. .” - Rayannon
LIVE SHOWS
Adelaide Fringe is now on sale for my solo show and for The Newlyweds. Would absolutely adore you to snap up tix and tell your mates.
Links to Melbourne and Sydney tix will be coming soon.
Fans of my wife can go see her show this month at the Sydney Festival.
“I’ll End On This One”
Here’s some stuff I’ve been enjoying lately.
Listen: I always love listening to the Best of Comedy Bang Bang at this time of year. It’s perfect for road trips. Jimmy Carr’s appearance on Mike Birbiglia’s podcast was excellent. Continuing my Bruce Springsteen education with Adam Scott and Scott Aukerman on Are You Springing Springsteen on My Bean?
Watch: Can someone explain Saltburn to me? I didn’t care for it. I did love David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived if you’re in the market for a heart-warming documentary and Renfield if you’re in the market for something silly.
Read: I finally finished the audiobook of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Ben Stevenson and it’s top notch. I also loved listening to Maria Bamford’s audiobook Sure I’ll Join Your Cult. There’s simply no one like her.
Loved this edition!
Thanks for the improv tip Marcel and good luck with the move today :)
Ooh! Loved that improv tip. I’m using that!!