So Wil what have you been up to today? So today I got up early unfortunately, because I’ve got two shows tonight. I wouldn’t have liked to have got up early, I would have liked to have a little bit of a sleep in. Once you get up early on a show day – particularly when you’re doing a double show, the most important part of my day starts at 7:30pm. But also, the most important part of my day starts at 9:30pm tonight because you know, people have paid fifty bucks to come out to see the show they expect me to be at my best. They don’t give a fuck what sort of day I’ve had, or that I just did another show or that I had a meeting for the tele. Y’know, they don’t care. They just want me to be good. Which is totally their right. So I kind of keep that in mind. So I tweeted at home for a while, I did some work, I fiddled around… Then I had a Gruen meeting – we have a Friday afternoon meeting, so we planned the show. We’ll have another meeting on Monday and then we film it on a Tuesday. So today’s kind of our first script go-through, like what we think we’re going to do next week. And then over the weekend it can changed based on something really cool we want to talk about happen. But normally by Friday we have kind of like, well if nothing interesting happens, between now and Tuesday, this’ll be the show. Which is a relief after doing an election show for four weeks where essentially like on Tuesday afternoon you’re still making decisions about what’s going to be on the show.
That’d be full on. Oh it’s just a different thing. Y’know what – sometimes it’s exciting. To be in the midst, y’know, it’s the only way that you can do that show. So you just do it how it needs to be done. But I’m glad, we would have Sunday meetings and stuff for that one so at least now I get my weekends a bit which is good. So I had a meeting for that this afternoon. I made some major career decisions in between that meeting and this tonight.
Can you tell us about them? No, I can’t! But I went for a walk for about an hour and a half and realized that every second shop on King Street, Newtown is now a yoghurt shop. Like I thought that was like a Bondi disease. No no, Newtown too apparently. Everybody loves frozen yoghurt.
It’s like Yoghurt Time, and Yoghurt Time 2… Right! On different sides of the street. It’s ridiculous. I don’t like it. Even though I did have some yoghurt…
Did you go the healthy kind? Did you put fruit or did you go for chunks of cookie? No, no, no why would you, like, that’s ridiculous.
Like, if you’re going yoghurt, you’re trying to be healthy? No I’m not. I’m trying to convince myself I’m being healthy. But there’s a difference between those two things. I couldn’t go into an ice cream shop and eat an ice cream that had cookie dough and cornflakes on it – which is what I had on top of my yoghurt.
Cornflakes? Well, they were those Crunchy Nut cornflakes – those really tasty cornflakes that go fucking well with frozen yoghurt it turns out. So you can convince yourself. That’s what I’m looking for. I’m just looking for permission to – I don’t want to know that studies have shown that drinking diet cola means that you’re more susceptible to put on weight than drinking regular cola. Right? But in my head, if I drink diet cola, shit’s fine. That’s all I want. I don’t want to know the truth. I read an article once, well I didn’t even read the article, it was a three page thing in the Good Weekend or one of those magazines and it was about how they’d found that salt might actually be good for you. Now I’m sure that if I read the whole article there would have been a lot of provisos and “in this case, yes, but in most cases, no” or whatever, but I didn’t want to know that. I just wanted to know that salt was actually probably good for me and it’s kept up with me and I’ll just have salt whenever I want. Because I love salt.
You just have salt and vinegar chips, and anything covered in salt? Last night for dinner I ate – while we were waiting for food – I ate bread and butter and salt. Like, it was fresh bread and I put butter on it and then I put salt on it. I ate it. It was delicious.
Okay, back to Gruen, you said you had a meeting, are you planning any more Gruen spin offs? Or are you just sticking with Gruen Planet for the moment? So we do Gruen Planet for another seven episodes and then we have no plans. Well, we have some plans. But they’re plans that I can’t speak to you about. Or anybody about at this stage. But, the thing that I would say is that I think the show works best around special events. Y’know, there’s something about doing it around the election, something about doing it around the Olympics that brings the show to life. And I think it’s where the show’s at its best. So, if there’s further life in the show, then I think it would definitely be around us finding those creative things where we can go in and have a look at stuff like that. So I guess the question that then has to be asked is, “is there enough of those things, what are those things?” Like, y’know, the Olympics isn’t around for another three years, there’s not another election for another three years, what do we do in the meantime? Is there something else or is it a matter of not doing it for a while and then bringing it back when there is something. I mean, these are all conversations that we’re having at the moment. If I was a big fan of the show, I wouldn’t necessarily expect to see it next year. But you know, I can’t say one way or another at this stage.
So let’s head back towards your stand up show, you’ve been around for so long, how do you deal with hecklers? I don’t really get too many. I get some.
Surely you’d get a few at the 9pm show? Well, you know what, much more likely. Much more likely at the 9pm show than the 7:30pm show, particularly on a Friday night. Because people go after work.. like, no one’s going home before the show tonight. Even the girls in the Gruen office, they’re coming to the late show tonight and even they were like, “we’re gonna go and get drunk after!” and I’m like, “you technically kinda work for me…” [laughs] they don’t really work for me. But I like every show to be different. I would like to think that, you know, this is the seventh month of the show and I would like to think that I could identify, not necessarily immediately, but if someone told me the right thing about the show, like if someone said, “hey, I was there that night that..” I was sitting next to Shannon Bennett the chef [of celebrated Melbourne restaurant Vue Du Monde] on the plane and he started talking to me and he said he came and saw one of my shows during the Melbourne Comedy Festival. He told me something from the night and I was able to pick exactly what show it was. There should always be at least one moment that was just about there. And often those moments are the dickhead down the front who wanted to be a part of the show or the guy who answered when you said ‘blah blah blah’ or the couple who came in late and are on the first date and you talk to them because they’re the identifiers. I’ve got someone who is going to propose to his girlfriend at one of my shows coming up.
How do you feel about that? Well you know what, I don’t mind. Like, I wouldn’t do it at the start because if she says ‘no’ that’d be terrible. But also, to be honest, it’s happened one other time before and I always make sure – this has been in the works for about three months. So it’s one of those things. He was really serious about it and I made sure beforehand. I was like, “is she going to be into this?” He’s like, “100%. We’ve talked about it, I just want to do something special.” She’s a fan of mine, blah, blah, blah.. So, I don’t mind those things because to me that’ll be the bit that people remember, y’know. Like, I’ll do the show and I’ll do it at the end as I’m finishing up and that’ll hopefully be a really wonderful and special moment for everybody who is there. But you know, sometimes that’s just the dickhead yelling out. So I don’t really mind. The only hecklers I don’t like – If you’re going to heckle, be funny. That’s all I would say…. If someone just drunkenly goes on, after a while, if I’ve done my bit and everyone’s laughed and I’ve won, shhh. It’s okay, we had a moment, I’m not going to go hard on you but if they keep going eventually you have to kind of execute one to educate a million. It’s that sort of thing. You have to go, “well if I don’t deal with this now, I lose control of this room.” So my first instinct is never to be mean spirited. I don’t like to go mean until they go mean. If that makes sense. But if they go mean… Like here’s the thing. What the fuck are you doing? Like seriously? I have a microphone, the lights are pointed towards me, everyone’s here to see me, I do this for a fucking living. Like if you really think you want a shot at the title, I mean… but I feel like the odds are stacked against you. It’s an absolute recipe to insure that there is going to be a heckler tonight for me to say that people don’t normally heckle but people don’t normally heckle.
Do you think Australian politics are LOL enough for there to be a Daily Show in Australia? Would you ever do it? No. I’m not 100% sure… I wouldn’t do it. Because for me, I’m not interested enough in the way that politics is conducted in this country. Even when we do Gruen, which is four weeks, I probably am too disdainful of the whole thing. Like, people know what my attitude is toward the whole thing from that show. Like, I’m not proud of the system. I don’t get enthused by politics in this country. I get depressed by it. And I think most of them are rubbish. And I think that the whole system is broken. Because good people get into it and get corrupted and broken by the system. So, I don’t have the passion to do it but I wouldn’t rule out that someone would have the passion and the capacity to do it.
But the second thing that I could say is I think our politicians are very different. Like it was great to see Craig Emerson sing on The Hamster Wheel but our politicians don’t seem to think that there’s anywhere between serious and stupid. Whereas with American politicians, John Stewart will get right wingers on there being charming and putting their point, and having a laugh at themselves and I think their politicians are more willing, capable and see the value in going on there and sparring and making your point and being part of it than ours do. My experience with dealing with our politicians is they’re either fearful or humorless. They don’t have that sort of thing of going on and be great and speak well. They’re so scared of making a mistake that they will speak in focus group tested catchphrases. So I think that would hurt. I mean we did four weeks of an election show during the busiest political time of the year and I thought that was enough. I thought we had enough stuff to talk about. Because I don’t want to talk about the shitty little things either. The thing that frustrates me about the system is that fucking ridiculous 24 hour news cycle where we’re so obsessed with Kevin Rudd’s hair and I don’t want to feel like I’m contributing to that. If anything, the way that we talk about that is meant to be that I am disdainful both of how this is played and how we allow it to be played. I’d go fucking mad. I reckon I’d be a week in and I’d be like, “I hate you all.”
I find it really hard, even when I go on The Project. We had Julia Gillard on at one stage. And they pre-record the interviews so they can edit them and put the vision in and stuff and I asked her a question about gay marriage and they just cut it. I think they were right to cut it because I was disdainful of her. Like I really was. Not in a disrespectful way. It was the week Ellen [DeGeneres] was in town and I remember saying to her, “do you look at the fact that middle Australia is supporting this person who is married to an Australian but can’t officially be married to an Australian in her own country? Doesn’t that say something to you?” Anyway, I get too angry and too frustrated by it all, so no, I don’t think so.
Alright, thanks Wil! Nice one.
GOODWIL TOUR DATES
Thursday 26 September ~ The Concourse Theatre, Chatswood
Friday 27 September ~ Enmore Theatre
Thursday 10 October ~ Canberra Theatre Centre
Friday 11 October ~ Dee Why RSL
Friday 18 October ~ Sutherland Entertainment Centre
