The potency of this little work of art is somehow diminished now, and the question of taste seems more pertinent after the memorial service, than had this done the rounds closer to the breaking of the news and the commencement of the media circus. But if this seems somehow mistimed or irrelevant now, it will seem less so looking back from the parallax error-inducing position of the future. Try not to analyse it too closely; it’s just an elaborate, well-executed joke.
Thanks to comedy writing legend Graham Linehan for tweeting the link to this clip with the words “1,000,000 times better than a complaint letter”. On their YouTube page Dave Carroll explained how
in the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didnt deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.
Enjoy the clip.
The following day Linehan tweeted the link to this story, announcing that the airline is now ready to behave better. Nice ending.
Totally unrelated to the broken guitar story, I’ve always loved the Smothers Brothers’ brand of musical comedy, their sibling rivalry somehow adding to the beauty and simplicity of their genre-parodies. I particularly love their song ‘Chocolate’, which I always dragged out when asked to present some examples of recorded comedy on air. The delayed punchline, put on hold for the typically folky ‘lolly-dooo-dummm, lolly-do-dum-day’ repeated refrain, producing greater humour when it finally comes.
Now a tragedy has occurred and I can’t help but think of this song. I don’t mean to be a heartless bastard – well, I guess I must when I refer to the event as ‘an Augustus Gloop impression’, I suppose…
…but I still can’t think of the event without thinking of the comical aspects of it. It is not the ideal way to shuffle off this mortal coil. And yet – what a way to go!
‘Delamere’ is a Norman name. Neil Delamere knew this. His sixth grade classmates didn’t. His teacher chose to inform them in the process of teaching the class about the Norman invasion.
“The teacher linked England and 800 years of misery, death, famine and oppression to the Norman invasion and then added, ‘Neil is Norman’,” the comic explains. “Ding, ding, ding, ding… break time!
“We went out and I got battered – absolutely battered. It was the Irish families versus the Norman families. Me and one guy called Steven Prendergast got the crap kicked out of us by the Dunns, the O’Kellies, the O’Sullivans, the Moores… the fact that the Cappuccis joined in was a bit of a disgrace, to be honest with you. They owned the chippy; he was hitting me with a cornetto, the Cappucci lad was!”
I had no idea Irish comic Neil Delamere was of Norman descent, and it’s hardly the most vital biographical detail to arm yourself with when going to interview him. Neil is in Sydney to present Crème Delamere, his most recent festival show, at the Comedy Store for two weeks, but good luck trying to find out anything substantial about him to take to the interview. There’s precious little on offer on-line. Or at least, that’s the case before I meet him: neither the ‘Neil Delamere’ Wikipedia entry nor his homepage have much detail, the homepage bio still refering to Delamere’s 2007 Edinburgh Fringe show as his most recent. Which is almost grounds for embarrassment, the surprisingly soft-spoken comic reveals when I meet him face-to-face. True to his description ‘banter bomb’ (as dubbed by The Scotsman) we have a long, entertaining and effortless chat – as you might surmise from the amount of text that follows. Thankfully, the handful of stand-up comedy and chat show clips available on-line reveal enough to get us started.
For example, there’s the set Neil delivered at the 2008 New Zealand Comedy Festival Gala, where he opens by explaining he’s from “the southern part, not the scary Northern part” of Ireland, and in so doing, demonstrates the mischievous and cheeky streak he brings to the world around him. He notes that New Zealand public transport is “the opposite” of his girlfriend: “this bus kneels on request,” he quotes. He marvels at the kauri, a species of tree native to New Zealand and famed for its longevity, that he longs to touch. “It’d be brilliant – just rubbing up against 2000-year-old wood. Like Catherine Zeta-Jones does.” But it’s his cute observation, that it takes “an awful long time” to get to this part of the world, that will prove the best point of departure, so to speak:
While it’s nice to see the Easter references emerging in his humour – suggesting a religious upbringing – I like it most because Neil’s surname, ‘Delamere’, is French for ‘of the sea’; this international visitor is clearly descended from international visitors. As we sit before a not-quite-roaring open fire – a gas flame in the fireplace – in the hotel foyer that clearly once was the drawing room of a fine and stately home – the perfect place to interview a visiting Irish comic – I put it to Neil Delamere that he “comes from a long line of travellers”.
“That could mean anything!” Neil laughs, not revealing whether I’ve somehow suggested he’s a bastard, or implied some other insult. There is an entirely different tale of lineage and bastardry to relate, it turns out. ‘Delamere’ is, indeed, French, and does mean ‘of the sea’, and “the fact the Delameres moved to the midlands – the only landlocked part of Ireland,” Neil explains, “suggests an awful lot about the lazy branch of the family from which I am descended.”
It is at this point that he tells me the name is in fact of Norman origin, as he always knew, but as his teacher only revealed to his classmates when it could do the most damage – bastard! That the chippy-owning Cappuccis joined in to go him with a cornetto is particularly insulting, since the Cappuccis and Delameres may well have been neighbours in the ‘old country’; the Normans did colonise the southern half of what is now Italy, as well as the islands off its coast. But that’s by-the-by. Turns out the Normans were originally Vikings – which Neil again knows a great deal about, since his 2007 Edinburgh Fringe offering was The Viking Show. “My mother’s side were Vikings, as well,” he says, “so technically, I am 100 percent Viking – although I don’t look it, to be honest.”
Well… okay, Neil Delamere is not tall and lanky, but he is at least a bloodnut – a common Viking trait. It’s an alternate explanation for why the ranga gene is common amongst the Irish – the other being that they are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
What did he say about his mother?
I’m glad Neil brought up his Mam. As mentioned, there is a dearth of biographical detail available regarding Neil Delamere on-line. According to the Wikipedia entry, he was born “circa 1980”. Either his poor Ma endured an unfeasibly long labour – which she may well have been equipped to do, given Viking lineage – or Neil is being coy about his date of birth.
“No,” Neil says, “there’s no coyness. I’m 30.”
The reason there’s not been much of Neil Delamere on-line, the comic confesses, is because “I’m really lazy with my website – which is kind of ironic considering my degree was…”
“That’s another thing!” I interupt before he can finish. The Wikipedia entry says he “completed a degree”. No specifications. “What degree? Where from? It could have been purchased off…”
“No,” Neil interupts me this time. “It’s from Dublin City University. And I’ll tell you how I can prove it…”
Turns out, Dublin City University – Ireland’s self-proclaimed “most innovative” university – is now producing bookmarks. Neil discovered this while visiting his alma mater. But that’s not the most innovative bit. They feature photos of the institution’s more impressive alumni – or, in Neil’s modest words, “people who are meant to have a bit of a profile”. So, along with Matt Cooper, one of Ireland’s leading broadcasters and journalists, and Jamie Heaslip, who plays No. 8 with the British and Irish Lions rugby squad, you can find Neil Delamere’s “stupid face” (his words) peeking over the top of book pages. Of course, like any good comic should, he does material about this find. “The new Edinburgh show is called Bookmarks,” he announces.
So Neil Delamere attended Dublin City University where – get this – he completed a degree in Computer Applications. That’s the irony of his rather meager homepage. Since graduating, Neil’s “gone the other way” and become a “luddite”, more-or-less: “I still enjoy gadgets but I have no interest in geekiness,” he says. Unlike Neil’s older brother, who completed the same degree. “Now he’s earning millions from IT and I’m doing this. I feel like Dannii Minogue!”
Offaly nice place to visit… by mistake
Neil’s branch of the Delamere clan comes from a small town called Edenderry, in County Offaly, virtually slap-bang in the centre of Ireland. As fitting as it may sound that marauding Norman invaders might settle in a place named after offal, Neil explains that ‘Offaly’ is actually an English corruption of ‘Uí Failghe’ – pronounced something like ‘ee-VOLE-ya’ – which means ‘land of the Failghe’. This is the original kingdom that occupied what is now Ireland, before said marauding Normans invaded. That the county takes its name from the land’s earliest known inhabitants suggests that it is steeped in history, and indeed it is. But the other way of looking at it, Neil points out, is that “the midlands of any country is the place time forgets”, producing “odd places and great characters”. He cites England – “always a bit odd in the middle” – Ireland, and even Australia, whose middle includes the likes of “Alice Springs, the Nullarbor and all that sort of nothingness”. According to Delamere – (‘of the sea’, remember) – “most people are drawn to and hang around coasts, and the ones who go further inland are the people who kind of look at you with a twitch.”
Historically, what is now County Offaly once included Clonmacnoise (I’m not even going to attempt to spell it phonetically!), a monastery whose monks kept learning alive while barbarians destroyed Europe during the First Millennium. Offaly’s more recent past has not proven so spectacular. “If you name the year, I can name the tourists,” Neil boasts, offering an example: “1994 was Jans and Ulrich, two lovely lads who grossly underestimated the cycle to Galway, and ended up in Edenderry.”
If two lost tourists are the highlight of your calendar year, there can’t be a lot to do in your small country town in your landlocked county. At least Neil had the influence of two brothers – one ten years older, the other seven – to broaden his horizons. They essentially introduced him to comedy.
“I’d be watching Blackadder when I was 12 or 13, and Cheers and MASH…” Neil recalls. When stand-up became popular enough to feature on BBC television, he was exposed to the work of Tommy Tiernan hosting The Stand-up Show. Ardal O’Hanlon (Father Ted, My Hero) was hosting by the time the likes of Tommy Tiernan and Dylan Moran were winning the Perrier Award for Best Show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (1998 and 1996, respectively). “So,” says Neil, “it was put in my head that ‘these are the lads who could do this sort of stuff and they’re from roughly the same background as you’.” Thus, he figured, he might as well give it a go. “I did it once in a bar and just kind of kept doing it. But didn’t do it until I left college – I was 21 or 22.”
Havin’ a laugh
That was in 2001. International success wasn’t too long in coming. In 2004 Neil Delamere was invited to play the Montreal Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, featuring in a related television show at the same time. “Somebody saw me and got me to do The Panel,” he says. Oh yes, Working Dog sold the format of The Panel to other countries, and Ireland’s version features Neil Delamere as a regular panellist as well as, in more recent years, host. He works a treat on it, as YouTube clips demonstrate. He’s so natural that it’s hard to tell if he’s pulling in pre-existing bits of stand-up where relevant, or is very good at making with the funny business on the fly. Neil insists he rarely resorts to doing pre-existing ‘material’.
“The great thing about The Panel is you’re on with four other people and we make each other laugh. We’re not good enough actors to fake that, to be honest with you. So what happens is, when you see one of us laughing at the other person’s jokes, it’s genuine and spontaneous.”
This is, of course, ground that would have been covered when the local version of The Panel hit big – and is probably asked of every humorous topical game or chat show: how much is spontaneous and how much is rehearsed? “There is no rehearsal whatsoever in the show that we do,” Neil explains. Of course everyone’s pretty much going to know what the main stories up for discussion are each week; working comedians would have written gags about them or immediately seen a funny side of them anyway – that’s what comedians do. I reckon if you put the same people from The Panel in each other’s company in, say, a pub, they’d have virtually the same discussion, and Neil agrees – adding you’d probably have to record the entire conversation over the course of the night and then “cut it down to the funniest 50 minutes.” But that’s the greatest compliment to the show – that feels as though it’s a bunch of mates – even you and your mates – having a bit of a yack at the pub.
“The lack of contrivance is the aim of all stand-up,” Neil reckons, but it’s also “one of the problems of stand-up”: when you make it look like uncontrived “talking off the top of your head” – as the best stand-up should – “the lines are blurred”. Nobody would heckle a play; they can’t heckle the telly. But they heckle at stand-up because “it’s like talking to you in a pub!”
This raises an important issue every comic must face: not every heckler is trying to be disruptive and some heckles actually contribute to the performance, giving the comic something new to react to and build on. But if you encourage it, it may become ‘open slather’ for the audience and then detract from the show. Where do you draw the line? How do you ensure it adds to the audience experience?
“You have to take each heckle as it comes,” Neil acknowledges. “There are myriad reasons why someone would heckle. Each one has to be dealt with on its own merits.” Pause. “And I have a hammer…”. We both laugh at the tag. “No, I don’t, I don’t,” Neil reassures me. “But it would be good if I did, though, wouldn’t it!”
The way the cookies crumble
You wouldn’t expect it of a so-called ‘topical’ comedy panel show, but old episodes of Irish Panel are be hilarious. At least, the bits that make it to YouTube are. There’s a clip that features the discussion arising from an expensive biscuit company wanting to sue a budget biscuit company whose packaging is, they argue, indistinguishable. Neil, as host, reminds the other panellists of the time when cheap brands actually looked cheap, because, he says, “poor people needed to be reminded that they were poor. Big military writing: ‘YOU ARE POOR!’”
Nowadays, I guess, printing is affordable enough that the so-called cheap brands can look expensive – and your parents always would argue that they tasted the same anyway, so why pay more money for the ‘prestige’ product? Because, Neil argues, “if your mates caught you with that” in the supermarket, they’d tease you mercilessly: “HA HA HA HA HA! Yellow Pack! Vincent de Paul! Vincent de Paul!”
Since the cheap stuff is virtually indistinguishable from the expensive, there has been a shift that coincides with Ireland’s fortunes. “Ireland was one of the richest countries in the world in the last ten years,” Neil acknowledges, “all based on a house of cards, really. But we went through this period of being loaded and lovin’ it. Lovin’ it! We completely lost our inferiority complex with Britain because it’s a lot easier to take a derogatory joke from somebody if you know deep down you can afford to have them killed. But now we’ve gone back the other way and it’s become genuinely fashionable to be thrifty again, so we’re all going back to those days and buying ‘home brand’ stuff.”
One other thing that may change back to how it was, now that Ireland is less well off, is a massive and groundbreaking tax incentive called The Artists Exemption. For a time, creative types who contributed to the cultural life of Ireland were granted tax breaks so significant that it was in the best interest for talented people like U2, say, to stay put, and inject their massive earnings back into the local economy, rather than going, as English performers were wont do, into tax exile. But it was such a good tax break that people like Van Morrison – from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and therefore part of the UK rather than the Republic of Ireland – and Elvis Costello – a Liverpudlian with Irish heritage that he conveniently rediscovered – moved to Ireland to make the most of it. The Artist Exemption was introduced in the ’80s by then-Prime Minister – or ‘Taoiseach’, as it’s called (pronounced something like ‘TEE-shock’) – Charlie Haughey, Neil explains.
“It was for struggling artists – your guys writing books or self-publishing poems, sculptors or artists or whatever. But they didn’t think to cap it, so you had people like Frederick Forsyth and Lisa Stansfield moving over.”
Lisa Stansfield, eh? She’d been around the world, and she, she, she – decided Ireland was the most lucrative place to be. Eventually, The Artists Exemption was capped at €250,000 – at which point U2 started moving their holdings to The Netherlands.
“There was a lot of controversy over that,” according to Neil. “Bono on one hand saying, ‘give your money to the poor and make poverty history’, meanwhile moving most of U2’s business holdings to a foreign country.” Question is, does such an exemption aid comics? Do government officials consider comedians as creators of art, contributing to the social life of their country?
“We absolutely do!” Neil insists. “The trouble is that it’s very hard to prove that it’s original material and it’s very hard to hand something to the taxman. If you write a book, you can hand him the book; if you write a script, you can hand him the script; if you write an album, you can hand him the album. It’s quite difficult to hand him your set of jokes. It’s weird, because it’s only on the writing of stuff, it’s not on the actual performing, so it’s complicated. I think it’s a great idea, but I would say that in six months, it’ll be gone, because we are poor again.”
Well then, Neil Delamere, you have six months to record, release and hand to the taxman a DVD of your work, I offer. To which he replies, “the DVD is already recorded – the second one. It’s coming out in early November.”
Neil’s first DVD, No Message was released in 2007 and went platinum – “in Ireland, that’s 14 DVDs, so all the family bought it” – but he has no idea where it’s available, and he hasn’t smuggled any into Australia to make some sly, tax-free spending money. “Once you release it, you kind of forget about it,” Neil explains. “I’m sure you could order it from somewhere.” Pause. “I’m the worst salesman in the world! ‘I’m sure you can get it somewhere…’ Jesus!”
Back downunder
Neil’s success as a stand-up comic grew with the success of The Panel, enabling him to tour off the back of the show. It’s also meant that he could return to Edinburgh Fringe with a bigger profile, and has been doing so over the last few years, as well as record and release DVDs. For local audiences, it’s meant he’s had a big enough profile to justify doing a show at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and returning to Australia now for his two-week residency at the Comedy Store. But just as this year’s Comedy Festival turn wasn’t his first, this current stint at the Store isn’t his first visit to Sydney.
“I was here four or five years ago and probably did three or four gigs around Sydney, but people wouldn’t even remember,” Neil says. “That year we did the Fringe Festival in Adelaide, and then did a mini tour around places like Ayr, Townsville and Mount Isa.”
Mount Isa, eh? I had a friend in Mount Isa who, if you named the year, could probably tell you which comics toured, maybe even which ones misjudged their Georgetown cycling holiday.
“It was kind of strange, but a brilliant craic, I have to say,” the comic fondly recalls. “It was a ‘Best of Irish’ compilation show, which is amazing: you can put them on anywhere and people will go to see them, for some reason.” The reason is, as Neil says of that tour, and I’d say of this conversation, because it’s kind of strange, but a brilliant craic!
Lord of the flights
Seeing as we started our chat with long-haul flights, it’s fitting we should end with them. Neil flew to Australia this time with Air Etihad, a carrier he “can’t recommend enough” because they fly direct from Ireland. Which makes the most difference heading home.
“We always used to have to go through London, and there’s nothing worse than being on a plane for 24 hours and then realising you’re not home yet – that it’s going to be another four hours before you’re home!”
I’d agree, but before I’ve had time to, Neil considers what he’s just said. “When I say, ‘nothing worse’, I mean, obviously, crucifixion is pretty rough; and mutilation is pretty bad, as well. But four or five hours when you’re stuck in London…”
I’m wondering if it’s all down to a matter of those final hours, though. I’d heard Neil had been banned by Ireland’s low-cost airline – the ‘yellow label’ of flight, if you will – Ryanair.
“Well, that might be a slight exaggeration,” Neil says of the story. “I certainly did a gig with Michael O’Leary, who’s the Chief Executive Officer of Ryan Air, and I may, perchance, have slagged him off in front of 700 people…”
It was a corporate gig that Neil was MCing and the organisers had gone to great pains to point out that keynote speaker Michael O’Leary, “worth half a billion Euro”, was doing the gig for free. “Please don’t mess with his introduction,” they begged, and Neil, of course, promised he wouldn’t. But he was lying.
“I had no intention of agreeing,” he confesses. “I thought, ‘I’m never going to get this opportunity again’.” So he introduced Michael O’Leary:
“In 1987, Ryanair ferried 5000 passengers across Europe; in 2007 they carried 50 million passengers across Europe. Of those 50 million, 10 million got to the country they originally booked for, and some got their bags back. Ladies and gentlemen… Michael O’Leary!”
Naturally, O’Leary took the stage and started slagging off his MC. So when Neil returned to the stage after him, he gave O’Leary “dog’s abuse! It was dog’s abuse!” The best bit was when Neil produced a paper aeroplane, and said, “I’d like to symbolically represent a Ryanair flight right now. If you can just imagine that corner to my right over there is the country you actually want to get to – watch!”
And then 700 people watched Neil Delamere turn and throw the paper aeroplane in the opposite direction. The crowd loved it. Michael O’Leary leant over and said, “It’s good to go last, isn’t!” to which Neil replied, “Yes it is!”
For Neil, it was an opportunity to be funny with a well-known identity. “I thought, you’re never gonna get this opportunity again’. It was an odd gig; it was very loud. But as he was the keynote speaker and I was the MC, I knew he would be the one whose introduction I would listen to, so I took the opportunity to get the few lines in there and just kind of slag him off a bit.”
So there is a conclusion you can draw, as to why Neil Delamere may avoid flying Ryanair nowadays. “I had a horrible feeling, the next time I took a Ryanair flight,” Neil concurs, “that as I walk up to the counter I’d see the guy reach under for a silent alarm and dogs would bound up and rip my testicles off. But that only happened once…”
Time to go
Our own craic has run its course. Neil’s got a gig in a few hours, and since he only touched down in the country five hours earlier, it’d be nice if I let him rest. But I’m quite amazed that he’s awake and so lucid.
“No,” Neil corrects me, “I’m actually asleep. This is entirely a dream. I’ll have no recollection of this conversation in about 20 minutes.”
Neil Delamere is at the Comedy Store until Sat July 18
Some YouTube Clips:
2008 New Zealand International Comedy Festival Gala clip
The Panel McVities v Jacobs clip
Star BPM 37093 is now officially a girl’s bestest-estest. Friend. Evah. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has announced that this heavenly body, situated some fifty light years away as part of the constellation Centaurus, is in fact a mass of crystallised carbon. That is to say, BPM 37093 is now the biggest known diamond in the galaxy.
Scientists have renamed it ‘Lucy’ – after comedian Peter Cook’s daughter, of whom John Lennon’s son Julian painted a portrait, depicting her in the sky, with diamonds. Oh, the scientist would be citing the song that John Lennon wrote, inspired by that painting, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, located on the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and long believed to be both tribute to and proof of Lennon’s experience with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). A substance, you may consider for just a moment, that may have also given rise to scientists believing there are huge gemstones in outer space. Perhaps Mars is a great big ruby, and Venus, a hunk of gold? (That’s just silly; everyone knows Venus and Mars are billiard balls!)
With an estimated diameter of 2500 miles (4000km), Lucy is thought to weigh around 10 billion trillion trillion carats – ie 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 carats – or some 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes, give-or-take. “You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the sun to grade this diamond,” said Travis Metcalfe, the astronomer from the Havard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the team that discovered the interstellar gem. “Imagine trying to construct one – you’d most likely fall on your lens grinding machine and make a spectacle of yourself,” he might have added, had he been a Groucho Marx fan.
The diamond, naturally, is mostly carbon, coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases. It was formed by the crystallisation of a white dwarf – which itself is the hot core that remains of a star after it has used up all of its fuel (like the embers of a fire, I guess, except, since they don’t crystallise, once the fuel runs out, they become solid, unburnt carbon – more like graphite rather than diamond.)
Turns out astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised for more than four decades, but the ability to determine if this was the case only became possible recently. The white dwarf radiates not only light, but also sound, ringing “like a gigantic pulsating gong”, apparently. (So that’s what the constellation Orion is doing – it’s not the hunter at all, but a huge J. Arthur Rank gong-ringer!)
By measuring the pulsations, scientists were able to study the interior of the white dwarf in the same way geologists study the earth’s interior by measuring the pulses of earthquakes with a seismograph.
“We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy’s largest diamond,” says Metcalfe.
This raises some important issues – like should the Seven Dwarfs sign up for those space flights that have now become available? “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s into space we go” for the biggest diamond so far located in the known universe must make better sense than chipping away in the diamond mine day-in, day-out. Maybe they can get Mitsubishi to sponsor their trip (because ‘Mitsubishi’ means ‘three diamonds’).
And, if scientists have only just determined that there’s a star made entirely of diamond after four decades of suspicion, how did Jane Taylor know that a star could be exactly “like a diamond, in the sky” when she wrote the lyrics to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ back in 1806?
What about our own nearest star, the sun? Why have we been lumbered with a so-called ‘mass of incandescent gas’ when other solar systems appear to be sporting bling? Fear not. Look forward to our own sun becoming a white dwarf when it dies. How long will that take? Astronomers reckon about 5 billion years. And a couple of billion years later, the core should crystallise to form a giant diamond. Until then, would Sir be interested in some cubic zirconia just beyond Pluto?
Meanwhile, the biggest problem facing the massive diamond in our galaxy is making the most of it. How the hell are we supposed to mount it onto one of those rings of Saturn?
People frequently ask my opinion about comedy – often wanting to know if there’s “anyone new they should know about”. At the moment, my answer is Shane Mauss (pronounced ‘moss’). He’s a young-looking guy who’s been doing stand-up for about five years, who made the breakthrough relatively early in his career. He’s been on Conan O’Brien three times now, which is unprecedented for such a relative newbie. But when you see his material, you’ll understand why he’s doing so well.
His style makes much use of the ‘reveal’ gag. You know, like in cinema: the close-up or angle makes you think it’s one thing, but after the camera pulls back or changes perspective, you see it’s something different. In comedy, the disjunction between what you thought, and what it is, produces the humour; how well it’s pulled off determines how much.
The thing with Shane is, the ‘reveals’ are so sophisticated. The twist can be a complete about-face. The initial set-up might have you ready to be offended or angered, but the punchline reveals to you your own folly, your own prejudice, your own preconceptions – and the relief of being shown that mistake creates an even bigger laugh. But make no mistake: the set-up – the bit that makes you jump to a conclusion in the first place – is as clever as the punchline. It is expert misdirection.
At this point I usually have to offer an example to the person who asked, to illustrate my point – and Mauss’s brilliance, of course. I don’t mind quoting the first joke I ever saw him do. It’s on-line, in one of his Conan O’Brien clips, and he opened with it on his Australian debut, at Sydney’s Original Comedy Store. It goes something like this:
I’m sorry if I don’t quite capture Shane’s on-stage delivery. His pace is slightly slow, as though he might be – whisper it – a little retarded. It suits his material, since the cleverness appears even cleverer to you when there’s something encouraging you to not expect it.
But all of this is by-the-by, because the person I’ve repeated the joke to invariably reacts the same way I did when I first heard it. It’s the same way the Conan O’Brien audience mostly reacts, the same way the Comedy Store audience reacted, and the same way you reacted reading the set-up: with confused silence. Perhaps the slightest smattering of uncomfortable laughter. In your head, you’re going, “Huh? Who’d buy that? How would you sell it? How could you possibly make money?”
Part of the ‘problem’ for the audience is that it seems as though ‘scheme to get rich’ is the set-up, and ‘sticker saying I’m a child molester’ is the punchline. It isn’t. There’s a real punchline coming, but in the brief pause, you’ve also had time to move on to “How is this even funny? I may even be a bit offended by this…” if you’ve wanted to. While you may or may not be thinking all of this, not having found the first bit funny, Shane speaks up:
Maybe I should explain about the bumper sticker. You don’t put it on your car… that’d be stupid.
(C) Shane Mauss
A roar of laughter washes like a wave over the audience. If I’m re-telling the joke to a mate, it has the same effect.
What’s in a name?
Shane’s material is all of that quality, often challenging you time and again to see stuff differently by forcing you to at least consider the option of seeing how you saw it in the first place. If it makes you uncomfortable to think of comedy that much, rest assured: it just makes you laugh a lot out loud.
As I join Shane for brunch the morning after his Comedy Store debut, it seems too early to start with such a high-falutin’ approach to the art of comedy, even if he has been interviewed live on air already. I’m content to begin with a more base level of journalism. “What’s with the weird spelling of your surname?!” I demand.
“I have no idea,” Shane says, admitting that people “have a lot of trouble” with it being pronounced ‘moss’ and spelled ‘M – A – U – S – S’. But mostly, he confesses, their trouble is down to him “messing” with them. His explanation:
“It’s like ‘mouse’, expect the ‘O’ is an ‘A’ and then the ‘E’ is an ‘S’. I mean, ‘Mauss’…” – (pronounced ‘moss’) – “… How easy do I have to make it for ya? It’s like ‘hippopotamus’: you just flip the ‘M’ and the ‘A’ around, take the ‘hippopot’, that’s an ‘S’ now, we’re gonna flip it around to the end: ‘Mauss’…” – (again, pronounced ‘moss’) – “…Easy-peasy!”
Clearly, Shane’s faced this line of questioning before.
People’s inability to pronounce his name can come in handy though, he adds. “I always knew when the bill collectors were calling, because they’d be like, ‘is Mr Shane May-ay-you-ouse there?’ I’d be, ‘No, he’s not here right now. He says he’ll pay you next month’.”
However, it can pose a bit of a problem when it comes to marketing and promoting. Imagine this were a radio interview rather than a written one – you’d hear me talk up ‘Shane Moss’ and you’d go to google the name as you heard it. Google’s not so likely to ask, ‘Did you mean Shane Mauss?’ But someone doing comedy as clever as Shane’s is going to have thought that one through. He not only opts for addresses utilising the name ‘shanecomedy’ (easier to hit if you google ‘shane moss comedy’) but his little blurb at the top of his MySpace page says, “Did you spell my name ‘Shane Moss’? You still found me! Hooray!!!” That’s so all the people who search on-line for ‘shane moss’ still end up at www.myspace.com/shanecomedy. Very clever indeed.
But he not only admits it’s a “screwy last name”, he also confesses that he’s “heard the strangest thing” about its derivation. Apparently, Shane’s ancestors were Jewish and their surname was “‘Moshe’, or something like that”. The name was changed as a result of land ownership issues. “They just made up some different spelling so people wouldn’t know that they were Jewish!” Shane reports. “I have a hard time with blond hair and blue eyes believing that any of my ancestors were Jewish.”
I can’t help being reminded of Art Spiegelman’s excellent graphic novel adaptation of the holocaust, Maus, in which Jews are depicted as mice, Hitler’s Nazis, as cats, but Shane is unfamiliar with it. “I don’t read,” he says. “I write. And then I read my own writing, which means I’m dumb, because I never learn anything because I never learn any new words…”
Wow. Turns out I’m brunching with the cleverest dumb-dumb I’ve ever met! But I can’t decide whether Shane’s comedy – the way it’s constructed – is a result of him being able to interpret things differently because he isn’t much of a reader, or if whatever it is that motivates him to avoid reading is a result of whatever it is that also makes him interpret life and construct jokes around it differently.
“I’ve never been into the same things as other people,” Shane says. “I never took the common educational system seriously. I learn things on my own.” Rather than reading books, he prefers to spend time “on Wikipedia” and the like, researching facts for himself. “I don’t read books, I’ve never been into sports and I’m not as fond of music as most people. I’m not into the same stuff that everyone else is so I’ve always felt that I think a little differently than most people.”
I’m intrigued. What do you do as a kid when you’re not into reading and music and sport?
Shane was “a little more” into sports and music as a kid – though not reading, mind – but wasn’t into “being a kid” as such, at all. “I didn’t have much fun. I was a dark little child.” Though, again, not a ‘depressed’ child, mind. Shane had fun with his mates. “I always thought I had a different kind of humour, and I was always cracking my friends up, but I was never the class clown; I was never out-going in classes. I did not like being a kid. I couldn’t wait to be grown up when I was a kid.”
Reminds me of stories of Tom Waits’s childhood. He so liked ‘old people’ that he’d dress as them. Even though I run the risk of losing Shane – if he’s not into music, will he even know of Tom Waits? – I ask him if he was the same. “No, no, none of that,” he insists. “I still don’t dress like an adult! I still dress like I’m 14 years old.” He holds his arms out inviting me to appraise his tee-shirt and hoodie. At least, I think it’s a hoodie. If not, it’s a trendy skater-kid’s hoodless hoodie. “And this is a good look, considering what I used to wear,” the comic adds. “My girlfriend kind of dresses me now and makes me look a little better than what I used to. I used to be a real slob!”
The rise and rise of Shane Mauss
It wasn’t just being an adult that Shane looked forward to as a kid. He reckons the only thing he ever wanted to do since he was ten years old is stand-up comedy. “I never thought about doing anything else and I never took anything else seriously,” he says. “When I was around fifteen I started writing little funny ideas down. I started accumulating material. But I just put it off for too long, cos I was really nervous and I didn’t really know how to go about getting started.”
What was the metaphorical kick-up-the-bum that forced Shane to finally take to the stage? Well, at the ripe old age of 23, he realised he was stuck in a miserable factory job he hated, drinking way too much, getting into a lot of trouble and hating his life. “I was like, ‘I’ve just wasted these five years – I’ve been putting off this stand-up thing forever…’.”
So it was time to get on with the career. Shane left his home in Wisconsin, aiming, he says, for New York, or maybe LA. “But I had a friend who was moving to Boston and I was like, ‘well, that’s close enough to New York’. I was desperate just to get out of Wisconsin, so I went.”
Getting started was hard. Shane spent two months struggling with “terrible, terrible stage fright”, bombing in “horrible” open mic rooms, often to virtually non-existent audiences. Until something clicked and, aided by “a ton of supportive comics”, he made the transition to clubs, where, within six months of having started out, he was getting paid work – “really unusual in the States”. But it was when Shane landed in the finals of the Boston Comedy Festival – “not the biggest deal in the world, but at the time it was a really big break for me; I got in the finals” – that his career took off.
Shane was recommended to the people who run the HBO Comedy Arts Festival – “the biggest festival in the States”. After a couple of auditions, one of the people who mattered – though just the one – liked what she saw. “They didn’t want me in but she put her job on the line for me and I was one of the last people picked." So Shane did the festival, in the process doing some of best sets of his life. “I got a lot of attention and won an award for best stand-up comic,” he says. All this, and still only two-and-a-half years into his career!
The HBO success meant Shane could pretty much pick his management and agents – and it also meant the Conan O’Brien people saw him in action. “Everything just started falling in my lap,” he offers. Or, to put it another way, everything started to get “crazy, very intense and little overwhelming, too”. Shane Mauss might be the only comic who can boast that his first Conan O’Brien spot came three years into doing stand-up comedy. “They liked me and had me back six months later,” he adds, “which is also pretty unusual”.
There’s been a third appearance since then, and a fourth is lined up for this July. Which is even more impressive now that Conan’s graduated from his Late Night show to The Tonight Show. “And then I’ve got a half-hour Comedy Central special, Comedy Central Presents…, and then I’ve got to do a TV show in London. Things are just going really amazingly well. I’ve been very lucky.”
In hindsight, Shane realises Boston may be the best city in the United States to start out as a stand-up comic. “New York and LA, you go there once you have your chops and a little more experience and it’s time to try to get noticed by the industry,” he says. “As far as starting out, there’s tons of stage-time available and it’s really amazing in Boston.” Of course, he doesn’t need to make the transition to New York or LA now – he’s already been noticed.
At the top of his game
Okay – there are a couple of questions I need to ask now, in light of what Shane’s revealed. The first one has to do with one of his jokes about work (also featured in his first Conan O’Brien spot):
I wanna know if Shane really was a roofer back in Wisconsin.
“People do ask that all the time,” Shane laughs: “‘Were you really a construction worker? You don’t look like a construction worker – you look more like… y’know, whatever it is the gays do.’ No, I’ve never worked in human resources… I did a lot of construction stuff.”
After I quickly point out that there was a construction worker amid the Village People, Shane explains that his father was a construction worker who had his own business and all his uncles were construction workers also. “It’s a little bit ‘in the blood’ – but I was terrible at it. I was really a disgrace to the Mauss name. I was the worst construction worker in the world.” Man, if that’s the case, I’d have been a depressed and disappointed drunk in my early 20s, too! Good thing comedy won out.
My other question is a more standard one: what with all this success, is it all a stepping-stone to the sitcom or cinema?
“I don’t care that much about that stuff,” Shane insists. “I really, really love stand-up. But I am working on some other stuff.”
The other stuff includes things like funny video shorts to be uploaded to the internet; a sitcom pilot based on an idea Shane and his girlfriend had; and a book, being written in collaboration with a friend.
“I dabble in other stuff,” Shane admits, “but I get really excited when I first have ideas for things, and then after working on them a while, I just get bored with it.”
For Shane, like so many other stand-up comics, the very beauty of stand-up is the fact that you can have a funny idea, turn it into a routine, do it on stage almost immediately and then move onto the next funny idea.
“I have such a terrible attention span that stand-up really lends itself to the way that I think. It’s an amazing and under-rated art form and I really love it. It’s never been my goal to be particularly famous or be in huge movies or anything like that – I just want to create a fan base doing stand-up so when I go to places people come out and know what I’m about. I get to goof around a little more that way.”
Kid kidding
If Shane Mauss was never the class clown, if he was a bit of a dark little loner, if he suddenly upped stumps and nicked off out of Wisconsin where he was last seen as a builder’s labourer on some construction site, surely there must be people he grew up with who see him now on Conan O’Brien and exclaim to whichever family and friends are watching television with them, “Him? How’s he a star comedian?!”
“Yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of people that are caught really off-guard,” Shane agrees. “I wasn’t a guy who got picked on a lot or anything, but I wasn’t in the real cliquey crowds either. I just kind of kept to myself. To my friends, it was really no surprise because I was always cracking them up, but to a lot of people I was just some quiet kid. They probably didn’t even know that I was there. So I’m sure it’s pretty shocking to a lot of people. I’ve actually got to see a lot of my classmates who have come out to shows that I’ve done in the States.”
I didn’t think Shane was ever the kid that was mercilessly bullied. He doesn’t do the angry ‘revenger’s comedy’. The overtones of ‘this’ll show ’em’ you sometimes see in other comics’ material are totally absent in Mauss’s unique work. Although, he does have a nice little joke about his childhood:
“I once participated in the four-year-long popularity contest called ‘high school’ and I lost miserably – which was devastating because the reward was a career at Applebees…”
(C) Shane Mauss
Because I don’t quite react as I should – comics see through a courtesy laugh immediately, and some of them aren’t so desperate to be loved that they accept them anyway – Shane asks, “do you have Applebees here? Applebees is a crappy chain diner.” Well, for all I know, it could be a legal firm in the States. Clearly, ‘Applebees’ would be ‘McDonald’s’ in Australia. Point is, popular kids in high school often become the losers in adult life, which Shane finds “very funny; very just”. Hmm. Perhaps there is a touch of ‘revenger comic’ about him. Still worth noting, the joke contains the ‘about-face’ so common to Shane’s humour. So it’s probably safe to turn the discussion to his opening routine about getting rich with the bumper sticker.
“That’s one of my favourite jokes,” Shane says. “I love to make audiences really uncomfortable and think that I’ve taken something overboard or that it’s not gonna be funny, and then there’s that release of tension. That’s one of my favourite kinds of structure.”
Being so into comedy, Mauss is the kind of person who, when watching a comic on stage, can often guess where the joke is going to go, getting the punchline before it’s been cracked. He applies this knowledge to his own writing: “I’m constantly guessing where I’m going to go with it and where other people think I’m taking it and then I try to go as far off-course as I can. It’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of like a puzzle.”
Yeah, but I particularly like it when he does all of that, with a level of shock – making the audience just a little bit uncomfortable. When that happens, Shane ‘calls it’. He lets the audience know he’s aware that he put them in that predicament by addressing them as “my uncomfortable audience” in the next stage of the joke set-up. It reminds the audience that he’s still in control, making them more likely to laugh, rather than be offended.
“My favourite thing,” Shane adds, “is to find a way to break down something shocking or offensive in a very innocent, likable way that makes people go ‘okay…’. Like, I talk about really nasty sex in a very adorable way, where girls go, ‘oh, that’s cute’ about stuff they really shouldn’t be laughing at. I try to find a way to make myself likable that way.”
Rest assured, it works.
Shane in action
Here’s the clip of Shane Mauss’s first appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled, but just click the link (or look the stuff up on Shane’s MySpace). Of course, as ever, you should be seeing him live whenever you’ve got the chance!
Change is good
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