“You know what I looked up today?” John Robertson asks down the phone
line, joy in his voice as he adds, “this is fun!” What he’s looked up today –
and I’m not sure whether he knew what he was looking for, or if he stumbled
upon it – is a Wikipedia article about a serial killer. “It’s a guy called ‘The
Servant Girl Annihilator’, which is now my favourite serial killer name ever.”
Okay, don’t get the wrong idea. John does appear a little too happy to discover the existence of The Servant Girl Annihilator, revelling in the description of America’s first documented serial killer who slightly predates Jack the Ripper and whom some believe was in fact one and the same homicidal maniac as Jack. But John Robertson, a fine comic who has been doing stand-up some seven years, is currently touring a show that happens to be called A Nifty History of Evil – which one promoter has astutely summed up as “the comedy of your nightmares; a manic journey through history’s biggest bastards, with the icky bits left in!’ With that kind of description, you not only already know you’re gonna like the show, you also know that ‘The Servant Girl Annihilator’ is likely to inspire more material. And if you do like the show already, you should also know that you’re in good company: A Nifty History of Evil recently won ‘Artists’ Choice’ and ‘Critics’ Choice’ awards at Perth’s recent Wild West Comedy Festival. So you can understand the comic’s joy at discovering that such a thing as ‘The Servant Girl Annihilator’ exists.
“My favourite element,” John says of the Wikipedia entry, “is that centuries later, some anonymous dickhead is attempting to claim, for the glory of America, that they had serial killers before Britain; there’s a more obscure and less lauded serial killer more worthy of attention.” John likens it to the story of Jim Shepherd, publisher of superhero comic book The Phantom, having once written to Bob Kane, creator of Batman, and accuse him of being a hack for stealing Lee Falk’s work and Ray Moore’s character design – since the Dark Knight is clearly the Ghost Who Walks, Man Who Cannot Die with ears and a cape…
The reference is a little obscure, even for me, but it sums up the essence of John Robertson: extreme knowledge of precise minutiae, delivered entertainingly. It’s part of what makes this Perth comic such an interesting proposition.
Acting funny
On first blush,
John’s clearly an actor turned comic. Not because, like most
actors-turned-comic, he declaims his routine on stage like a well-rehearsed
script; no, he’s one of the good ones. But you guess he’s an actor because everything
John says off stage could well be dialogue perfectly scripted for the character
he happens to be in real life. Or, to be more accurate, the character he
happens to be, in larger-than-real-life.
As a comic – and
indeed, as a frequent host of sci-fi conventions – he keeps an audience equally
spell-bound with hand puppets and ukulele-accompanied songs as he does purely
with words. But before you even get to that point of the on-stage – or
off-stage – performance, you might be struck, as others have, by John’s
resemblance to other people. Like Melbourne comic Danny McGinlay, for example.
“Oh, that’s nice,”
John says. “You can mistake me for Danny McGinlay if I was a foot-and-a-half
taller, and his voice was three feet deeper…”
Actually, if
you knew either of them well, you wouldn’t mistake one for the other… unless you were dealing with them over the phone – since John’s voice isn’t three feet deeper than Danny’s. There’s probably only a couple of inches difference and it’s hard to call who’s actually ahead. However, if Danny’s
sideburns were a couple of feet broader, you would have trouble telling them apart. John’s sideburns are, after all, part
of the source of the other comparison he frequently receives, to Wolverine of
the Uncanny X-Men. “Yeah, if Danny had sideburns that stretched from here to
the Tasman Sea… although our shoulders are reasonably the same breadth…”
It’s hard to tell
if John is merely doing the comedian’s thing – taking an idea that’s been
offered and running with it, turning it around to look at it from various
angles, to see which bits of it catch the light and so can reflect a new twist leading
to new humour – or merely running through thoughts that he’s toyed with
previously.
“I’ve only met Danny once, actually,” John continues.
“It was like, ‘Aha…! Two years ago someone told me I was a little like you, and
now that I’ve met you, I wish I were. Because you’re quite handsome, you
devil-may-care devil…’”
I doubt they were John’s exact words to Danny, even
if they had actually met. But Robertson insists they’re certainly his
sentiments. “With his well-developed chest, and me at five-foot-eight and
slightly overweight, I’m so glad people think I look like him!”
John also accepts the allegation that he “can’t not
have been an actor before he was a comic”, adding the proviso that “it doesn’t
mean I was a good actor”. Rather, he says, as a stage actor he found the “artifice”
of live performance to be “absolutely ridiculous”:
“A comedian will walk out onto a stage – which is an
area purpose-built so that a large group of people can look at you – and will look
back at the crowd and talk directly to them. Whereas an actor has to go through
this ridiculous contrivance of pretending that somehow the audience isn’t there,
while at the same time talking to someone who’s next to them in a highly
intimate manner – and by ‘highly intimate’, I mean, they’re standing at an
angle and in fact yelling at the top of their voice, so all the people that
they can’t see because they aren’t there, can actually hear them.”
Clearly, stage acting had to be jettisoned for comedy
– John’s ability to see the absurdity in life wouldn’t allow him to actually
live that absurdity daily without being able to call it, as a way of life. “I’m
too logical to be an actor. I like the idea of, I walk out, I look directly at
you, and I communicate directly to you. And if you like what you hear, you let
me know immediately.” That arrangement works best for John, he insists, because
he’s “an impatient, ‘only child’ sort of a chap” who likes his feedback
directly.
Playing himself
John doesn’t quite engage with the suggestion that he’s
‘playing himself’ larger than life off-stage, although he agrees that he does “adapt”
who he’s going to be, depending on what he thinks of the crowd. I reckon it’s
as true of the people he’s with off stage, but I know he’s speaking
particularly of audiences. “You can tell how high I think a crowd’s IQ is – or
to be fairer, how drunk I think a crowd is – by whether or not I roll up my
sleeves before I go on stage”.
According to John, rolled up sleeves means “g’day, I’m
your everyman! I’ve just finished doing some heavy physical labour, and here I
am now, to communicate to you”. With his sleeves down, John just looks like “a
reasonably well-dressed boy”. It’s the difference, he says, between giving a ‘happy-and-fun’
audience happiness and fun, and a rowdy, aggressive audience, some aggression.
As we’re discussing this over the phone, I can’t tell if I’m chatting to the
reasonably well-dressed boy or the physical everyman, but I remind John of one
such gig where he had to roll the sleeves up; he talks about it on stage: a
horror gig before an audience of pissed-up Yorkshiremen.
“There’s a whole subset of comedians from my town who
were there that night,” John recalls. He relates the story in a tone that
almost sounds like warm nostalgia – and it may well be, now that time has
passed. “Everyone has a war story from that evening.”
The story goes, a “lovely” Perth promoter – a
luv-er-ly cockney lad who used to book the comics for club gigs and corporate
gigs, and whom John ‘does’ in character when telling the story, phone the comic
up with the offer of a “lovely, lovely” gig to a “lovely, lovely young crowd”,
replacing the original MC who had dropped out. The ‘young crowd’ happened to be
an audience of 80-year-olds at a golf club.
“They were all old Yorkshiremen and women who had
been members of the club since they emigrated to Australia 20 years before. Every
comedian on the bill was 40 to 60 years younger than them and they hated us.”
Rest assured, the gig commenced as normal, with both
sides trying to make the most of a bad situation. They respectfully sat through
John’s opening slot, despite not really ‘getting’ him; they tolerated the first
act. But the second act was an American, at which point, John says, “they lost
their shit”. A guy up the back yelled out, “Ah don’t lahk yanks!” It was
followed by 20 minutes of “deathly silence and Yorkshire grumbling”.
Another comic – whom John describes as “basically
like an Umbilical Brother” – got up and did sound effects, and while the agéd
Yorkshirefolk didn’t like him either, they eventually applauded him out of
respect “for the sweat he produced”.
It was during the interval, while John was taking a
leak, that revelation came. “I heard a large voice behind me say, ‘Oh, aye, a
comedian. Ah lahk you. Some of your jokes are funny. You know who Ah lahk? Ah
lahk that Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown.’” It was at that moment, John says, that he
realised they’d been booked for the wrong gig. “At the time, none of us were
punchline merchants. We are now. That’s what we learnt that evening: ‘Whattaya
know? We should write some jokes. People like those!’”
True enough, although the extent of damage wrought by
lack of punchlines was yet to be unveiled. Somewhere during the night an
old-school open mic-er got up and delivered sub-book gag routines like “…She
asked me to kiss her somewhere dirty, so I took her to Battersea Power Station…”
which went down a treat. So when the headliner, who was meant to do a fifty
minute set, told an internet joke, which the agéd Yorkshirefolk loved, followed
by another internet joke, which they also loved, and then promptly ran out of
material agéd Yorkshirefolk like, things were bound to come unstuck.
“I can’t tell you his name,” John says of the
headline act that night, “because I’m certain he doesn’t want to remember this.
But he said, ‘I’m out of internet jokes; wouldn’t you people rather be asleep? Or
dead?’”
And that’s when the crowd – on the verge of hostility
all night – finally cracked: four minutes into a 50-minute set. He said, ‘Are
we all tired of stand-up?’ and they said ‘Yes!’ and started booing.” The
audience booed the headline act offstage, and then started chanting for the
old-school open mic-er to return. So John got back up, thanked everyone for
coming while the booing and the chanting continued, and then all the comedians
fled from the venue, fearing for their lives. “And three of us pissed on the side
of the building,” John adds. “That’s how aggrieved we were. And off we went.”
John recalls that he happened to be sitting next to
the promoter’s daughter while the headline comic was busy asking the audience whether
they wouldn’t “rather be watching Gardening
Australia? Or Matlock? Or just
rotting in the ground?”, and she turned to John, demanding, “What is wrong with
him?” According to John, “there was nothing to say. It was an age war. And we
lost. We were the Germans in this encounter. It was Perth comedy’s Gallipoli:
an Englishman sent us to the wrong beach.”
Close-knit fraternity community
The metaphor of warfare – a battle waged between the
comics on one side and… well, and everyone else on the other – is telling.
Perth comics are a closely bonded tribe, particularly evident when they’re
interstate.
“This was one of the incidents that cemented the
brotherhood,” John insists, before getting sidetracked by trying to correct ‘brotherhood’
with ‘fraternity’ and realising that ‘fraternity’, like ‘brotherhood’, appears
to overlook the female Perth comics. “This is one of the problems with the
English language”, he says, hoping to opt for ‘community’ but deciding against
it since ‘fraternity’ at least implies ‘family’ whereas ‘community’, he argues,
“could be anything”.
“Yes, you are a close-knit family,” I agree, “but don’t
change the subject. I want you to talk about it.”
“Yeah, let’s do it!” John insists. What I want is the
story of how the Perth comedy circuit built itself up from nothing; how it is
comedian-based, since they set up and run the rooms as a collective and –
Shock! Horror! – everyone gets paid. Instead, John wants to concentrate on “that
incident” that took place a few years ago at the Yorkshirefolk golf club. “We
were all younger then,” he reminisces – as though he’s the one who’s hit the
other side of 80 having died in two World Wars. When I point this out, he cites
his own old age and physical decrepitude: “I’m 25 now, and my thighs are going”;
having just hosted a scifi convention in Sydney, his body is “absolutely
covered” in bruises, the provenance of which he cannot trace; his legs ache. “I’ve
no idea what I did,” he says.
“You need to regenerate,” I offer. Lame as the Dr Who
reference is, it’s the best I can offer. Like a properly trained out-of-work
actor who plays a lot of theatresports, John knows better than to turn down the
‘offer’: “I think I will,” he says, “but the adamantium in my system is
corrupting my body.”
Ah, a Wolverine reference. How apt.
“I was so delighted to find that out: the only reason
Wolverine is not immortal is because of the adamantium in his body. There you
go. There’s a fact.”
John receives comparisons to Wolverine far more
than he does to Danny McGinlay. But, I point out, it is Wolverine whom Robertson resembles; not Hugh Jackman,
who played the character on the big screen.
“Hugh Jackman is from my town,” John says. “We’d all
like to look a little more like Hugh Jackman.” At this point, he realises the
interview has mostly made him sound “particularly ugly”. But that’s down to John; it’s come out in his answers, not in my questions.
“Ah well,
you see, that’s humility,” John replies. “If I were to be fair to my own
self-image, I’d have to say that Hugh Jackman styled that look on me. I am a
tremendously attractive deep-voiced soul, all 5-foot-8 of me. I have the build
of a rugby player who doesn’t play rugby anymore.”
“Yes,” I add, in a downright un-Australian and cheeky manner, “but you just haven’t had your
‘alleged’ marriage of convenience yet.”
I regret the cheap and nasty Perez-Hiltonesque remark before it’s even finished coming out of my mouth, but John – ever the gracious professional – keeps moving in a different direction. “I can’t imagine a convenient marriage,” he
counters. “I had a look at the two men from whom we get the term ‘sado-masochism’,
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, and both of them had some
good ideas, just that they were really shit at using them.”
According to John, “all Leopold wanted” was for his
girlfriend to sleep with other people, but she was reluctant. “It was illegal at
the time, and she would probably be shot, so he had a nervous breakdown”.
Meanwhile, all the Marquis de Sade wanted, apparently, was to have orgies, but “he
was such a dickhead about it that he kept telling everyone that he was doing
it, which was unheard of at the time, so he kept going to prison”. John’s
conclusion? “I should find some nice bohemian combination of the two, and then
never mention it to anyone, ever.”
I know it looks as though John’s taken the opportunity to chase down another
tangent in order to side-step discussing the nature of Perth comedy, but what
he’s actually done is deftly led us back to the topic of show he’s doing, A Nifty History of Evil. Still, in the process, it does look as though he’s having a much better conversation with himself than with me.
“That’s what comes of being an only child,” John
counters: “a need to respond to a simple question with a nine-part answer, none of which
parts are inter-connected”. Indeed, he concludes, “I’m the Old Testament version
of my own life story”.
Raymond and Cat Cat
There is the tinge of the Old Testament to John’s life just at the moment, an example of the
Good Lord who giveth, taking away. A key point of his performances has been the
appearance of two adorable puppets – a sad guinea pig and a hideous cat. “I don’t
know what it is about them,” he says, “but audiences find Raymond the
Manic-Depressive Guinea Pig and Cat Cat the Munt-Faced Cat utterly enchanting.”
Turns out John found Raymond on the floor of the
children’s entertainment centre where he used to work. “He just looked so
miserable and so desperately sad that I took him home. I literally stole him.” John
used to walk around the place with the guinea pig on his hand, speaking with in
its voice all day. “I absolutely loved the idea of a sad hamster. It was just so
much fun. You could make it look like he was cutting his wrists; he could cover
his eyes; it was just this great moment of pathos. It could make an audience so
sad.…”
How sad? The way Raymond was first incorporated into
the act was, John says, in the middle of a stand-up performance where all of
the various lines, jokes and act-outs worked, and everyone was having so much
of a “generally crazy time” that he decided to take the gamble and ask the
audience if they’d like to see the puppets. The drunken audience loved the idea.
So John pulled out Raymond the Manic-Depressive Guinea Pig and made him start
talking and covering his eyes. The crowd was utterly hushed, until a man broke
the silence by shouting, with tears in his voice, “Make us laugh! Make us
laugh!”
“It was a nice moment,” John says. “That was Raymond
sealing his part of the deal: girls would squeal in delight when Raymond came
out, and then they would be moved with intense sadness. This is something I
think we could do more of.”
You don’t need to do more of it if you can do it
well. The moment of sadness in a comedy show – if done properly by someone who
knows what he’s doing, is magical. It makes the release of the funny, when it
returns, even funnier, because there’s been some patently ‘not funny’ (but no
less powerful) to compare it to. After all, if everything was uniformly
hilarious, how would you know? And it’s worth noting, Aussie comics do pathos
very, very well. Consider Grahame Bond and Rory O’Donohue’s ‘singing tramp’
characters Neil and Errol on Aunty Jack, or Paul Hogan’s wino…
“It’s true,” John agrees, “and we handle it well,
too. But we treat it like a foreign concept whenever it appears.” So much so,
that it only works if the performer is totally committed to it. In fact, he
adds, the lesson he’s learnt is that, with everything you do, “you have to
really commit to it, or it doesn’t work. That seems to be the secret to the
universe.”
Having reached the point where Raymond had
more-or-less reduced an audience to tears, he’d pull out Cat Cat the Munt-Faced
Cat, another item purloined from that place of work. “He’d been touched and
played with by some 40,000 school children, so this once beautiful cat had been
rendered almost black with dirt; his face was pushed in; his eyes were just
blazing and sinister.”
Before an audience wracked by sadness, the repulsive
cat did the business. “Cat Cat could scrunch his upper lip into his lower lip
and then flap out his mouth, whereupon he would speak like Jabba the Hutt: ‘Waka
jawaka, Solo. Bring the Wookie to me. Waka jawaka jawaka.’ The release in the room
would be amazing every time.”
I have experienced this firsthand, but what didn’t
quite twig that time – and I’ve no idea how or why I missed it – is that Cat
Cat spoke like Jabba the Hutt. The Han Solo reference should have been a
give-away.
“I don’t think anyone remembers it. That’s the nice
thing about puppets: they get a biological response. Who gives a crap what the
puppet is saying, providing it’s moving, and looks funny?”
John has used these puppets, he says, in places where
it should almost be unreasonable to use them. There’s a YouTube clip of him
entertaining a 1,200-strong anime convention with a kid’s story featuring
Raymond and Cat Cat in prominent roles. “They lose their shit,” John says. “A little
girl yells out, ‘everybody loves Raymond…’ They love it.” He also pulled
Raymond and Cat Cat out while doing the support slot for Wayne Brady. “That was
2,500 people. And I learnt something that day – visual jokes don’t carry to the
back of the room!” Three tiers of people laughed while the fourth tier – who
had been making a lot of noise up to that point – fell silent. John knew it was
time to put the puppets away and pull out the ukulele.
Unfortunately, John lost Raymond and Cat Cat during
the most recent Melbourne International Comedy Festival, on the way to a sci-fi
convention. “I hadn’t pulled them out for the whole festival because they’re
not part of this year’s show,” he says. “I was taking them to the sci-fi
convention I was hosting. I got off the tram and realised I’d left them on it.”
John ran through traffic to catch up to the tram, but couldn’t reach it. He
jumped onto the next tram, and had that diver contact the driver ahead, but to
no avail. “By the time the driver on the first tram looked, they were gone. I
rang my girlfriend and we wept. It was like losing some kids. Except that now,
it’s months later, and it’s like losing some kids we didn’t really care about.
I loved those guys, but I don’t burst out crying. Anymore.”
Well-meaning friends have sent John replacement
puppets, but they know they’re not the same. The new kitten puppet is far too
adorable. Even though it can be very funny when you “make it a Nazi and give it
the voice of Christoph Waltz, from Inglorious
Basterds”. Indeed, John says, it’s amazing how many puppets can do the Nazi
salute. “It’s one of the first things people do when they grab them. ‘Can I
make it touch its dick? Can I make it do a Nazi salute?’” Those things are
hilariously funny, clearly, but it’s the pathos that the other puppets
presented, that made John’s onstage shtick what it was. “I like my pathos,” he
explains. “I like my animals weird and munted.”
Better acting as a musician
The puppets may be gone, but John still has his
ukulele, which, like the puppets, doesn’t exist for what it is, so much, as for
what it isn’t. “It’s not even there, necessarily, to be a musical thing,” John
insists. “It’s just a point of difference. ‘Look, I’ve just done however
minutes of high-energy stuff on stage, maybe we’ve gone a few places, maybe we’ve
done some weird shit, maybe I’ve yelled a whole bunch of jokes at you; now let’s
see what I can do with this happy instrument.’”
What John usually does with the ‘happy instrument’ is
perform three songs, two of which “appear” to be “very happy” – although, when
you listen, he points out, “neither of them are” – and the other one, really
depressing. The ‘depressing song’ is mostly conveyed through John’s facial
expressions. He finds the “face work” to be liberating. “Playing a slow, sad
song where you don’t sing and all you do is look out into a large crowd as if
you are dying on the inside is one of the most enjoyable things you can
imagine,” he insists.
“But a lot of the time you can’t see the crowd,” I
offer.
“I can,” John argues. And in a way, he can. Because “it
isn’t about ‘seeing’ the crowd; it’s about ‘hearing’ them. If you’ve got a
really large crowd and you walk across a stage looking incredibly sad and you’re
singing a song that is amazingly pathetic, and you’re looking out at people, it’s
amazing to hear a ripple of response go through them.” And, he reiterates, “having
it carry through the entire room as you walk the length of the stage is a
really gorgeous thing. It also makes you think ‘Christ I must look sad! I’m a
better actor than I thought!’”
Nifty history of the show
We’re almost back to the point where we began: John
Robertson, the actor-turned-comic – except that we actually began with John’s
infatuation with serial killers and evil, which he’s turned into a live show, A Nifty History of Evil. I quite like
the poster graphic – John as a cross between the Nosferatu vampire (from the
film of the same name) and that
character Ron Moody played – or rather, that character Noel Fielding of the
Mighty Boosh plays, based on a Ron Moody character, that has ‘Polo mints for
eyes’. It also reminds me of Screaming Lord Sutch, an English rock’n’roll
character from the ’60s. But John reckons it’s accidental that he looks as
though he might want to talk to me about eels; rather, the look grew out of the
costume, first and foremost. “I just thought, ‘Hey, let’s put on all of our
steampunk gear today and see how we look. Oh, I look a little like an
aristocrat…’”
The ‘steam punk’ clobber comes from Gallery
Serpentine, a ‘goth shop’ that sponsors John by slinging clothing in his
direction “every once in a while”. So, he says, “I’m wearing one of their frock
coats. I’ve got one of their corsets on, I’m wearing their shirt… the hat was
mine.” As to the poster image for the show, John’s feeling was, “how good would
it be if I were to have these really horrifying distended fingers?” His buddy
Mel, “this tremendous graphic designer” that John insists is on par with Shaun
Tan (Tan is “a more dream-like, less photo-realistic version” of Graeme Bass,
according to John), ‘knocked it up’ for him with little effort.
“It’s the finest piece of graphic design I’ve ever
been associated with,” John says. “Mel’s been my best friend for years and she
really hates it. So much. Tim Ferguson wrote to me and told me that he likes
it. I told Mel, and she was so embarrassed. She would have preferred if he’d
seen any of her body of work that wasn’t that.”
The show A
Nifty History of Evil itself, according to John, is about “marketing, blood
and style”. It’s an historical journey through “obscure moments of evil
mythology”. So it features “Philippino vampires, a puppet show about the
Marquis de Sade, a happy song about Stalin’s Purges which is basically Goldilocks and the Three Bears retold
from a soviet perspective…” – a little bit of everything, really. If it’s
inspired by anything, it’s the facts gleaned as a kid from children’s
encyclopedias.
“I really liked those entries you’d stumble across
that would end, ‘and then he massacred all of them’,” John says. “When it’s
been divorced from context by about 400 years and then phrased in a children’s
encyclopedia, it usually tends to be great. I basically wanted to put together
a horrible history of the world, and some of these things are just excruciatingly
funny.”
What sort of things are excruciatingly funny? He
offers the possible alternative endings to World War II as an example. Both the
Russians and American were working on secret weapons that would finally bring
the conflict to an end, once and for all. The Americans were developing the
deadly ‘Bat Bomb’, essentially “a bat with dynamite strapped to it,” according
to John.
“They were going to release these over Tokyo. They
never did it because the first day they were experimenting with the bats in a
secret army base, they flew up into the roof and, when they exploded, took out
the base.” The historical consequence of this was the Americans developing the
more cost effective nuclear fusion. “It was cheaper to develop the atom bomb.”
At the same time, John says, the Russians were
developing the ‘dog bomb’ – a dog with a landmine strapped to it. Dogs were
being trained – no doubt via Pavlov’s classical conditioning, to run under
German tanks, by putting food under tanks. “But the Russians didn’t have any
German tanks for the dogs to practice on,” John reports, “so the dogs would go
out into battle, look at German tanks and freak out, then look at Russian tanks
which they associated with food, run back to them, and explode.”
These ridiculous historical factoids are great, but
better still, for John, are the moments in the show when people hear about
stuff they already know, but weren’t aware others were into.
“I’ve seen a large guy dressed in footy shorts cheer when I mention
Countess Elizabeth Bathory,” John says. And why shouldn’t an apparent rugger
bugger cheer at in recognition of the horrible Hungarian ruler who used to
bathe in the blood of young virgin women – since beauty products containing the
stem cells of discarded fetuses weren’t yet on the market – in order to remain
youthful?
Likewise, “troupes of young women high five each
other” when John begins to discuss Lilith, the first woman. Well, she’s the
first woman according to the Kabala and variations of the original myth from
which the Adam and Eve story is reportedly derived. Apparently, Lilith was
banished from the Garden of Eden by God because she refused to acquiesce to
Adam as husband and boss. Depending on the version of the story, Lilith
disappears, becomes a howling wind, or becomes a vampire who preys on children
and pregnant women. No guesses which version of the story A Nifty History of Evil deals with…
This has been a long conversation, admittedly, John concludes, but it’s
the last chance we’ll get to have one for a while. “The minute I finish the show in Sydney,” he says, “I’m
flying home to Perth where I’ll spend four hours changing my bags over so that
I can fly to Edinburgh and do 44 shows in 22 days. Then I’m doing club work in
the UK until October.”
There you have it. If you want to see A Nifty History of Evil in Sydney, John’s doing it at the Comedy
Store, Sunday July 25th. Until then, he’s featuring in the Store’s season
of ‘Heavy Weights of Ha Ha’ featuring Bruce Griffiths, Chris Wainhouse, Smart
Casual, Jackie Loeb, Joel Creasey, Amelia Jane Hunter, Rhys Nicholson, Umit Bali and Emma Markezic. Oh, but during August you can see A Nifty History of
Evil in Edinburgh!