Mr Bean, Jim Carrey, The Two Ronnies, Monty Python, Hale and Pace, Clarke and Dawe… Fawlty Towers. All of these played in my house when I was growing up.
Dad was a Brit who migrated to Aus in the 1960s with his family. I describe my dad as a silly doofus.
I am now that.
I always loved whacky. Mr Bean splats into the spotlight in the opening titles. Jim Carrey’s purposeful overacting in Ace Ventura, the wit of Aussie political satire duo Clarke and Dawe and impressions of Aussie sports commentators from Billy Birmingham’s record The 12th Man… all of these led me to putting on puppet shows in front of my family and playing the comic-relief characters in my high-school musicals.
Yeah, I was that character in Fame the Musical who sings about his erection. I was 15. WHAT? I also remember doing impressions of my school teachers at my primary-school graduation. ALSO… WHAT?
Everyone will try and intricately analyse how you became a comedian. But really, I just watched a lot of comedy, a lot of silly, and my family leant into the silly. I ended up doing that for a profession. It’s that simple really. We don’t need to overthink it. You could also replace the word ‘comedian’ with ‘silly doofus’ and you have the same thing.
My Big Break
My ‘big break’ was getting a gig on an Australian children’s TV show called Giggle and Hoot in 2009.
It was an open-call audition: 5,500 people sent in an audition tape (well, you had to burn it onto DVD – yes, I’m that old (and yes, I knew how to do that… nerd! (And yes, I have used too many brackets.)))
I got the gig. It was still in development when I got cast and I was able to help bring the character of ‘Jimmy Giggle’ to life.
For ten years I pranced around in my pyjamas talking to a blue puppet owl on Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC. That was my full-time job for a decade.
The show was silly. Not educational at all. Pure fun. Props made of cardboard flying everywhere, songs in every genre sung to an audience aged under seven. The show ended with a lullaby at 7pm.
For ten years I pranced around in my pyjamas talking to a blue puppet owl. That was my full-time job for a decade!
Parents all across Australia used it as a bedtime signal for their kids. Now those kids can drive cars, and one bought me a beer at a pub recently and it made me feel SO OLD!
When a young adult comes up to you in the street and blurts out, “Mate, you put me to bed every night when I was a kid,” it evokes some puzzled looks from nosy passers-by…
So that was my break into TV. The show was a national success and ran for a decade. We toured Australia countless times. There was a plush toy made of me. A plush toy and a decade-long show… I should retire now.
The second act
In 2019, the ABC decided to end the show as the television landscape was changing and the show would have needed a major overhaul to keep up.
I shifted from children’s TV to more grown-up TV and I went on Dancing with the Stars (Australia’s version of Strictly Come Dancing). My partner? A 19-year-old Russian/German/Australian dancer called Alex. I was terrified into doing the samba and other such dances.
I also lost one million kilos, while also eating two footlong subs-with-the-lot for lunch every day. (Subway was next door to my training venue, OK?)
Don’t take Ozempic, just try and perfect a 90-second jive every day for a week, being whipped by a Russian/Australian dancer. It kind of ended in disaster as one of my twins, who was eight weeks old (yes, it was a crazy idea to take on Dancing with the Stars with newborn twins), ended up in ICU after a medical procedure went wrong. I withdrew from the show, but I would have won, haha. And little Mack was OK.
Then 2020 hit and we all know what happened to the industry and the world in general.
This was my chance to pick up the camera and start making some silly videos for the internet. I had studied film, TV and media (in the 60% of an arts course I completed at university before I got bored).
I think I realised perhaps university wasn’t for me when, in my drama class, we lay on the floor for three hours learning how to breathe. IT’S INNATE!!! Anyway, I made a video and put it online and people liked it. So I did it again. One of my posts on Facebook got one million views. So I tried again and it started to get more traction. I had some unwritten rules about my content as a hangover from being on kids’ TV for a decade:
• I didn’t want to be malicious or ridicule in a way that would polarise an audience.
• I wanted to be clean (or at least bleep my content) so my mum and grandma would still be able to watch, and even those kids who watched me on TV who were now in their teens could follow along.
I’m not that person anyway, but there is a tendency to see what other people are doing online, see their views and overanalyse why that content is going better than yours.
The classic phrase ‘taking the piss’ began to ring true in my content.
During the height of Covid lockdowns, I set up a mock press conference of our state premier, who would deliver the Covid numbers every day at 11am. I made it look similar and dressed like him.
I posted it at 11am, the same time the news broadcasts had ‘Live Stream Starting Soon’ as they waited for the premier to arrive for the presser. Bam! People thought mine was the real one, until I walked into frame. It got silly pretty quickly.
I tried to impersonate his mannerisms, wore the glasses he had and a puffer jacket. It got an amazing response. As if some pent-up laughter just needed to come out.
We zoomed the lens out and acknowledged that the world was mad at that time. It was comic relief that was needed. From there I made weekly, sometimes twice-weekly, news updates of all the bizarre stuff that we were experiencing, like when thousands of teenagers in Darwin decided to go against all the social-distancing rules and have a party on the beach. There was nothing the authorities could do. The scenes were wild until the tide went out in the early afternoon and the saltwater crocodiles descended on the party.
I mean, you can’t write this stuff. I tried to make it fun. We needed the levity.
A Viral Moment
The Guy Who Decides Packaging. Possibly one of those observational moments that perhaps nobody had thought of before.
Why do we put food in this packaging? Scissors in plastic we need scissors to open. The rubber band on the baby broccoli is purple and must be purple. Two litres of milk has a handle but two litres of juice doesn’t: ‘People with two litres of juice don’t need a handle, you idiot.’
I imagined it was just a drunk CEO-type character who makes these decisions. I imagined him creating cricket.
‘Balance two small sticks on top of three taller sticks stabbed in the ground’… His offsider Jason is writing all this down and can’t believe the absurdity. ‘No, sir’… to which his boss spits his martini at him: ‘Do it, Jason.’ The original video got 25 million views on Facebook in a few days and went on to get more than 50 million.
Other platforms contributed to the overall success of the numbers, which I’ve lost count of. I hate using the term ‘viral’, but I think it made it to that status. It was shared so much I got invited to Las Vegas to perform it at ‘one of the largest packaging and manufacturing conferences in the world’ (so I was told). I didn’t go because… well, Covid.
By God, this world needs a bit of light comic relief.
Touring
My audience had grown to millions. Someone suggested it. I hadn’t thought about it. We decided to announce a modest few dates in a modest venue in Melbourne, Australia (my home city). We sold them out rather quickly. What started as five small shows ended up being a national tour of 39 shows in 1,500-3,000-seat theatres.
It was unbelievable. That was 2022. People needed to get out, needed a laugh and wanted to thank me for some laughs through a very tough time. The last few years I’ve continued to make videos. Trying to still zoom that lens, creating observational humour showing that everything is all a bit bizarre. I mean, I have three kids, all boys: an 11-year-old and seven-year-old twins. My entire life is full of bizarre.
As I jot notes to write this article, my car smells of farts, and I have just finished hair-drying my son’s school shoes as he thought it would be funny to just jump in the pool with them on yesterday – and tell me about it this morning.
People still ask me what I want to do when I grow up. I’m taking that as a compliment. I remain a kid at heart, just like my dad before me, and I believe I am breeding three more silly doofuses. By God, this world needs a bit of light comic relief.
I did ten crazy shows at Edinburgh Fringe in August and I’m coming back to the UK with my live show In Reel Life this February 2027. Fast-paced, characters, props, a screen, a camera and you.
Click here for tickets to In Reel Life next February.
