Austen Tayshus
After 30 years heckling the punters with his own particular barrage of suggestive invective, Sydney's angriest comedian lets fly with what's been on his ribald mind lately
By Ruth Hessey
Barry Humphries and I are the two titans of Australian comedy. The rest of them are about nothing. I’m not going to blow my own trumpet, but we need a bit of provocative humour. There’s a lot of mediocrity in the business. Rove? What’s the guy done? Adam Hills? Dave Hughes? They’ve got no point of view. They’re all so politically correct. Maybe it is a reaction to those stupid Howard years. Or a reaction to the 70s and 80s when I was pushing the envelope. I was smoking dope out the front of the Fisher Library at Sydney Uni. I was hanging out with Richard Neville, Germaine Greer. She’s still got the best brain of the lot. That Steve Irwin thing she did was great. No one else dared to say it. And Keating – I love him too. Every now and then he comes out of the cupboard and upsets everyone. Mike Carlton tries, but he doesn’t have the balls or the intellect to follow through. But not Rove...
Why don’t I have a show? Why don’t I have a film? I’ve been in to see all of them, and I get knocked back. They’re all frightened of me, even John Polson. Ever since we won Best Film at Tropfest in 1997 with the film Intolerance. I won Best Actor. We said it was directed by this Laura Feinstein character. The plan was to have an acceptance speech video from “Laura” because she was up in the Northern Territory shooting a documentary. We didn’t get round to it. But of course when the film won, Polson is proclaiming the first Trop Queen, and Paul Fenech couldn’t stand not having the kudos. He had to jump up and say, “That was me!” And I get the blame for it all. Polson hates Fenech’s guts, but he won’t have anything to do with me either. Since then I’ve put in lots more films to Tropfest but they never get in.
Everyone in my family is funny. I went on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton and talked in depth about growing up with that Orthodox Jewish background. My dad was a big joke teller, although it was always the same joke. My mother’s Dad was also renowned as a funny guy. Jewish humour is a reaction to authoritarianism, and persecution.
Out at Blacktown they love me. I do all the accents. The Dutch, the Italians, the Greeks, the Chinese,
the Thais. They love me. We all laugh at the Aussies. I’m an eastern suburbs Jew, and I’ve got a hundred people in Blacktown wanting to put me on their camera phone, bringing out the old vinyls of my hit song ‘Australiana’ – still going strong after 30 years!
I have big plans to do my new show Made In China in the theatre where I can be a bit more sophisticated. It will be a multicultural experience, a wake up for the Aussies to pull their fingers out. Because everyone’s here now, and they have to compete. I encouraged them all when I was running my Double Bay comedy show: Akbal – lovely sweet guy; Joe Avati – he’s humungous in the Calabresi community, but even when he was a novice I could see the potential. Paul Barron, Tahir Bilgic...
I’ve tried so hard to get the comedy scene going but the people making the decisions have no idea. Look at me. My HUGE body of work. I’ve achieved so much. You’d think they’d be saying, let’s get behind him, let’s make it work. But I know what it is: I’ve got the talent and they haven’t. If I’d had people like Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn here. What a team! Instead they give the money to Tony Martin and Mick Molloy. BoyTown? Crackerjack? What rubbish!
But you see, 90 per cent of comedians can’t work on their feet. Because they haven’t worked hard, like I have, at being in the moment. The fresh thing is great. I like working with no material. I’m developing something more fluid. I feed off the audience.
Because there’s one fucking thing about me. I never give up.
