Hot off the Press - 30/04/06 @ Melbourne Town Hall - by epod

Hot off The press was described as “an afternoon’s diverson on the art of writing and drawing funny stuff, brought to you by a collection of humourists who bring you laughs via books, newspapers, radio, television and film”. As it featured an awesome lineup of some of my favourite performers, I chose to attend and I was definitely not disappointed!

MC of the show was Dominic Knight, founder of the Chaser Newspaper. He did a great job of keeping the show running smoothly and helping out a couple of the other speakers who had no idea how to run video footage on the computer onstage.

First speaker was Shaun Micallef, whose work I have admired for quite some time. He talked about how when you are writing for a comedy like Full Frontal, the piece that you write may start off being funny, but there are so many people who handle and change the idea around that by the time it is on the tv, it is not much like the original idea you had at all. He said that stand-up is so pure, and consequentially usually much better, as there is usually only one person involved in the implentation of ideas, and the performance of said piece.

Shaun mentioned that he got paid $120 a week for working on the show, and that things were getting so ridiculous that at one point there were dares for the writers to write shit material just to see if it would be chosen to be performed on air. Not surprisingly, some of it made it.

Next was Corinne Grant, who spoke about being a writer on Rove and The Glasshouse, and how much reading she does of certain magazines to ensure that she uses the right words and phrases that said demographic will understand, and most importantly, find funny. She mentioned that she also has been writing a column for “Life Matters” magazine, so she needs to use an altogether different dialogue when writing that, as it is targetted towards a totally different demographic. Whilst what Corinne was saying was interesting, I would have liked to hear her expand on what she was saying a bit more, as most of her time on stage was spent reading an article she wrote for “Life Matters”, which really did not fit with the topic on hand.

Mark Knight, a cartoonist for the Herald talked about how he uses cartoons to convey humour. He mentioned that a lot of people have misconceptions about what his role is, including asking if he just draws the pictures or does he write the captions as well? Yes. Is he told by the newspaper what to draw. No. He used an overhead projector to show how he drew cartoons - one of Johnny Howard, and the other of Jeff Kennett, explaining each part of the picture and why it was excentuated. He was asked by an audience member if he ever drew any cartoons of his boss Mr Murdock. Mark replied that he did, but it was prior to working for his newspaper.

David O’Doherty then took to the stage and talked about about his writing, which was really interesting. This guy was responsible for the first ever theatrical production where people were asked to bring in their bicycles for repair live on stage, how could he not be interesting? He has written a children’s book, and also had a radio series called “Bee Detectives”. Yes, Bees that are detectives…as I said, this bloke is interesting. At the end of his piece, he showed a small portion of what he is hoping will be a tv show that will get a spot somewhere on tv. What I saw of it was hilarious and I really hope that I see it on television soon.

Above all, the most interesting speaker was Demitri Martin. I honestly had no idea of what his back catalog of work involved. Turns out he was a writer for the Conan O’Brien show, one of my favourite shows! He worked as a writer with Conan for a year and said that it was a dream job. Unlike other comedy shows, there was not a lot of pressure on the writers. He said that, for example, writers for Saturday Night Live are under a lot of pressure to get their work on the show because if they do not get enough sketches on the show, they are then fired. Conan came from that environment, which he did not like at all, so he chose not treat his writers in that manner.

An example of a day at work as a writer at Conan would be that they would all meet and be told to go back to their desks for half an hour and write as many “Year 2000″ jokes as they can (Year 2000 is a recurring segment on the show, for those not familiar with it). They then come back to the meeting with just their initials written at the top of their pages of jokes, and they are all read out loud, and anonymously so that no one is shown any favouritism.

Writers are also able to suggest concepts/sketches for the show, three of which Demetri showed the audience today, which were all very interesting. He actually got to star in most of the sketches that he wrote, and had a lot of say in regards to the production of the entire piece, rather than having to hand the idea off to multiple people, which can lead to problems, as mentioned earlier by Shaun Micallef.

Demitri was asked why did he leave the Conan show if the job was indeed the dream job that he was describing. Demitri said that it was just something that happened. Just prior to getting the job at Conan, he had got the Perrier award for his first ever show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which meant that he could be touring all over the place, but with a job like Conan he couldn’t do that. So, he had wanted to be a writer with Conan for so long, but on the same token here was his stand-up which was another avenue that he also really wanted to persue.

Although parts of the show dragged a little in parts, this was a really great show to see, which I really enjoyed and also managed to learn a few things as well!