The Pun

Send in the Clown

By Gillian Terzis ⋅ April 23, 2007 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Tragedy, they say, is inherently funny. It’s why some of us (let’s face it, most of us) try desperately, often unsuccessfully, to stifle our guilty chortles at others’ misfortune. Comedic films such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Squid and the Whale exemplify this exegesis of humour and calamity; although, it arguably gives little explanation for the popularity of ‘Australia’s Funniest Home Videos’.

This analysis of comedy would assert that depressing and confronting fodder such as heartbreak, rejection, family dysfunction and addiction would make a highly successful comedy routine; logically, one would declare Greg Fleet to be one of Australia’s most successful (if not slightly tragic) comedians.

Fleet is a festival veteran, having braved and entertained the comedy connoisseurs both at Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Edinburgh Fringe. He’s done a stint on the Austereo radio network (the subject of Judith Lucy’s scathing invective at last year’s festival) and enjoyed widespread public recognition for his role on ‘Neighbours’. What drove Fleet to give soap-opera job security the flick in favour of the fickle mistress of stand-up comedy is anyone’s guess, but soon enough, he was getting paid regularly to make people laugh.

His comedy festival experiences have been overwhelmingly upbeat. In particular, he enjoys the ‘cool and creative vibe’ that Edinburgh Fringe and MICF exude. The crowds behave well, as if they were ‘watching theatre,’ Fleet marvels, and he suggests that even the hecklers at the festivals serve a productive purpose.

‘It’s usually creative and constructive, rather than pissed or angry,’ he says’although, one year, a severely inebriated woman interrupted his show by walking to the middle of the stage, holding up her shoe and loudly lamenting that it was broken. She looked at him expectedly, to see if he could fix it.

‘She thought I was a cobbler,’ laughs Fleet.

Festival drunkards aside, he can count some of the world’s most renowned comedic talent as fans; he attributes his success to Eddie Izzard and Frank Skinner attending his shows early in his career and, fortunately, spreading the word.

It’s not only his comedy routine that has made him so fascinating to the media; Fleet also endured a well-publicised addiction to heroin (He left rehab in January this year.) and a family dynamic that was (apologies for the lack of eloquence) utterly fucked.

His father was, as Fleet recalls, a ’sex addictÔø?ƒ?a rooting machine,’ and the impetus behind his acclaimed stand-up gig I Wish You Were D(e)ad. Philandering aside, Fleet’s father faked his own suicide to ‘escape family life to the States’. It’s an astonishing incident that’s hard for outsiders to fathom. To this day, Fleet remains incredulous in his recounting of events.

‘It was genius. He was very theatrical as well,’ he remarks in his somewhat laconic yet indolent drawl. ‘He’s just mad; he’s done a lot of crazy things.’

Apparently, his father was in email contact shortly after the Edinburgh performance of I Wish You Were D(e)ad, and suggested that Fleet had ‘issues’.

Fleet laughs, once more in disbelief, ‘Ôø?Ôø?I mean, whaddaya fucking reckon?’

Perhaps, comedy has been a form of public therapy or a much needed catharsis; in any case, Fleet maintains that his relationship with his father is probably better than it’s ever been.

‘We don’t talk much’, he admits. ‘But, when we do, it’s pretty good’.

Fleet believes comedy is linked with tragedy. He suggests that most comedians tend to focus on the topical, which seemingly happens to be dismal’Ôø?Ôø?war, current affairs, drink driving’Ôø?Ôø?it’s not the stuff that happiness is made of.

‘Comedy is tragedy plus time’, he explains, and cites examples of comedians being chastised for speaking ill of the newly dead.

‘People made jokes about Diana after the day she died, and that was too much for people. It was too soon. Six months down the track and people are laughing their arses off at the same joke’.

Fleet joins a litany of comedians who tackle typically disheartening and confronting issues, but he’s adamant that he tries ‘not to have a victim’ in his jokes.

‘I’ll make jokes about AIDS’, he says, ‘but I don’t do jokes about a poor individual who has AIDS’. Rather, he would choose to focus on ‘the way we deal with the problem and the fear that’s instilled within society’.

His latest venture with Gud musician Mick Moriarty, however, seems a little less melancholy. When I ask him about his latest offering Fleetwood Mick, his response is characteristically deadpan: ‘It’s about AIDS’.

The show is, in fact, a parody of news-style programs, an inspired and anarchic invention of the current affairs shindig as we know it.

‘We’d like to see the news presented with songs, beat poetryÔø?ƒ?with music running through it’.

Personally, I think newsreading done as a poetry slam, Allen Ginsberg-style would rate the impeccable trousers off the unstoppable juggernaut that is National Nine News. Perhaps, it is something for those commercial newshounds to consider.