The Chaw Remains the Same
As I recall it, twenty-two years ago, when Melbourne’s swollen comedy scene first metastasised into a full-blown festival, the biggest act in town was something called Theatresports. Sure, there was Stubbsy and Morgs, The Cabbages and the Dougs, Blood, Thonk and Wogs, and that bloke who took a dump on stage at Le Joke (I can’t remember his name, but I did hear that he tried it again the next week and was immediately accused of ‘doing old material’). But looming larger, every Sunday night, was an all-star parade of completely made-up (the word, we were told, was ‘improvised’) nonsense that became so popular it had no choice but to swagger into the city’s fancy new arts centre to challenge even the MTC for theatrical supremacy. Michael Gow’s latest bunfight at the beach may have been dragging them in, but were the boring bits ever enlivened by Mr Gow himself suddenly leaping from the wings with a bucketful of Minties? I couldn’t tell you. I was next door, at the Theatresports, barracking for The Woebegones or Lost on Stage, and hoping that, like last week, Glenn Robbins would opt to perform every scene as a wistfully violent Greg Norman.
The man hurling the Minties crowdwards was ringmaster Simon Rogers, ‘the incomparable compere’, a tall, thin bespectacle who leapt about the stage like an anglepoise lamp in black tie and tails. ‘Four minute scene,’ he’d decree. ‘You’re a giant spider, menacing a family in a log cabin, during a flash flood.’ Without missing a beat, ginger-headed monster Russell Fletcher would adopt the stance of an enormous waterlogged spider, rap on the log cabin’s invisible door, and enquire of the cowering occupants, ‘Would you, by any chance, have three more sets of flippers?’ And so on, until two hours later the curtain crashed down and the exhausted crowd shuffled towards the exits, marvelling to each other about how ‘they really do make it all up as they’re going along.’
‘But what about the line about the flippers,’ said my friend, a Theatresports virgin still grappling with this then-novel concept. ‘Surely he had that worked out in advance?’
‘What, on the offchance he had to be a giant spider in a flood?’
‘So that storyline doesn’t come up every week?’
‘What are you talking about? It was suggested by the audience.’
‘But couldn’t he have had someone planted in the crowd?’
‘What, just to do the flippers joke? Are you insane?’
‘But…’
‘Leave it! Just leave it.’
Nowadays, after twenty years of Whose Line is it Anyway?, Thank God You’re Here and George W. Bush, audiences are well used to the idea of fumbling improvisations as a source of comedy gold. Frankly, if I never again switch on Foxtel just in time to see Ryan Styles in a puffy shirt trying to guess who Greg Proops is meant to be at the cocktail party, I’ll die a happy man. But in the mid-to-late eighties, it was something shiny and new, like the two-dollar coin and The Venetians.
***
It was when some of the most popular players started to appear regularly on the new TV comedy shows like The Big Gig and The Comedy Company that the wheels started to fall off the Theatresports wagon. As I heard tell, a pocket of disgruntled improvisers started grumbling that audiences were ‘only coming along to see people off the telly.’ But as the ‘showboating’ comedians were weeded out, the size of the crowd began to shrink; it turned out that it was the showboating that people had been coming to see. Let’s face it, no-one really wants to see non-comic actors improvising on stage. I’m told that one show shortly after the ‘purge’ featured a lengthy reenactment of the bombing of Hiroshima. Even a glaringly inappropriate shower of Minties failed to win the crowd back.
Around this time, four of Theatresports’ funniest practitioners, Greg Fleet, Tim Smith, Andrew Goodone and the aforementioned Mr Rogers, started calling themselves Chawfest. The Chawfest mission was to take comedy impro out of the big theatres and into the kind of rooms where the only thing that contained more alcohol than the patrons was the carpet, and where the performers sometimes got paid in matchbooks. One exception was a classic season at the Athenaeum 2, where the audience snaked down the stairs amidst clouds of marijuana smoke that surely couldn’t have been coming from the dressing rooms. I mean, you couldn’t do a show like that stoned, could you? I refuse to believe that Fleety may have been under the influence of anything stronger than his own reviews when he nuded up during ‘Word-at-a-Time Story’ and insisted on only using the word ‘Kierkegaard’. The format was always the same: three brackets, with ‘Rodge-o’ hosting and the others each doing ‘ten of old’ at the head. The games themselves would spiral out of control, leaving the audience helpless with the kind of giddy rolling laughter that only the genuinely spontaneous can elicit. It would take ten years and the emergence of something called Ross Noble before I heard those kinds of laughs again.
As for Chawfest themselves, it took a disastrous season as the ‘in-house comedy troupe’ on In Harmer’s Way to suddenly declare the party over. It wasn’t that they didn’t deliver; it was the deadening effect of the editor’s scissors that nobbled them. A four-minute impro cut down to ninety seconds doesn’t look like an impro any more, it looks like a sketch. But one you’d never write. In Harmer’s Way has never been repeated. Many those responsible are still facing prosecution.
***
So, imagine my surprise when, twenty years after I saw that show at the Ath 2, the phone rang and former Empty Pocket (and fellow Scrivener) Matt Quartermaine requested I suit up and fill in for Andrew Goodone at an upcoming Chawfest gig. It turns out that the band is back together (with Quarters replacing Fleety, who no-one has seen since he disappeared up that river looking for Mr Kurtz) and has been for a couple of years now. With nothing that could remotely be described as a fanfare, the Chawfesters have been making lightning raids on the furthest fringes of the Melbourne comedy scene; doing lunchtime shows at Victoria Market, and shows where the performers sometimes outnumber the audience. Now they’re asking me, a man who’s played Theatresports a grand total of one time, to cover for Andy G this Friday night at the Hampton RSL.
‘Why isn’t Andy doing it?’
‘He says Tim didn’t tell him it was on.’
I wonder if the Rolling Stones have conversations like this after all their years in the business.
***
The first thing I notice is that Matt’s name is spelt wrong on the poster. The second thing I notice is that there’s no audience.
The Hampton RSL is one of those fine old establishments where the beer prices are fixed at whatever they were when The Don Lane Show was on, and the smattering of patrons appears visibly weakened by the introduction of non-smoking laws. Outside, the immaculate bowling lawn extends into the darkness like a serene green lake, and nestled on its shore, grazing on cigarettes and Carlton Draught, are the Chawfesters. Older, certainly (Simon tells me he’s about to turn fifty!), but pretty much the same, and well used to gigs where, as Si puts it, ‘There’s only one mike, a spotlight, and so few people we may have to call it off.’ Not that anyone seems to mind. Tim Smith is a radio veteran who, having survived lengthy breakfast shifts with Richard Stubbs, Steve Bedwell and Tracy Bartram, is the industry definition of ‘battle-scarred’. The RSL is his local and most of his family are here – his daughter is pulling beers behind the bar – and nothing can dampen his ready laugh and belief that this could be a great comedy venue given the leg-up that we are theoretically here to supply.
While waiting to see if anyone else is going to turn up, I find myself in conversation with the bloke whose car gets filled with shit at the end of Kenny. He’s come out to support the troops and fascinates me with tales of working with the late Kendal Flanagan, co-director of Houseboat Horror (and whose name is spelt wrong in the credits!).
‘Whenever he wanted an actor to slightly change something, he’d say, “Just dial it down by half a poofteenth.”’
At the last minute, when the gig is just half a poofteenth from being cancelled, the room suddenly starts to fill with possibly reluctant punters. I suspect there may have been a ring-around. There are still several empty tables, but Simon declares it enough to work with, and bounds onto what I guess can be called a stage to explain, for what must be the millionth time, how comedy impro works and that it’s nothing to be frightened of. Speak for yourself. It’s only the encouraging smile of Tim’s mum in the front row that prevents me from fleeing as soon as we’re introduced in the familiar ‘incomparable’ style.
Thanks to me, the games start creakily (I discover that the word ‘decorum’ is not a helpful one for ‘Word-at a-Time Story’), but halfway through the first round of ‘Freeze Tag’ the old Chawfest magic sputters to life. The RSL crowd, who I wrongly thought might not be on for this sort of thing, are soon applauding such pulled-from-the-arse concepts as So You Think You Can Ski and a man who snores so loudly that Essendon Airport files a complaint. One two-hander, a round of ‘Backwards Alphabet’ with Simon and myself, actually, dare I say it, ‘kills’, despite my use of the word ‘Usurer’ (I have no idea what it means) and a gratuitous mention of Kierkegaard in honour of the absent Greg Fleet.
The stand-up spots, too, go over well, even if I recognise some (and I emphasise some) of the material from twenty years ago. I will never tire of hearing Tim Smith say of Heidelberg ‘and that’s in Germany, isn’t it?’. Simon gets off a few zingers at the expense of St Kilda, recalling for us all the pre-Secret Life of Us years when comedians could afford to live there. And Quarters busts out some excellent poems but fails to do my favourite bit, about the time his dog threw up in the ‘foldy bits’ at the base of his car’s gear stick.
While Tim boots the night home with his ‘self-pleasuring’ routine (not one I could do with Mum sitting in the front row), Matty and Si suck down quiet smokes round the patio furniture outside; they’ve heard this gear so many times they can mouth it along with him. As I head back in to catch his big ending (as it were), Simon says: ‘If he winds up before we’re finished, can you wrap it up for us?’
He’s half joking, but this crowd is so good it’s a hard offer to resist. Except that it’s been nearly five years since my last stand-up gig, at Young & Jacksons, where I died in the arse coming on after not Ugly Dave Gray, but Ugly Dave Gray’s son.
‘I don’t think I can remember any of my jokes,’ I whine.
‘What about that one you were telling me on the phone,’ says Quarters. ‘The tattoo joke. The one you reckon’s been stolen by [NAME WITHHELD]?’
And before I can remember the wording, Simon’s bringing me on.
***
What happened next is a blur. I completely forgot the tattoo thing and opened with a dick joke that’s been sitting in my Spirax book untouched for fifteen years. Amazingly, it worked. In fact it worked better than the few remnants of my 2004 act that I managed to recall intact. What worked best was a rambling bit I’d been thinking about in the car on the way to Hampton; about the huge concrete block that is Panasales in Gardenvale and how it used to be Mickey B’s and before that Silvagni’s and before that Alexander’s and how it’s been repainted so many times there’s only a thin sliver of footpath left out the front and the locals have to inch by like they’re on the ledge of a tall building…
At that point I looked across to see the three surviving stars of Chawfest rowdily urging me on. Because it was impro. Not great impro, but fresh off the front of my brain, just the way they like it.
***
Afterwards a red-faced regular bails me up in the Gents and says, ‘You cunts can come back anytime.’ I pass this news onto the others as we spill out into the darkened car park.
‘Sure,’ says Simon, who’s done a breakfast radio show that morning, faces a 90-minute drive home, and, like the others, has done tonight’s show for free. ‘Let’s do it again. And maybe next time we could, I dunno, advertise it.’
It’s their third decade doing this and they’re still making it all up as they go along.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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