Review: Corinne Grant at the Comic's Lounge

To one side of the conformism of public and workaday life, Australians are capable of much wry fun. They acknowledge many of the better jokes made at their expense, not just the cheap ones made compulsively by ferrets like Rove. At the Comic's Lounge in North Melbourne the better jokes can be heard. Last night I felt as if I heard some of them, told by Corinne Grant and Adam Richards, the secret of whose art seems to me to be in positioning themselves to one side, though never too far to one side, of the comic and workaday conventions to which comedians and the rest of us conform.

On the tram north from the city, two likely lads tried out some malign humour of their own on me. Were they speeding? Not in the literal sense of the word. The no. 57 tram to West Maribyrnong was taking them to the showgrounds for a party at that slow speed Melbourne trams like best, somewhere between walking and cycling pace. With a druggy nonchalance, one of them asked me what my name was. When told, he informed me I was lying: with a nose like mine my name had to be Pinocchio. I told him it was a dud of a joke and asked whether he had another. His friend did, but it turned out to be worse: was I some kind of f*cking emo? If not, why was I wearing all that black? My nemeses had bright knitted tea-cosies on their numbskulls, the ones with the long dangly bits at the side – ideal for hanging them with, I thought; I said – couldn’t they see the blue shirt beneath my inky cloak and – two substandard jokes on the trot did they want to have one last try or quit without further disgracing themselves? Next, something interesting happened. They realised I was ready with half-decent comebacks and wasn’t going to pretend to ignore how obnoxious they were being like everyone else on the tram. A little wave of universal bruverhood rippled across the scene. For the rest of the trip we played a game of ethnic 20 questions (I tried to guess what part of the world they came from, they tried the same out on me); they complimented me and my date on our respective choice of companions for the evening; they even asked for invitations to the wedding. I said they’d only be getting invites if they could guarantee they wouldn’t wear woolen bonnets. Not to be outdone, the lovely CW (my date) chimed in – maybe they should promise that they would wear the knitwear, so the wedding guests would know when the Moroccan village idiots had arrived. The village idiots doubled over with laughter, acknowledging they’d been dealt a couple of palpable comic hits. I shook CW’s hand, then theirs, told them not to f*ck too much sh*t up at the Showgrounds and got down in front of the North Melbourne Townhall. As the tram rounded the corner into Abbotsford St, village idiot no. 1 was hanging from the handrails and swinging his feet up into the faces of those around him.

We enter the Comic’s Lounge and head upstairs. Our names are crossed off a list and we push out into the lounge bit – a red carpeted space with some couches, a bar and lots of mirrors. The comedy takes place through some swinging saloon doors, in a room with a low ceiling big enough to host a big Greek wedding. There are trestle-tables at the back and round numbers for more intimate gatherings up the front. On all of them there’s plenty of Comic’s Lounge paraphernalia. About the only annoying thing about the place is the way it spruiks itself before, during and after the show.

. . . Enter Corinne Grant. She opens with a routine about "LOL" – don’t stick it at the end of a text message saying you heard your friend’s grandma died. Grant has already extracted from someone in the front row the confession that they thought LOL meant “lots of love”. Clattering pearls of laughter. Grant is clearly pleased – she hunches forward as though she’s got stomach cramps, a deliberately forced grin on her face – the compulsiveness of public laughter itself seems to be getting a grilling. Before handing over to Gab Rossi for his bracket, she’s up on the comic heights twice more. The first thing in her sights up there are aging hippies who make their own soap (out of squeezed together leftovers, creating what she calls “a pube sandwich”). Then it’s the turn of school-age white gangsta rappers on PT (whom she forces herself not to laugh at in case their fragile adolescent d*cks drop off). Let’s not say Rossi lowers the tone – the tone isn’t that high to start with. (One of his opening gags is “I woke up this morning and saw a great pair of tits – and I thought – I gotta lose some weight.”) But Grant is in another league. She’s the unpretentious wise-cracking blonde, unbuttoned on most topics, straight-laced about a few – the girl-next-door raised to the power of 10. Rossi by contrast is the patriotic male slob, the sub-normal bloke whose one character trait – not necessarily a redeeming one – is that once he’s poured out the slop-bucket of his mind in public, he has the rudimentary honesty to own the contents. Half-way through his bracket he regales us with his reasons for being a tea-totaler. The first is that he doesn’t need to drink to get himself to the point where he’ll flop his chop in public – give him $2 and he’ll do it anyway. As funny as that is, it’s a touch too consciously low-brow. (A paradox for Australian humorists: though obscenity is one of the most powerful kinds of subversiveness, what are you subverting if you’re playing that card to an audience for which obscenity itself is de rigueur?)



It’s interval, there’s some general milling towards the bar and I take a turn round the room while CW heads off to the WC. The crowd is made up of a few couples, a lot more mixed male-female groups and still more parties of unaccompanied (single?) women. The girls form closed circles, as they do in Melbourne, where solipsism is a group dynamic, especially among girlfriends out on the town. (One of Gab Rossi’s more advanced fantasies has just been to imagine a circle of male clubbers under the spell of the same anti-social sociability, dancing in a circle with their shoes in the middle and going off to the toilets together for a cry.) CW comes back and we order mixed dips from an Indian waiter who ogles CW instead of looking what he’s writing on his order pad. CW tells him to watch what he’s doing. He says he can “do both at once.” One of our table-mates tells us the two girls he’s with got the same treatment from the waiter when he ordered potato wedges ten minutes back. The two female beings in question stare shyly into space as if the whole world is one big ogling mechanism.

Grant saves her best material till after the break, when she opens with tales of growing up in a country town with one glorious public swimming pool. It’s the 70’s, the Emerald-Blue Golden Age of Chlorine. The problem teenagers of the 00’s have turned into the unproblematic kids of 30 years ago, getting high on the fumes from their towels. Back in those days you amused yourself by tying your mopping-up equipment round your head and calling yourself an Arab. (Corinne: “Try that one on nowadays!”) Then the pièce de resistance. What’s Corinne meant to think about all her friends having babies? To her distress they are having them left, right and centre – literally; her friends are so fecund and so far gone on motherhood that they can’t be stopped having 2 – 3 babies per day (each) – in hospitals, in the park, in the supermarket. (“Here we are at Safeway, Julie, me, look, here’s a packet of Cruskits, ploop! there’s another baby.”) Julie’s grotesque facility for baby-making has clearly unnerved our heroine, who is yet to get off the mark and doesn’t even have a boyfriend; “I think I want to have a baby,” she confides, “I just don’t want it to be an ugly one.” Corinne impersonates an over-sized baby, growling like a grisly bear. Corinne impersonates herself being wigged out by an elephantine baby in her arms (big ugly babies are the elephant in the room of Corinne’s maternal psyche). Corinne takes off no one in particular letting plop with another baby. The crowd at the Comic’s Lounge are laughing so hard they sound like they’re all having babies. . .

After a second interval, Grant’s rival for funny man of the night enters the scene. This is the manifestly gay Adam Richards. (“I know what you’re thinking, ‘he’s from poofterland’ – not from Sydney though!”) The inspired gawkiness of the girl-next-door gives way to a different though equally likeable sort of comic persona, the ideal gay friend, deliciously catty yet self-deprecating. Richards keeps a perfect balance between making idiots of third parties and making an idiot of himself, his comic evil eye flicks back and forth between Self and Other in a way which is itself quite amusing. One minute it’s Kylie getting the treatment. (Richards tells us he thinks it’s Kylie herself who’s the cancer and what she had removed was her only sliver of humanity.) But the all-round human uselessness he finds in the Minogues he joyfully posits in himself as well; in no time at all he’s telling us about his fantasy McDonald’s, where his cheeseburger is not just handed through the car-window, but fed him through the window as well. (“Put it in my mouth, girly, put it in my mouth!”)

In Richards’ routine, the mild toxicity and plain weirdness of social life are really what’s at issue. Confronted with screaming social dysfunction, the comic, generally speaking, has two basic options: to display in his own person the effects of an alienating world in producing alienated individuals or, alternatively, to revel in the horror of it all. The first path is rarely trodden in Australia; when it is the result is comic personae that are a jumble of reaction-formations to the pain, absurdity and strangeness of a world we are not at home in. (Think of Raymond J. Bartholomew or Elliot Goblet). The second path is the one Richards merrily traipses down, putting the freaks and phoneys in comic brackets and performing a little dance around them. In Richards World, late-night brawls and party drugs are no longer the worrisome signs of social problems, or the even more worrisome occasion of tabloid tub-thumping, but the amusing cause of irreducible human mediocrity. Richards calls partying-on in Melbourne “punching-on” in honour of the CBD’s 4am blood-letting. And that’s the line he takes with all the incipient social dangers we’re made to feel alternatively spooked and morally exercised by: the worst he can see in kids popping E’s in nightclubs is their spacey self-regard – and the $8 bottled water; when he pops an E himself and stalls his car in the middle of the road he calls out for his fellow motorists to pull up and join the party going on in his own mind. – Every time he gets a reaction from his audience – and he got big reactions time and again last night – he waggles his hands in front of his chest like a seal that's lost control of its flippers. This is the equivalent of Corinne’s cartoon grin. Richards seems so delighted by the effect he’s having he needs to flap and swivel to stop himself wetting his pants.

Not every comic register is covered by the night’s entertainment, but in retrospect I’m surprised by how many are.

Grant and Richards are both expert social observers, hiding novelists’ talents beneath their jesters’ caps; what we’re laughing at when we’re laughing at Fitzroy mothers or punch-drunk bogans (up to a point what we’re laughing at when we’re laughing at Grant and Richards wearing the masks of their own comic personae) is a recognisable slice of social life transplanted in isolation from its usual (a)social environment, then fixed on until it collapses under the weight of its own particularity – one of the oldest and best types of humour in the book.

No self-respecting night of adult stand-up comedy can fail to explore some of the vast comic range that lies between straightforward sexual innuendo and complex misunderstandings between the sexes. The very bald Sammy Harrison, who follows Rossi, tells of a fancy dress party his girlfriend suggested he go to in a turtleneck jumper – as a circumcision. After Harrison comes Tommy Little, who goes for a less baroque penis joke: given one genie-in-the-bottle-type wish, what would his stoner brother grant himself? “A massive c*ck that shoots laser beams.” However the prize for most analysable sexual comedy goes to – you guessed it – Corinne Grant. Next time you’re breaking up with a guy, ladies, says Grant, forget about telling him “There’s nothing the matter with you, it’s me,” wheedle out of it a different way, tell him “It’s not you, darl’ – it’s not me either – it’s them.” To see why this one’s funny you’ll have to go and see Corinne do it live, as you should her whole routine. To get the flavour of the "it's them" joke, imagine her pronouncing “it’s them” in a tone of breathless eye-popping paranoia. Serious-minded analysis: isn’t the deeper point here that, objectively speaking, it often is “them”? Don’t you, ladies, bust up with us (or we with you) because there’s something about us (you) that won’t sit with what they will say and think?

There are also lots of fairly predictable jokes about Frankston and the Western suburbs – what you might call the “humour of social contempt”. At their best they can express a sort of inverse warmth towards the object of their disdain, but normally they're a straightforward expression of Schadenfreude: they're cheap and mean and one-dimensional and we laugh at them because of that not in spite of it. Richards, as I say, takes pleasure in parading the personal mediocrity of the famous and that’s about as close as the night gets to satire; in the end making a sharp moral point by sticking sharp comic wedges systematically between glossy appearances and grimy realities would dispel the air of amiability he and Grant rely on to allow us to enjoy ourselves without thinking too much. Satire in the full aesthetico-moral sense of the term is a weapon against a thoroughly cruel, hateful or absurd world and the unspoken suggestion from Grant and Richards is that the nastiness of the world is simply too piecemeal to warrant such a savage approach.

Grant and Richards draw us into their humorous point of view because they’ve both found the happy medium between satire in the full sense (the satirist’s philosophical sense of the radical disparity between the ideal and the real) and the septic horseplay of Rove, Hamish and Andy et al. If full-blown satiric metaphysics is something Australians have never had the nerve for, in the present day and age they’re as far from it as they possibly could be because they’re so at ease with the wilful gormlessness of Rove, forever grinning in the mirror chamber of his own ironies. In the mirror chamber, snark and Schadenfreude are not two among many comic moods as they are for Grant and Richards, they're what the whole aesthetic form is permanently lurching towards. One of the reasons we need institutions like the Comic’s Lounge is because mainstream comedy has much too much time nowadays for scripted exercises in seeming more knowing than the next guy; the latter represent a contraction of aesthetic possibilities for comics and their audiences alike; they depend for their attraction on an identification on the part of the audience with the snark-merchant’s easily-won sense of superiority, not, as in Grant’s and Richard’s routines, on a hard-won ability to see the social world – now from above, now from below, now from a variety a side-angles.

That’s not to say there wasn’t a sort of abrasive point to all the good-natured sniping. Coming away from the Comic’s Lounge on a night like last night, you do feel as if some of the received ideas of Australian social life have been made to unravel. The moralistic hypocrisy or sheer corniness of the way we talk about family values or problem teenagers or the quiet joys of motherhood have been skewered. The clichés have been drawn out of their hiding-places in the open-air right in the middle of public life and been blown away by the breeze of sheer high spirits. Perhaps we always knew they could be. Did we ever take them with the seriousness with which their purveyors in the political or media arenas pronounced them? Though we didn’t, the moment when they collapse in a heap is an exuberant one all the same. We hoot and howl for joy, we gladly "give it up " for Grant and Richards - for making possible this spring cleaning of the chamber of thought and speech. The question worth asking though is whether, when the houselights go up and the rest of life remains, we'll go back to accepting all the snark. And, just as importantly, will we go back to imbibing all the plastic-leaden rhetoric that the snark distracts us from but can never truly defy?

27 September, 2009