The Laughter Clinic
The Laughter Clinic Podcast brings a refreshingly different approach to mental health education. Your host Mark McConville, is an Australian professional Comedian of 25+ years who also has a Masters Degree In Suicidology from Griffith University. Mark delivers you evidence-based self-care strategies, curated research insights, and meaningful conversations that inspire, educate and entertain.
The Laughter Clinic
Chatting with comedian Mike Van Acker. From the origins of the Brisbane comedy scene to building connected communities via trivia.
This week I chat with comedian Mike Van Acker and we take a trip down memory lane talking about the origins of stand up comedy in Brisbane and touring road trips. We also explore how Mike enriched his comedy career by running multiple trivia nights that keep people entertained and connected.
• from open mic to headlining, the early days of stand up in Brisbane
• lessons from the golden era of Australian stand-up
• being a good MC and the art of stagecraft
• bombing, crutches, and wanting to be better
• travelling comics and customs shake downs
• building trivia nights and community mental health
• writing fair, interesting questions that people care about
• the success formula to creating a good time for trivia goers
• raising boys, mobile phones, and scrolling entertainment
• fitness, sobriety, and reinvention
To follow Mike Van Acker visit: https://www.facebook.com/triviatribe
If you enjoyed the episode, please share and subscribe
Website: www.thelaughterclinic.com.au
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thelaughterclinicAus
"If you or someone you know needs support, please contact one of these Australian mental health services. In an emergency, always call 000."
Lifeline Australia
Phone: 13 11 14 (24/7)
Web: lifeline.org.au
Suicide Call Back Service
Phone: 1300 659 467 (24/7)
Web: suicidecallbackservice.org.au
Beyond Blue
Phone: 1300 22 4636 (24/7)
Web: beyondblue.org.au
Kids Helpline (for people aged 5-25)
Phone: 1800 55 1800 (24/7)
Web: kidshelpline.com.au
MensLine Australia
Phone: 1300 78 99 78 (24/7)
Web: mensline.org.au
SANE Australia (complex mental health issues)
Phone: 1800 18 7263
Web: sane.org
QLife (LGBTIQ+ support)
Phone: 1800 184 527
Web: qlife.org.au
Open Arms (Veterans & Families Counselling)
Phone: 1800 011 046 (24/7)
Web: openarms.gov.au
1800RESPECT (sexual assault, domestic violence)
Phone: 1800 737 732 (24/7)
Web: 1800respect.org.au
Headspace (youth mental health, ages 12-25)
Phone: 1800 650 890
Web: headspace.org.au
13YARN (Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander crisis support)
Phone: 13 92 76 (13YARN) (24/7)
Web: 13yarn.org.au
Music by Hayden Smith
https://www.haydensmith.com
Welcome to the Laughter Clinic Podcast with comedian and psychologist Mark McConville. Bringing you practical, evidence-based self-care strategies, the latest research in mental health, along with conversations that inspire, educate, and entertain. This is the Laughter Clinic Podcast with your host, Mark McConville.
SPEAKER_06:Mike Van Acker. Welcome to the Laughter Clinic Podcast, my friend. It is so nice to have you here.
SPEAKER_02:How are you going? Mark McConville. I'm good, mate. Lovely to lovely to be here. Thank you very much for the invite. And I've got to say, about time, I've been looking at the list of people going through, going, okay, well, I'm at least as funny as him. Not as funny as Ellen, so I'll take that. But yeah, when is it my turn?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, well, a and how long we've known each other as well. I say to people that you're one of two comedians that gave me career enhancing advice right from the very start. You I say to people all the time, the best advice I ever got, Mike Van Acker, when I very first started, get good at MCing, mate, and you'll never be out of work.
SPEAKER_02:And do a lot of it, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:And I do tons of it now, corporate. Still true.
SPEAKER_02:Still true.
SPEAKER_06:Mate, it is, it is. And the other piece of advice that I was given was from Greg Sullivan. May I know what that was? Ditch the red shoes at Right Some Jokes.
SPEAKER_02:I do remember that about your early days. You would bring a briefcase. Oh yeah, I was serious. And um serious about it. Yeah, and we all just assumed there was cocaine in that briefcase.
SPEAKER_06:Well, it was a big briefcase.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, but it was just a handheld voice recorder. Yeah. I do remember the red shoes, and if it helps, I wore bright blue ones for a long time. There you go. Yeah, I didn't that they don't help, do they?
SPEAKER_06:No, they do not help. It helps to have jobs, it helps to have jokes, people.
SPEAKER_02:It really does.
SPEAKER_06:Mate, a question that we ask all the guests right at the start is centred around the saying laughter is the best medicine, right? Now this is a saying that's been around for over 3,000 years, dates back to big b biblical times, and now we have modern day research.
SPEAKER_02:You know, that actually backs it up.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, supporting the health benefits of physical laughter and the psychological benefits of your sense of humour as a coping mechanism. So when you hear the term laughter is the best medicine, what does that conjure up for you?
SPEAKER_02:Well for me, there it's obviously there's a lot of truth in it. Is it the best medicine? It's in the top couple, isn't it? Right? Because I think we've actually overcomplicated human health. And I think sunshine, exercise, time in nature are hugely important. And along with that comes all the natural human emotions that we have, a big one being sense of humour leading to laughter, crucial, right? And and the very process, the very fact that people show up to watch live comedy because of what it does for them, there's your answer right there. No one's, you know, sort of showing up to watch well, I suppose people go watch theatre to feel sad, but there's a lot more people going to comedy clubs than there is going to theatres. Uh it's a cr it's an amazing skill that we have. There are, particularly in social media now, there are millions of views going to things that make people laugh. Make people laugh, yeah. That's every answer you need.
SPEAKER_06:And it's incredible to think like this, uh, you know, they we talk about four different styles of humour and one being aggressive humour, laughing at the expense of someone else. And we've turned it into a form of entertainment.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_06:You know, like funniest home videos.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, fail reels.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, all of that sort of stuff. My favourite at the moment is Carnage at the boat ramp. Oh, I haven't seen it.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, it's I I obviously get what it is. Yeah, oh yeah. It probably does exactly what it says on the tin. Pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much.
SPEAKER_06:Mate, so when I start when I started back in 98, you were already going. You know, you were already going and you started pretty much stand up.
SPEAKER_02:When the sit when the sit-down started. Yeah. So 92, 93, whenever that was. And I geez, I was like young, had a baby already. My daughter was had been born. I think my daughter was six or weeks, six or eight weeks old when I did my first gig. And I was the first five-minute comedian to turn pro in Brisbane. Right. In the new era. Because there was stand-up in Brisbane before the sit-down, there's Bonaparte's where Jimmy Pulos and Keith Belcher and those guys were way back in the day. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:What was that one down near the Kedron Brook? Can you remember where I'm talking about?
SPEAKER_02:Do you mean Brentley Theatre Restaurant? Sorry? Do you mean Brentley Theatre Bentley Theatre Restaurant? It was a theatre restaurant more than comedy. Yeah, yeah. And Dirty Dicks over at uh South Brisbane that that came and went a little bit.
SPEAKER_06:And they had stand-ups. That's where Jim Jimmy used to do stand-up.
SPEAKER_02:No, Jimmy used to do stand-up at Bonaparte's in the valley, and you'd have to ask Jimmy for sure, but there was a small comedy club circuit.
SPEAKER_06:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and it was I think my understanding was it was that style of comedy that was old jokes dressed up.
SPEAKER_05:Right.
SPEAKER_02:You know, don't take my wife, please. And a lot of the the you still see shit comedians doing it today, taking an old joke and trying to pretend it's their life.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, there was that. And then but when the the sit-down guys showed up in ninety I think it was ninety two, they uh basically made it a thing. They made it a thing. And that only happened, I don't even know if you know this, that the sit-down comedy club, the snug harbour at Dockside, approached the sit-down people and said, We want to do theatre sports, and they looked at the stage and said it's too small for theatre sports, why don't you try to stand up? So it was an accident.
SPEAKER_06:I must say that I am so grateful that I started at a time where I got to experience that stage. Because any any older school comics in Australia that got a chance to work on the sit-down stage when it was at Dockside, Snug Harbour down there, that little sunken stage, hundred and it only sat what, 150 people that room, maybe?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. There'd be a lot of people listening, never been there. And it, as you say, a sunken stage with the audience on kind of two and a half sides of you. So it was like a natural amphitheatre. Well, not a natural one, but it was an amphitheatre. And man, when you got the it I think they got 200 in there occasionally. The tiered seating, tiered seat.
SPEAKER_06:No, that would that was the key, wasn't it? You know, you had the immediate audience in front of you, nice and low. Yep. And then three, three or four steps up to a raised section. Raised section, and it was just oh man.
SPEAKER_02:And that was intimate. Like you were you'd be smashing them there, like and the person, the furthest person away from you in the audience was fifteen meters or so. So it's really immediate, you know. So I remember sitting on the steps one time before I I think I was a five-minute comedian, and looking at the a support act who's only doing twenty, and thinking, if I could just do that, if I could just be that good that I could do really well for twenty minutes. And that at the time as a five-minute comedian, that was so far away from my reality that that was an incredibly lofty goal. And the thought of being a headliner and getting out there and doing it for 40 minutes and being the dude, being the guy, that was unfathomable to me.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I know. And so I'm curious because when I started in '98, I would go down there and I would watch guys like yourself, you know, Fredo, Andrew Nason, Paul Brash.
SPEAKER_07:Yep.
SPEAKER_06:But there was also this string of international, uh sorry, interstate headliners that would come through, you know. So like I was fortunate enough to see Shane Bourne come through when he was going at it, you know our dear friend Dave Grant would come through, you know. A lot of these guys would come through and you'd sit there and look at them and go, wow, that that's the benchmark. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So when you started, did you have a similar sort of Yeah, but what I saw was what I think was in a lot of ways the golden era of Australian stand-up really was of that of that time. Because and I learned to MC and got good at MC because the sit-down's business model was that they didn't have enough homegrown comedians. So they would every week import, or every second week as a minimum, but often every week, import a big name from somewhere else. And that would be so that'd be the guys that cut their teeth on DGen and the big gigs. So Anthony Aykroyd's coming through. Oh, really? Yeah, and Ross Daniels and Elliot Goblet and Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:I remember yeah, Elliot Goblet. And Steady Eddie would have been tripping around and he came in in the early days too, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But he kind of bypassed the comedy club era and just uh stage and kind of went straight to Megastar.
SPEAKER_05:Right.
SPEAKER_02:So I remember one night at sit down, I've been doing it for a couple of years, and I'm on next, and Steady Eddie drops in and he goes, Can I get up? And they go, sure. And they put him on before me. So he gets up, he's only going to do five, and of course he's steady, and he doesn't doing five minutes. He's not doing five minutes. Have you ever done five minutes? I don't think he has now. So he tells We love his steady by the way. Yeah, yeah, good on you, mate. But he tells every joke he's ever fucking heard or written. And then after he's just smashed them left and right around the room, because that's right at the that's peak steady, right? Where everyone is just the it guy. Yeah. And then they go, here's Mike. Oh no. Oh god. And and that that's part of when a big name crashes a lineup, you whoever's on next gets it. Just too bad. You know. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so we saw the the the the big names, the the TV generation of standard comedians, even names like uh Graham Pugh, I don't know if you'd know, but he was he was huge. And yeah, all these guys would come through. And it meant that it bred a really solid group of guys that could compare a show really well because we did it every week, right? It was always a home growth. So Andrew Nason, myself, who were the other good ones? Brashy did a lot of comparing back then because there wasn't a lot of headlift. So a whole bunch of guys came through. And then though, we'd get say Dave Grant, who was one of the great mentors to Australian comedians everywhere, the late great Dave Grant, and he would come in and go, Listen, if you're gonna MC, if you're gonna MC a show, you gotta do it like this. And he he would teach technique. And I know you and I have huge technique nerds, right? Um about the the craft of what we do. And that's actually I'm going to sound like an old person now, Mark, but that that's lost some DMs.
SPEAKER_06:I love it. I love it. I love that stuff. Yeah. You know, like I remember the fur my first experience of meeting Dave Grant was I was fortunate enough to be his support act. So I'd booked to do 20 minutes down at sit down, down at Snug Harbor, and it was the Thursday, Friday, Saturday night.
SPEAKER_03:Yep.
SPEAKER_06:And I'd I did my 20 minutes and I'd never met this guy before, you know, tall, looming figure with his big black leather jacket and stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I hope he had clean undies on because he would have checked.
SPEAKER_06:Well, mate, I got off stage and he came on on the Thursday night, he came up to me and he goes, 21 minutes, well done. Right? And so my brief was I had to do between 20 and 25.
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_06:Right? He goes, 21 minutes, well done. Yep. And I'm like, okay, didn't know you were the official timekeeper, but fair enough. And then I watched him get up there and just smash it, right? Friday night, as same thing. Got off stage, came up to me, 20 minutes, awesome work, punching it out, great. And I'm like, what is it with this guy? Right? Friday night, gets up, smashes it again. And then on the Saturday night, I did the exact same set, got up there, he comes up to me and he goes, 22 and a half minutes, mate. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And then he gets up there, smashes it, and then at the end of the night he goes, So do you want to go and talk comedy? And I'm like, Yes, I do.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, I do. Yes, I do.
SPEAKER_06:And so back then they put the comics up in the hotel, and we sat on the balcony of that hotel unit, and I was just a sponge for the amount of information that he gave me on craft and laughs per minute and all of that. And I'll never forget it, man. You know, I'm the comedian I am today because of a lot of people, and he's one of them. You know, you're one of them, but he's he's one of them. And it was like I talk about, you know, turning points early on in our career, you know, like when you think to yourself, I can actually do this for for a you know, this is this was a good decision. And I think for me it was Dave Grant saying to the comedy club runners in Sydney and Melbourne, get this guy to come down and start to do some gigs.
SPEAKER_02:Very valuable.
SPEAKER_06:What about for you? What was your do you have a turning point? Do you reckon?
SPEAKER_02:I see I was in a weird place with it because I turning point. No. I can remember the first time I got last, having not got last for months. Right. I was awful when I started. Awful. And uh for the first year or so, eight months or so.
SPEAKER_06:So how did you how did you I'm fascinated by this because we've all been in that situation where another piece of advice you gave me, which I uh which sticks with me, and I tell people this a lot as well. Same thing, Snug Harbor down there, I'd gone up on the Thursday night, smashed it, went up on the Friday night, did the exact same set, died in the arse. Right? Word for word. And I remember you coming up to me at the end of the night going, Do you know what went wrong? And I went, I can't remember, I don't know what what what happened. I was just a wreck. And and you said, How many people were in here last night? And I said, about 120. And he goes, and you said, How many people were in here tonight? And I said, about 30.
SPEAKER_02:Same energy.
SPEAKER_06:And you said you played to 120 tonight, and the audience just shit themselves. Why is that man yelling at us? Why is that man yelling at us?
SPEAKER_02:You and I used to talk about, uh and I'm glad this is a video podcast for but for anyone listening into the car, I'm pointing at my eyes with snake fingers and pointing away about giving people that really personal thing.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know, and even if there's 10,000 people in the room or or you know, say you're playing the lyric theatre and there's four thousand people there, yeah. Right, and you're supporting an international guy. If you are making meaningful eye contact with a person down the front, the people up the back can tell.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know? So that's always been a big part of what a term that comedians don't talk about, but you're a trained actor as well, Marky. So stagecraft.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Comedians say don't talk about stagecraft, but it's massively a thing about what we do. Watch Jim Jeffries look at his stagecraft.
SPEAKER_06:Stagecraft is so good and it's developed over the years. He is getting better and better at it. Yeah, yeah. What so when you when you were saying right at the start how you went those months without and you remember you getting your how did how did um how did you pick yourself up and and have that drive to keep going?
SPEAKER_02:I used to be terrified to do it too, because after the first time I thought this was gonna be easy because I'd done other performing. I've been a I I was a child performer, a child actor, did TV commercials and stuff or more, you know, like been around forever. And I'd have thought I'd be naturally good at this. I made people laugh all the time. And there was something about I was just very an a very immature person, really, was the thing. I was 21 or 22, but probably less mature than that. But chronologically 21 or 22. And I just had nothing to say to this room full of adults, and they knew it, and I knew it. Right. And it took a little while to kind of get a bit of an edge to it, and then you write one joke that works, and Greg Sullivan said to me one time, years later, but he said, if you've written one good joke, you can write a million of them. Just keep writing. And law of averages, you'll eventually write better jokes, and you stack enough of them together, and you've got twenty minutes, and if then if you craft that the right way, that twenty minutes of jokes becomes a twenty-minute act, which is not the same thing. So for me, uh I just had no alternative but to keep going. I don't know, I don't think I had a whole lot else going on in my life. I had a baby daughter at home. It was hard, I was trying to make money elsewhere, and I just I guess what it comes down to is I wanted it. And I'm pretty good at getting the things I want eventually. Yeah I'm not always a fast learner. I wasn't a f I I did my best to learn that. I was good friends with Fidelie or even then. Yeah. And we used to hang out a fair bit and talk comedy and whatever. I never watched a whole lot of comedy. Like the a lot of the the young comedians now, they'll go, Oh, in in this guy's comedy special, he talks about like I've to me, every time I watch a stand-up comedian do a great joke, that closes that door in my mind that I can't do a joke about that now because I will hear that joke when I go to write it. So I prefer not to see too many other comedians where I can. Um You kind of get subconsciously influenced. Yeah, you do, and it's very easy when you're improing or when you're doing that joke for one of their tags to slip out of your mouth. Yeah. And then everyone goes, he's stealing material.
SPEAKER_06:Or you can or you can't, you know, we're s looking at the world in a similar way, all the comedians, and you might c I remember coming up with something that I thought was brilliant. Greg Sullivan once again said to me, He goes, You can't do that. Paul Bradley's been doing that for two years.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:And I'm like But I just thought of it.
SPEAKER_02:And he goes, You may have, mate. You may well have, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:You know?
SPEAKER_02:Yep. So So I mate, I just kept going and I just wanted it. And then the turning points for me was I started doing guitar stuff and which was a weird thing for me, but I just had an idea for some song parodies and that lasted a few years. That was the basis of my first headline act, is that my act would go along like at a reasonable tr tu uh tra trajectory I'm trying to say. That's the trajectory. Anyway, it'd been going along pretty well. And then I'd put the guitar on and it would just take off. And I would leave to, you know, like I and I toured New Zealand finishing with the guitar stuff with playing playing the power station in Auckland and 1,500 people just going and you're like it's a like it's a a concert, you know. Hugely addictive, and it became kind of a crutch for a long time. And then one night I was playing at the Broad Broadbeach gig, mate. Broadbeach gigas have it.
SPEAKER_06:Was it Liars, but anyway. I'd forgotten about that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. I've well forgot it, blocked it out.
SPEAKER_06:It wasn't that bad. It was it was a bear pit. Yeah, it's going to be.
SPEAKER_02:I used to say know what you're doing if you're gonna play there. Not don't play there, just know what you're doing if you're gonna play there. And I by the end I won that all the time, but in the beginning I lost as many as I won at that gig. Yeah. And isn't that the worst feeling when you die at a gig and you've got to walk through the crowd, and especially if you're driving there with, say, the driver from the gig and you've just got to sit around all night. And the worst thing, and this has happened to me in the early maybe not you, maybe, but you'll sit there with the you you know, the guy, the other comedians, including the ones that have done well, and members of the audience will come up and say to the headliner, You are great, I love that, and then their eyes sweep across the group and they see you and they just blank you for a second and then see the people they like.
SPEAKER_01:Nothing to say. Not a thing. Either that or it's like um and you and you're all right too. You're all right too. You are you?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or or tell you what, you get it a lot as the MC going, have you ever thought about doing songs?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that's hilarious to me. You're really good. You're about you're as funny as some of the comedians.
SPEAKER_06:And I like to go, do you think? Oh, just a bit of education here, people. If you see an MC at a comedy club, they are a comedian.
SPEAKER_02:They're nearly always a headlining comedian. Yeah. That's right. So one night I'm playing my songs at the the Liars Bar at Broadbeach, and this thought comes into my head, I don't even like song parodies. Well, you're doing it. Yeah. Well, mid-song, mid-gig. I don't even like and I don't think I I think I did guitar one more time in my twice. Once at a festival show upstairs, and once when I was doing the ships and Fidel said, Um, take your guitar with you, they'll like the guitar stuff.
SPEAKER_01:So I did. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It's it's funny, it was a crutch. It was a crutch. Yeah, right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:And so when you when you stopped, because like how long what was that time period like that where you had the guitar and a few years.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, my early my early headlines were guitar stuff.
SPEAKER_06:And so how did you go from having it to not having it?
SPEAKER_02:I just stopped putting it-just stopped putting it in the car. Yeah, it was. It was because I go, okay, I need to write better stuff, I need to write spoken word stuff. And there's a lot of Brisbane comedy used to be a fairly ugly place, you know, and there was some pretty unpleasant people getting around it, and some of the leaders of the scene, some of whom are now reformed and nice guys, but back in the day, pretty bitchy little assholes. And so I'd copped it a heap for having a guitar, for playing guitar. Same as if a guy comes out and they're making balloon dogs, yeah, it'll be game on, right? They're gonna they're gonna go after them.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So I coped a lot of heat for that, and I was fairly unrepentant with it. When it's my show, I'll do what I want. But yeah, having moved away from that and getting into just sort of spoken word stand-up, it it's a different vibe, and yeah, I I don't miss doing guitar stuff.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Do you make me feel like I got out of it lightly with the uh comment about ditching the red shoes? Which is actually time, you know, very poignant advice, really.
SPEAKER_02:But not really, because he you look at people where would you want to wear, you know, and there's look at the what the people are wearing now. We got five minute guys who did a gig the other night, and there are guys that look like they just rode out of bed, right? There's a lot of that. Yeah, yeah. Uh Georgina Humphreys was there looking like she's on the way to I don't know what, but she is just glamour.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, yeah. Always glamour. No matter where you see that girl, she is glamour.
SPEAKER_02:But she's got her own thing going on with her own sense of style with it, and she dresses up for her audience. And I I I'm old school. I think you should at least look okay.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I like I like that as well.
SPEAKER_02:Unless you're a character comedian and and it sort of goes with your thing to be dressed like Jack Knight, uh, wears that army and it suits his character perfect perfectly well. Yeah, he's he's one of my favourite comedians getting around.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. He's very clever. Very clever.
SPEAKER_02:He's very clever and and that that madness that he has between his b behind his eyes when he's on stage.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know how much of that is an act.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I don't know him well enough. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02:I don't either, but I think he's great.
SPEAKER_06:Oh, he is great. There's no two ways about it. Yeah. You know, before I started doing stand-up, like in probably the ten years leading up to me actually giving it a crack, I look back and I, you know, I never thought about doing stand-up, but I think I look back and think about who I was influenced by, and it was like, you know, we had Eddie Murphy doing delirious and then Raw. You had Billy Connolly coming out with his black and white stripes and his big banana feet and Robin Williams, you know, dressing how he dressed and just going a thousand.
SPEAKER_02:He had the coloured shoes, didn't he? He had the coloured shoes, he did he did that to us.
SPEAKER_06:That's right. He did. He did do that to us. Well man. So did you ever when you were travelling around, did you you went internationally, like you said, in New Zealand. Did you ever go over to the States and do stand up over there talking about Roman World?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I've done little bits of pieces. I've done a couple of jump up spots in London when I was there with just with Andrew Nason. And bits and pieces in the States. I've been to New York a bunch of times, it's my favourite. And oh I can't remember if I just if I went to comedy clubs in Vegas or got up at comedy clubs in Vegas. I certainly went to them. It's an amazing thing going overseas though, because you go there thinking, well, I remember the last time I was in New York, I went to this comedy club and I sat there in the audience before the show going, Oh, I don't have anything to say to these people. You know, like what would I what what could I possibly have for the people of New York that they would find funny with their sophistication and you know, living in this city. And then I watched the first three comedians and went, I could murder these people. Let me have a turn. Let me have a crack out of it. Yeah, yeah, I can get these people. I can, yeah, smack 'em. And that that's the big thing I learned. The first time I went to New Zealand, I was freaking out, right? And Fidelity was with me and we went to the classic in Auckland. Yeah. Uh the classic being a famous comedy club in Auckland.
SPEAKER_06:Wonderful comedy club. Love the classic.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And they we're we're in the accommodation in in Auckland and Fidelity goes, let's go out. And okay, yeah, okay. And we get to I don't know if he did this on purpose, but we get to the classic. And we're on the next night, but not in that venue. Right, we're around a whole other place. We're at the power the powerhouse, power station.
SPEAKER_06:Which sounds like a great gig.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, power station. That was great.
SPEAKER_06:Wonder whatever happened to that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, don't know. But it was like twelve hundred, fifteen hundred seater, two tiers, a lot of people, man. And that was back when the the tourist and the visiting Australian comics they sold tickets, mate. We do every night for So it was just uh the bill was just you guys. There's two or not. Usually one local guy on who is normally pretty average. Yeah. Uh but I I did it with Peter Fox and Steph Torek one time. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. I've done did it three or four times. Peter Gross one time. Andrew Nason, I think, was there. I think Greg Sullivan one time. Anyway, how'd I get there? And oh yeah, so so fidelity's a classic. And I because I'm thinking, I've got what am I gonna do? I'm in New Zealand, it's a whole other country, right? And he comes up and goes, They're gonna put you on for five in a minute.
SPEAKER_06:In a minute. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Okay. So I mean that's a good thing about us is that we don't need to plug in a guitar.
SPEAKER_06:Mate, we're pretty user-friendly, aren't we? Plug and play.
SPEAKER_02:We've always plug and play. We've always got our tools with us, right? And if you're one of those comedians that I can't do it, I need an hour to get centered, then maybe maybe you need to get better at what you do, right?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Anyway, so up I go, and five minutes later I walk off going, Oh, okay, New Zealand. No worries at all. Um what I learnt then was you need to change your references. Yeah. So in Australia it's a bottle shop. In I think the UK, I think it's a liquor store. In America, I think it's an off licence, or I might have got those two around. But in the same way that you pick up a comedian here from Sydney or Melbourne, and they'll say to you, What's the crap suburb? Yeah. You know, what what what's what's the shitty suburb that we put shit on here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, so it's all about getting your references. Yeah. Yeah, local references. Yeah, local references. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, yeah. Was there a time overseas where you thought to yourself, you know, I'm a bit out of my depth here in relation to doing this gig?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but it wasn't it the gig, it was going through customs. I was in um going to Christchurch to do a breakfast gig the next morning, right? A breakfast gig? A breakfast gig. I'm doing a gig at a conference. I hate the breakfast gigs are tough. Didn't you do one this morning?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, yeah, but my yeah, the break, but the breakfast gig I did this morning was a laughter clinic, it was a mental health presentation, so I did a little bit of stand-up in it. Yeah. You know, but I'm talking for an hour and a half about m mental health and suicide prevention, you know. So yeah, l when it comes to comedy, less is more. Yeah, yeah. In in the context of that. But I've made a I think I sh every time I hear someone talk about doing breakfast comedy, I remember Fidelity putting me into a breakfast gig years ago and I had to do 15 minutes of stand-up for 22 lawyers.
SPEAKER_02:Oh yuck.
SPEAKER_06:No. 22 lawyers over breakfast at some gentleman's club in the city.
SPEAKER_02:That's not a gig. That's not a gig. You didn't like he he should not have sent you to that gig. He should have said, No, you guys, no, you can't have that. Well, so I'm I'm going to Christchurch, I'm flying there the day before, get to the airport, it's just me. I've got one little overnight bag, right? I'm doing you know. And customs. Sir, can you step this way? And they go through my bag and they go through my pockets and they go, What are you doing in town? I go, I'm doing gig. Where? This hotel, when? Tell 'em. Who's the booking agent? Tell 'em. They ring the booking agent, they ring the hotel, they for whatever reason they just are not buying what I'm selling. Don't believe that there's really a gig going on here. And they go out of their way to disapprove. They check my hotel accommodation, there's really a booking. They go through my bags. They did not search me, if you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_01:Fair enough. And for that I am grateful.
SPEAKER_02:Fair, yes. Good. I'm I'm grateful on your behalf. Thank you, mate. Yes. Um but they check my bag and everything really, really intensely and for like an hour and a half, and then I'm obviously there, I'm telling the truth. And look, the truth is I that was a stage in my life where I would from time to time smoke a bit, smoke a few jazz cigarettes, as my mate Richard Feidley used to call them. And but I was going to New Zealand and I'm not taking any, you know, across international. So there might there would have been some in me, but not in me the way that they would go looking for, but uh in my blood, right? But there was none, you know, in my bags or my pockets or anything. And they let me go. But I said to the guy, so what was that about? And he goes, Oh well as customs agents we always have a a project, a thing that we're looking for, and today it's people staying for one night.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:And he said, and we don't have too many people only staying for one night, so we spend a bit more time more time with you than we normally would. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But you can go. Wow.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. So that's new.
SPEAKER_01:It's stressful, isn't it? It really is.
SPEAKER_02:Even when you know you you're clean, it's it's like uh getting pulled over for a a breath test when you know you haven't had a drink for a week, but you still go, Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, you know, yeah. It's a weird vibe, it's that something in our in our makeup that we go, I must be guilty of something.
SPEAKER_06:Mate and and when you're in another country, you're at the mercy of their protocols and their systems.
SPEAKER_02:And for that reason I will not be going back to New York until things change over there, let's just say that. And I love New York, it's m my favourite city in the world. Yeah. New York, Melbourne, Brisbane. Yeah, in that order.
SPEAKER_06:Mate, I the the uh flying into New Mea, I don't know if you've done much flying into New Mea. And I was flown into New Mea to get on a cruise ship and m all the luggage has come out and my bag's nowhere to be seen.
SPEAKER_02:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_06:And then I hear this, you know, McConnell from flight blah blah blah. And and and they said your bag has been flagged, so you've got to come with us. Flag bag. And I'm like, okay. And like I've got a guy waiting outside to take me to the cruise ship and I walk into this little room and there's a stainless steel table in the middle of the room with my suitcase sitting on it. Okay. And two guys right wearing rubber gloves. Excellent. And I I just had a little bit of a you know bit of a clenching. A bit of a clenching. I started to freak out. And I said, What's the problem? And they said, Is this is this your bag? Yes. Do you have anything in the bag we need to know about? And I'm like, no, what what what is all this all about? And they said, Your bag has tested positive for traces of cocaine. Oh. And I'm like, You can't be serious. Right? And they've gone, well, it has. And so we're gonna search it, right? So okay. And I went, you go for it. There's nothing in there, there's nothing you need to find. You won't find anything.
SPEAKER_03:Yep.
SPEAKER_06:Right? So they looked, didn't find anything, obviously, packed and let me pack it all up. And I said, So where tell me, because there's none here, you've seen that there's none here. And then after the search, they said, Oh, we've traced it on it tested positive on the side of the bag and that handle.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_06:And I'm like, Rotto. So what do you you know, like the how what are we talking about here? And he said the tests are so sensitive that if your bag is rubbed up against someone else's bag or it's been touched by someone who's had it'll come up.
SPEAKER_02:I reckon go swab the baggage handler.
SPEAKER_06:That's exactly what I was thinking. I mean, seriously.
SPEAKER_02:Are you thinking about the way you pick up a bag to put it up on somewhere? One hand on the side, one on the handle. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a baggage handler, you might want a little bump to get through the date.
SPEAKER_06:I'd tell you what, I was freaking out of. Yeah. And then of course, you know, I was late for the ship, and then they wanted to know what was going on, and then just a quick drug stop, everything's fine. And it was just the whole funny box and dice, mate.
SPEAKER_02:Can you imagine saying to them, yeah, look, everything's fine. But did you know this part of my bag tested positive for cocaine?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm sure they they would have got out.
SPEAKER_06:They'd have loved it. Oh, they're pretty they're pretty stupid, all the ships.
SPEAKER_02:They really are.
SPEAKER_06:Hey, so just on the international thing before we move on, I'm curious, have you ever done a gig in a country where it's been a non-English speaking country and you've done an expat gig?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, what were you? Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore. With our friend Jonathan? No. No, Jonathan never once invited me over. There was a period where I worked in the nineties when I used to be cuter, Mark. And I know it's hard, hard to believe, I know.
SPEAKER_06:Well, Jonathan didn't wasn't doing them over that at that time, wasn't it? Wasn't it more recent?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he was, yeah. Yeah. But no, there was a period in the nineties when I was working for the Australian Tourism Commission, technically the Australian government, and I was doing gigs promoting Australia as a holiday destination.
SPEAKER_06:Were you a little Paul Hogan? Were you for the for the Malaysian market?
SPEAKER_02:I suppose in a strange way, but I was doing I was actually doing more sight gaggy stuff and magic and balloon dogs and stiltwalking and fire eating and unicycles and all those things.
SPEAKER_06:Well you did the whole lot.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I did that. But as part of that, they would also, when they found out I was a stand-up, they took me to a bunch of embassies and I would do shows for there and shows in some of the higher end nightclubs for expats. And and they really appreciate English speaking. English spoken word comedy.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, they they were good times, some some big shows. But as a consequence, I have no desire to go back over there now. Because I got it for free and treated really nicely. Yeah and the world I've discovered through my travels travelling with money way better than travelling without money. Traveling when you're poor is hard. Traveling when you've got enough money to at least stay in a decent hotel, much better. Highly recommended.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's my takeaway.
SPEAKER_06:Well, I've done both of those things, yeah. And I tell you what, you're a hundred percent right with that. So as you're tripping around, you know, doing gigs, before you we m talk onto your new ventures of the last ten years, I reckon every comedian has had a point where someone's come up to him after a gig and said, You've got no idea how much I needed that tonight. You know, like I've been going through whatever shit, you know, all that sort of stuff. Have you had experiences like that over the journey, surely?
SPEAKER_02:Uh lots of 'em. Um I less lately, because I I make myself less available to the punters now. Whereas back in the day I would I would enjoy kind of roaming among them and receiving the accolades, and I think I'm in a different place in my mind now where I don't need that. And I actually feel like I'll disappoint them where they'll be expecting that guy that they just saw gang bang, bang, bang, bang, and I'm not working anymore, and I'm just sort of I'm just Mike? Well, yeah, everyone has like you're I I know you we've been friends for a long time, but I also know what you do on stage, and what you do on stage is an amplified version of who you are the rest of the time. And sometimes when you and I talk and hang out, the stage mark jumps out while you tell a story, or for one line or whatever, and and that's the way comedians are, but hardly anyone is who they are on stage the rest of the time, you know. It's it's almost not quite a character, but it's certainly an amplification of who he ordin ordinarily are, you know. Uh so I I always think that the people that come and talk to you after the show, they're really hoping for a bit more of that guy.
SPEAKER_05:Right.
SPEAKER_02:And that guy's gone now, or is slowly evolving back. And when the gig's over now, I nothing good can come from me talking to the punters. I'm going home. Yeah. Right. I'm often in the car before the compare has say goodnight if I'm headlining. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. But I have had some very meaningful talks from people, and and often it's surprising how often it's someone who is in a wheelchair or for whatever reason dove has a some sort of a a challenge physically, they quite often will come and say hello and usually as part of that process make a joke about themselves.
SPEAKER_05:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Something I've noticed a few times. It's very unusual. Um I get that a lot in the other business that we're going to talk about in a minute, too, where people come up and they talk about how val valuable what we're doing is to them. Yeah. You know, it's it's easy to forget that what we do actually resonates with people and makes them makes them feel good.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. So, well, let's move on to that. So the other business that we're talking about is you've become incredibly sex successful at running numerous and not only running, but hosting numerous trivia gigs around South East Queensland. And you've been doing this for a long time. And and my writings I was trying to think the other night when you started doing it. Would it be when you were going you went through that I don't know how many years it was where you were actually booking the comics for when we were doing the Treasury Casino?
SPEAKER_02:It's around about the same time. It was, wasn't it? I had a comedy club empire that was four or five nights of comedy a week. Yeah. And that I mean I don't think about that much anymore, but there's a lot of guys around today that I gave their first paid gig to. Yeah, cool. Proud of that little moment of that moment in time, you know. Yeah, yeah. And that fell over when it did, and that was okay. But as part of that process, because I'd I'd sort of worked out that it's that whole mining thing where who's making money out of gold mining, is it the gold miners or the guys selling them the shovels? Um, the only time I really did very well out of club comedy was when I was running shows. Um But that wasn't the reason I started the trivia company. Started trivia because twenty-two and a bit years ago, the girl I was with at the time basically came up and said, We're gonna have a baby. And at that time I was a Road Warrior comedian, you know, so I would I weigh a lot. And I had got to the point anyway where I was thinking to myself, you know, adults don't get in and out of tarragos as often as I seem to. You know, why why am I doing this? Um that and the fact that some of the tours I were on were miserable, you know. Like I toured one time with ostentatious and Elliot Goblet. Oh that's a punish, right? Now, Elliot Goblet, Jack Levoy, he's a lovely man, right? But Sandy Goodman is a toxically adversarial person by choice, right? And I don't think he I even don't think he would mind me saying that because he didn't like me. Right. We didn't did not like each other. And I had two weeks in a tarago with this man, right? I worked with I toured with Phil Cass, comedy magician, legend of Australian films. Yeah, film. Yeah. You know, I did tours with local guys, Steve Allison.
SPEAKER_06:Isn't it weird how the the the general public would have this perception of three comedians at a tarago video for a week, they go back to the back of the battery?
SPEAKER_02:Well the truth is one time I was in a to uh Tarago doing a minds tour with Steve Allison and and can't think who else. But but we laughed our asses off for two weeks. Yeah. Right? And you know, the conversations can get deep.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Like very deep. Yep. And and also it can be just like you said, it could be three hours non-stop of just making each other lose their shit.
SPEAKER_02:It's very interesting, Mark. Uh knowing that we were going to talk about comedy, how many of my comedy memories you're in, right? So many of them. Right. And I don't know I mean you can always cut this out if you want to. But gigs, I think about with with you, the West Burley Bowls Club, where you were new.
SPEAKER_01:The West Burley Bowls Club.
SPEAKER_02:And they didn't exactly love you, but they loved me, and you were going, how did you do that?
SPEAKER_01:That was I do remember that.
SPEAKER_06:I do remember that. Yes, yes. But early days.
SPEAKER_02:I won't cut that out, but I was, you know, like also there's a gig How did you do that? There was a gig in Redcliffe one night where it was you, me, and Fredo, Fred Lange, great Australian comedian. You, me and Fredo, and Fred did very well, and I did really well, and you did really well. And I rang you the next day. And I remember saying to you something ostentatious and pretentious, and I'm sorry about that, but I'm the sentiment is true. I said something along the lines of now you're a stand-up. Now you you have like you showed me enough last night that you've got the skills, you've got the attitude, temperament material, all the things that make stand-up great. You hung it together in a way I've never seen you do before. And it was a turning point that night for me, but you probably don't even remember the gig or that conversation.
SPEAKER_06:No, I'm not sure. But I do.
SPEAKER_02:But when I we talk about going in a car to gigs together, I think about you and two words come to mind, and those words are Billy Jones.
SPEAKER_06:Oh man, what a favourite You know, it's just look, sing alongs in cars, uh just and if you're with someone that you you're just happy to just go, geez like this, I like this. Are you happy to sing? I'm happy to sing. And just melting it out in the middle of the night for I don't know how many hours.
SPEAKER_02:Uh driving home from Bundaberg one time, I think.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, and I've got to tell you, it was you know what I learned from that night? I actually learnt that I'd messed up a whole heap of Billy Joel lyrics. Yeah, too. That that that you're singing one thing, and I'm going, that's actually what that says.
SPEAKER_02:But it's funny, Billy uh that his song Summer Highland Falls, my brother Paul is a very good keyboard player. And he was at my house one time playing it that song on piano. And I'm realised, oh no, no, no, it wasn't that song, it was um Seeing the Lights Go Out on Broadway, Miami 2017. That song. Turns out I've been singing things phonetically that words that don't make sense. I thought they were words, but they weren't. Like that Ken Lee woman, remember her? Ken Lee, a dibba dibba dou. No, doesn't matter. Look it up, Google it. Oh, I got it. Um But yeah, I don't know if we're supposed to be critiquing Billy Joel's music in this part of this podcast.
SPEAKER_06:Oh no, look, it cracks oh look, mate, for a long time a friend of mine was convinced that Australian call in their song Things Don't Seem was singing Fang Sister.
SPEAKER_01:Fang Sister Fang Sister And I'm like, well, I can see it. Yeah, I can see it.
SPEAKER_02:Um to turn this back into a helpful bit of advice, my advice to anyone driving in a car and falling asleep through Spotify or I guess Apple Music, I don't know. Put on karaoke tracks. So you can sing your way And just sing it, man. Yeah, that's a good idea. Sing it. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Sing it hard, sing it loud, you know, sing like nobody's watching. Well, nobody is really if you're not gonna be able to do that.
SPEAKER_02:The guy in the car next to you probably is, but that's right.
SPEAKER_06:That is one of my I I I you know what, Mike? I really can't remember the gig. And I think we've I think you and I have had a couple of those Billy Joel moments. One I think was coming back from Toowoombra, I don't know what we were doing up there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Well, might have been the laugh garage at the golf club. Doesn't matter. I can't remember. Yeah, it's funny that I remember the drive and the thing, but not the gig.
SPEAKER_06:Same. Same. Because it was just, you know, yeah. But anyway, that's a good thing about I don't think that happens enough anymore. Like we used to do a lot of that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:You know, touring and and and like three or four comics in a car. And like, you know, we say, you know, it's a nightmare, but at the same time, it's bloody good fun, you know, like you're hanging out with your mates for a couple of weeks, you're going to do an APA gigs.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. You know?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's true. And you see cool stuff along the way. And even to be in a Tarago and drive from, say, Mount Isa up to, I don't know, Catherine or something, you just for that period of time you will see a part of Australia that most people don't get to see and watch the landscape change, and you really do get a sense of the how big this country is. You know, and a lot of people never get to do that.
SPEAKER_06:Oh, yeah. It's incredible when you know, because we've got people listening to this from all around the world, so we live in one state of Australia, Queensland, and we can drive for 24 hours north from where we are and not leave the state.
SPEAKER_02:No, no, no, absolutely. I don't recommend you do it.
SPEAKER_06:No, no, no, neither.
SPEAKER_02:And don't take the suburban hatchback if you do. Oh my god, the Bruce Highway. Anyway, so but I saw a lot of criminal tarragos, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Trivia, man, what a what a what a gift this must be to see the amount of people that you've brought together in communities. And how so how many actual trivia nights have you got running now?
SPEAKER_02:I run I run four. I have um various people that do shows for me for another three or four depending on the week, and some weeks I do five. The only thing stopping me actually from making the business bigger is it's hard to get people to run the shows the way I want them to be run. Because my shows are distinct and different to most trivia shows. Plus you're a comedian. Yeah, well that's that's our point of difference, is that everyone that works for me or with me is it used to be a stand-up comedian, but I've had to broaden that out lately to being a performer because there just aren't enough and it and whoever takes the job has to be available, commit to being available every Monday, every Tuesday. So there's no, oh, I can't do this one, I can't do that one, I need you 48 weeks of the year.
SPEAKER_06:It's an ongoing gig.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, if you need to go on a cruise ship or whatever for a couple of weeks, a couple of times a year, I can live with that. But to drop out and go, because I've got this gig down on the gold coast, it's a stand-up gig, then no. You know. So I got really lucky with that, where I found out that my girl was pregnant, I was a road warrior, that has to change. I want to be home for the new baby. So I looked around and I knew that trivia was a thing in Sydney and Melbourne. And I went down to Sydney, I went and saw a trivia show run by Haskell Daniel.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Senate comedian. Made an arrangement with him, bought his band brand to Queensland, bought questions from him, found a couple of gigs, and off we go, right? But along the way, man, I knew nothing about trivia. And I would go out there, just ask questions. But the people that came, they did know about trivia and they knew more than I did. So if I there was a mistake in the questions, and regrettably, with the questions I was buying at the time, there was often mistakes, and it would lead to this fairly ugly scene. And my whole thing was I did this to make money, I had a mic in my hand, I didn't care about the trivia. I cared about making a show of it. Uh, and over a period of time, and I've been doing it 22 years now, now I'm a huge trivia nerd. I know an enormous number, there's so much junk rolling around my head, Mark. There's so much crap that I know. But also I have distilled down in my mind, almost almost on a scientific kind of way, what makes a good trivia show, what makes it work. And the benefit for that for the audience is I attract people that come that generally I attract nice people. Like I've got very few dickheads at my shows, and I'm pretty good at encouraging the dickheads to not come back. I'll say to them, if that's the sort of thing that upsets you, this might not be the trivia night for you. I will sack players if they're gonna ruin the vibe that I'm trying to build. Um but what I what I've always loved about Triv is the vibe and the sense of community that we get. You know, they I I'm the leader of each gig that I do, you know, I'm in charge of it, but I'm also a member of this community, you know. And so people will come up and it's someone's birthday and we have this theatrical way of singing happy birthday to someone when it's their birthday. And people love it.
SPEAKER_06:What's the what's the longest What's the longest one that you've had running consecutively, do you reckon?
SPEAKER_02:Green Bank RSL is the first gig that I ever got. Uh it's now called G Green Bank Services Club. Yeah, yeah. And we started that first gig ever. So that's only about 2003, is it? Oh wow, okay. 2003. We've been there every Tuesday night since 2003, with the exception of about an eight-week period where we we weren't there. But otherwise ever and I did it for years and years and years. And then when I went off to do radio on FM radio doing Brecki, Andrew Nason, Brisbane comedian, he took it over, and that's still his gig to this day. I do I do once a month a show out there, but we've been there the entire time.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And most of our venues are longer-term venues. Yeah, uh, we build relationships with the people and with the venue. We hang in, you know, been there for a long time. And when we started, we were just reading questions off a clipboard, and now we're a multimedia show, you know. But the principle is basically the same. You know, ask people a question, make it entertaining, make sure the question is interesting. One of the creeds of the business is if you don't know the answer, the question should be interesting enough that you want to know the answer.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:See, here's the thing. I can ask you what's the capital of Venezuela, right? I can ask a whole room full of people. And some people will know it's Caracas and some people won't. Right? But no one cares. Right. Maybe one Venezuelan guy up the back cares because it's his homeland. But most people don't care. But if I ask you what board game did the Red Cross during World War II, what board game did the World Cross sneak in, maps, a compass, some money, and hide it in the board game and sneak it into prisoner war camps. That's interesting. People people go, who did that? The Red Cross did. What was the game? Monopoly. True story. You know, like and there's so much cool stuff in the world, Mark. Yeah, so much cool shit.
SPEAKER_06:I'm fascinated by the fact that you've got this community of people. There's I'm assuming there's a lot of varied age groups, like you know, like you see people doing comedy uh trivia on the cruise ships and it's all the old ducks sitting around in the you know, atrium and all that sort of stuff. But you know, there's been trivia gigs that I've been to on land where the the audience is incredibly mixed age-wise. Do you have a good age demographic? And on that, how do you cater for asking questions that span three different generations of people?
SPEAKER_02:To answer the first bit, yes, we get uh young people, but really I I have I'll I'll nurse if I get a twenty, twenty-five-year-old team, I'll nurse them along. I'll sneak up, I'll hand them give them a few answers, nudge them in the right direction.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:If the trivia is written properly, you've got some multiple choice in there anyway.
SPEAKER_06:Hey, just just while you're doing that, do you have to be rather secretive? Because I'm assuming some of the some of the trivia people take their trivia quite seriously.
SPEAKER_02:Some of them do. I try not to encourage that. I I work hard at researching the the shows. The shows take me about 15 hours every week to write, put a lot of time into them. Um but I'm using them four times. That's okay. But so man some people take it very like very seriously, and you go, okay, you need to relax, Mavis. So but the the actual shows themselves, I tend to focus it's between kind of 30 and 70, right? And those ages aren't as far apart as you might think, you know, like because if I do a music question from twenty years ago, the d 30-year-old knows it, so does the 70-year-old, or you know, there's a good chance, you know.
SPEAKER_06:I think for some reason the thing that pops into my head is the moon landing. If you did a question about the moon landing, you know, like would there be 20 year olds there going, We went to the moon?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, I don't know. But if you ask them, you know, what year was it? Some people know it was 1969, right? Some people won't. But if you say true or false, when the astronauts in the room well, when the astronauts from the moon landing came back, they had to fill out a customs declaration form. Everyone can relate to that question. Right. The answer's true, by the way, they did.
SPEAKER_06:No, she come on. They'd left the country. No. They left the company seriously.
SPEAKER_01:They left the country. They did it by going straight up. No, they did. How on earth did you find that out?
SPEAKER_02:No, the internet knows everything, mate. That's who who my respect is for, the pioneers of trivia who wrote, you know, like Sale of the Century, those guys, they wrote those quizzes out of encyclopedias. Books, yeah. Oh my god. Same as Brecky Radio Guys, Breakfast Radio Guys would subscribe to every magazine and it would arrive from the States three weeks old news, but they'd pretend it's happening right now because no one knows it isn't. There was no entertainment tonight, there was no internet, you know, like the through working in through the internet and through working in radio, I discovered that the newspapers used to decide when things happened. Because I would see things come through on the radio wires and no one would talk about it. And then four days later, because the uh the the the newspaper had this much space to fill, they'd run a story from days ago like it happened yesterday. True. Yeah. You know, they they decided it. Music used to be what the four radio stations in Brisbane said it was.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know, when um what what was um Justin Timberlake owns it now? The MySpace, when MySpace was huge. Right? And my daughter Rain would go, like Katie Tungstall, that's certainly uh see, that woman. Is that her name? Katie Tungstall?
SPEAKER_01:No idea. No, no, no, no, no, certainly.
SPEAKER_02:Don't matter. She'd go, oh yeah, yeah, she does the Hello Betty theme song or ugly Betty or whatever it was. I can't remember, I'm really making a dick of myself here on my references. But she'd said, I've been listening to her for two years. Right? Really? Yeah. How do you find her? You just find her. Where? On MySpace. Okay. So the internet opened up music for everyone, and there's people going, This is my favourite band that you and I never heard of, and we probably never will. Yeah. You know, like there's so many cool bands out there.
SPEAKER_06:I want to get back to the trivia, but just on the just on the radio uh breakfast radio, you stint in breakfast radio. One thing that always fascinates me, because me personally, I can't begin to imagine having to do this, is getting into a radio studio and you did breakfast radio, so whatever time you're in there, what, four, five in the morning.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, in there by five.
SPEAKER_06:The papers, whatever it is that's in the news that day, and there's the comedian on the panel being expected to go, you know, find the funny in this stuff. Yeah. At that hour of the morning, and we're gonna talk about it in an hour's time. To me, that just seems like an inconceivable task. And I know there's a lot of comedians out there that make a living doing it, but is it as hard as what it sounds hard, but I th I think you could do it.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Oh no. No, I I d like I I think look, the reality is, uh first of all, you're giving us a little bit too much credit because yeah, some of the current day stuff you're gonna write a joke about that day, but a lot of the show is planned the day before, and you've had the drive in and the drive home to write that joke, right? Right. So there's that. Second thing is a lot of the time the comedians in the show, your responsibility is to tag callers out. So someone rings in, tell us about the time that your granny fell over, and a guy rings in, tells a story, and your job at the end of the story is to just get just get a shot on it, right? And it doesn't have to be at the person, it can be any joke whatsoever, but just get a nice clean head out of something so that your anchor can go 97-3 and play a song.
SPEAKER_05:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Right? Uh to get them in and out. And that's that's a skill, but something I found quite naturally. And I think you could do that's what I'm saying, you could do that because I've seen you a hundred times when you're bantering with a doing crowd work and you're talking to someone and you need that one laugh and then go, folks, next performer. Right, it's the same thing. All you're doing is putting a full stop on the conversation.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So that was a skill that I had. Also, too, though, when you pick your stories that you're gonna talk about on air, you get to pick them, you know. So you pick the ones where you can see something funny in it. You know, you're not the news.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:She's in the next booth, the news reader. Yeah. Right. So you get to choose what you're gonna do. So that look, it's easy.
SPEAKER_01:Like Did you enjoy your time doing Brecky Radio? I loved being on the radio.
SPEAKER_02:There are certain things you get like the money was very good, and you do get free shit. You get invited to everything, the opening, it's it's actually interesting.
SPEAKER_06:Get to meet cool people, I'm assuming, coming into the studio, interviewing people. Hundreds of them.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. Hundreds of them. And I still now occasionally go, Oh, yeah, I interviewed him years ago, you know, and your sporting heroes and and Yeah. You know, people that you would never meet any other way. You know, like I I met Ben Elton, you know. Right. Yeah, and and uh just ridiculous people. Rick Astley from back in the day. I've interviewed him and Rob Thomas and like everyone. Yeah, yeah. Because but so is everyone that's worked in radio, because they're doing the rounds, man. It's they're they're on the they're on the machine and you're part of that machine, you know.
SPEAKER_05:Yep, yep, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So I mean that was great, but it's it was a it's a very close environment and it's an ugly industry, and the people that work in it are not always your friend, even though they will call you brother.
SPEAKER_04:Right.
SPEAKER_02:I'm a trusting person, so that bit me a couple of times. I've worked with some psychos as well, people that made my life very difficult and made it difficult for the show I was in to look good.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You know, that's the nature of it. Is that if you're on a radio team, you are counting on the other people on that team to want it the way you want it, to pull on the oars at the same way that you are, and you only need one person to be going through a mental issue or a laziness issue, and sometimes those two things are linked, and they can derail the whole thing, which is ultimately what happened to me at both of my radio gigs. Yeah, right. So I think my lawyers would like me to stop talking now about that.
SPEAKER_06:Right, okay, so we'll trip back to the trivia then. Let's let's go back to trivia.
SPEAKER_02:Nice safe ground.
SPEAKER_06:The the community that you've created, yeah, right? Like anyone that has heard me talk about, you know, the mental health stuff, and I've had different podcast episodes about social health and community and all this sort of stuff and intergenerational living and learning, you know, like this what's it, methodology? It's probably the wrong word. Where you have the elderly teach the adults, adults teach the adolescents, adolescents teach the youth, you know, like we look at those there's five blue zones in the world where people live to over a hundred really well, and one of the big things is community engagement. Is it you know, it's a big thing, and they there's five places Okina in Japan is actually the main one that would come up first if you did a Google search for blue zones. And there's three main kind of things they talk about. Diet is one of them, obviously reduced processed foods, sure, being active, you know, goes without saying. But community is the big one, and a lot of them have intergenerational living where you've got three and four generations of family living under the one roof. And it you know, when if you're a there's any grandparents listening that have got living with their grandkids, then it keeps you young.
SPEAKER_07:Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_06:And so when you've got this big group of people coming together for trivia, you must see the life come bring bre a breath of life coming into the elderly, yeah, knowing that they're sitting next to a table of twenty-five-year-olds or thirty-year-olds or whatever, you know, like it must it must be pretty rewarding to see 'em coming out every week.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're I mean, the number of people over the years that say to me, This is the highlight of my week. You know, I I only come out I only get to go out once a week and come to your show.
SPEAKER_01:That's cool, isn't it? It's really cool, you know.
SPEAKER_02:And when a venue say a venue needs a needs the space that we're performing in and they have to cancel one week. The disappointment in some of the players going, Really? Like, oh like I will be here the week after and they're going, oh yeah. And you can see them going, This is awful, you know? And I kind of COVID was a big teacher for me because prior to that I I think I took a lot of my life for granted and my life changed in a whole bunch of ways around COVID and the period immediately after. And I evolved into a very different person to who I was then. But from a business perspective, it was during COVID that I realised how lucky I was that these people left their homes and came to my crappy little show every Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever night of the week it was. And it made me realise then that I needed to love these people and I needed to get better at what I did. That I had to be better at writing shows. And I went from spending three or four hours to write a show to spending fifteen, fourteen, fifteen, twelve on a good week but you know of and like today this morning before I came in here, I've done this the show for this week I've done it twice. I did it Monday and Tuesday I've got two shows to go. I still worked on it this morning. I improved and tomorrow if there's any improvements to make and there's only one show left I'll do that. There's no substitute for putting the time in because you are touching these people and it must that must sound so absurd to some people going oh mate it's a trivia night a suburban pub. Yeah it is yep yep at its bones that's what it is but what it really is to me apart from the fact that I make a good living doing it is the fact that I am talking a language to these people that they all get at once because I'm attracting all these nerds that want to know cool stuff, right? And they're quite happy to be wrong about things right if I can show them something interesting. Along the way they're going to sit with their friends they can buy dinner if they if they want to do that. They can have a drink I've got people that get shit faced at some of my gigs right not that many but some and and their friends kind of and as the night goes on they start yelling out inappropriate crap because their third and fourth beer is kicking in. Yeah yeah yeah you know I got people that come with their parents and that's how they relate to their parents is that they catch up here a lot of a lot of parents and and progeny. Yeah. I couldn't think of the word for children. But yeah you know like I I get a lot of those people coming and and they sit together and hang out and along the way they catch up in whatever way they do but trivia is the is the vehicle for that.
SPEAKER_06:It's the conduit conduit is also the word yeah who's the vehicle and you know I I don't dismiss the power of it you know like you were saying about people going oh it's just the trivia to you know on the outside yes but when you when you do a deep dive into it I can tell you now from a mental health and suicide prevention perspective that is suicide prevention.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_06:Right? Because we live in a s we live in a time where we are incredibly connected tech by technology and yet so many people are lonely. Loneliness is an epidemic around the world it's constantly being spoken about and I know it sounds like a a doom and gloom statement but unfortunately it's true where loneliness can kill you. Yeah. Right. And all of the research shows that you know there's three different types of suicide prevention you know primary is keeping the population healthy and secondary is identifying people at risk and then managing and and tertiary is like managing those people and medications and hospital beds and all that sort of stuff. And all of the research from around the world shows that primary prevention works. Keeping the population healthy to start with a country that has had the most success doing this is actually Japan. They did it really they did a massive suicide prevention drive years ago. The study went for I can't remember how long it was now I won't say because I don't want to get my figures mixed up but I just do remember that they reduced their suicide rate in certain regions of Japan by nearly sixty percent and how they did it was by bringing people out and community engagement.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Is the Australian suicide rate going up or down?
SPEAKER_06:It's pretty stable actually this week the Australian Bureau of Statistics re released the figures for 2024. Yep we're usually a year behind in what we get out and it's only just come out so I haven't read the report but I'm pretty sure it's still it's around three thousand two hundred or thereabouts.
SPEAKER_02:Still still predominantly men? Seventy five percent of male we do not raise boys well in this country.
SPEAKER_06:It's nuts man yeah boys and men it's something I think we're actually recording this on International Men's Day. Oh happy International Men's Day mate. And to all the men out there happy International Men's Day the nineteenth of November I had no idea there was Yeah yeah and that's what I was talking about this morning with the council guys about you know supporting men and boys to speak up speaking up is manning up.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah okay yeah you know very interesting I've had occasion to talk with uh someone lately about the criminal justice system and it's just the ramification of the society we live in and I think the way we raise boys is broken. And but I also feel like the world will get better as some of the aggressive old people die basically. And then there's but we've got to do better raising our boys. And I'm really proud of the boy that I had raised because I I mean I got lucky with him no like but he's a quality human but I don't know if I did that or if I just got lucky.
SPEAKER_06:Well mate you you should take credit you know because I say to you know a lot of parents that at the end of the day yes your kids are you know they're their own people but they are a product of their upbringing and their people that so you should be incredibly proud of your young man mate I've got to tell you because you know like thing is though Mark what I always say is every parent gives their advice uh gives their kid their best advice possible right?
SPEAKER_02:I got one that listened. Yeah right so I got lucky there. Yeah so can't get him to trivia though is that right yeah when as a kid he used to come and he used to hand out the raffle tickets for the door prizes for me.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah and sometimes I still occasionally say as a joke hey Jake you uh you want to come to Trev and he goes uh got martial arts training yeah yeah he goes oh why did I meet you there I go oh you'll meet me there he goes yeah I go okay he ain't showing up no no no no and then when I get home again he didn't show up again as I said I'd meet you there I didn't say when the cheeky little that's pretty funny that thing about you saying about raising boys it the interesting thing is that I don't know if it's just boys you know like it's there's a really fascinating book I read recently and I urge any parent to read it if you get a chance it's called The Anxious Generation by a guy called Jonathan Hayt H A I D T and man what a fascinating read and the research this guy's done you know in relation to the childhood that you and I grew up with a play based childhood and you know discovery discovering the world and all this sort of stuff as opposed to you know a phone based childhood and neurodivergent all of that.
SPEAKER_02:No one was neurodivergent.
SPEAKER_06:Right. You know and bullying was rife when I was a kid you know but you just you didn't it was I I I never I never spoke to my parents about it. I never spoke to any teachers about it. I never spoke to anybody about it. You just dealt with it. Learn to be funny.
SPEAKER_02:That's learn to be funny. Yeah part of it having said that if I found out that my kid was getting bullied the way I was bullied I think I'd end up in prison. I think I would actually just in they would incur my wrath on behalf of young me as well. But yeah absolutely intolerable and it and how ridiculous that we in the seventies or eighties I think in your case I can't remember but how ridiculous that you should go to school and have the crap kicked out of you and not feel you could talk to anyone about that. That's insane.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah it was just yeah I remember I remember seeing a psychologist years ago and she said so who was your safe person? Who did you talk to?
SPEAKER_02:And I went No one Yeah me too.
SPEAKER_06:Didn't talk to anyone you know and it's weird that now you know you end up fast forwarding you know I was twenty eight when I started doing stand up to end up in a career that involved being on stage bringing joy to others.
SPEAKER_02:Yep yep it's all it's got to be linked in there somewhere. I don't know too many comedians had a great relationship with their dad. I know that you did but I don't know too many that did.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah it's weird isn't it okay so I know we got we we're on a time schedule I know you've got things you've got to go and do. So before we do wind up I do I do have a couple of things I would just like to say in rela ask you in relation to the trivia before we wind it up. Because I I do really believe that it is a fantastic way of bringing people out you know and bringing people getting people out of the house and connecting and that that sense of community is something that is we really miss in society now. And so kudos to you brother for bringing them out and so if there's anyone listening anywhere in the world wherever it is that you're listening and you're thinking to yourself yeah you know what maybe I wouldn't mind getting a trivia night going and getting my community out what would be your advice to those people do you reckon?
SPEAKER_02:Uh the easiest thing is actually just go to one that's already running but if you're going to run one yourself man that that's a whole different thing. There's that's a lot to that but I think trivia like I've I'm supplying currently supplying questions to a lady who's running trivia shows in Brooklyn. Really? Okay cool. Yeah so and that's a thing you know so they're they're and England of course invented trivia with their Guinness book behind the bar the book of records behind the bar that's how that started right is that right yeah you know that because you're a wealthy shit that is I really do know some crap.
SPEAKER_06:I warn I tried to warn you oh my God why do I like you know someone mentioned to me the other day about the blue whale right that I the that gag on that and I'm just like why do I know that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah why why do you know that?
SPEAKER_02:You know like David Attenborough he's got a lot to answer for that he really does you know so but yeah look to basically anytime you write trivia questions it's got to be something that will interest people right it's very easy to get into the habit of the the mental process of when you write a trivia question of going I want to trick the audience you don't ooh you don't you don't touch your microphone either you don't want to trick your audience right you never want to do that you don't want to fool them you don't want to trick them they're your customers okay one of the great truisms of the business that I run if I make people feel stupid that's very bad for business. Right. Yeah you go why would I go to that? I got 20 out of 60 I had a horrible time I felt dumb. I felt dumb yeah right so I want every team that shows up to get 45 out of 60 and go I'll be with there or thereabouts you know 45 out of 60 there's nothing wrong with that. And if it and I've built a culture at my shows where if you get to 50 out of 60 you've done really well and that's in the style of the the questions that I write but you want everyone getting 40, 45, right? So they feel okay about themselves.
SPEAKER_06:You know a real balancing act to do that absolutely to do that and yet at the same time make the questions interesting enough that the answer isn't instantly obvious.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So you don't want a team you don't want four teams getting 60 and with a bottom team getting forty. You know you don't want anyone getting much more than 5758 at the most okay but you don't want anyone in the 30s either and the the range of different people that you attract you know that you get people that are lovely right I I I know there's one guy I'm thinking of smart guy what works in IT knows stuff knows stuff does not know much trivia right he spent his life pursuing other things learning other things you know that's cool. But I've spoken I've spoken about other things and he's very knowledgeable he just has not absorbed the sort of stuff that they talk about just nerd fact based stuff you know and whereas yeah my brain soaks that up. Yeah so pros and cons of running your own trivia show? Oh look it's just you've got to attract an audience that's hard to do you know uh you've got to keep them once you get them and people are fickle and in in Brisbane you can throw a rock and find four pubs running trivia. Right. Right but I mean the difference is there I I okay I went to a trivia night not one run by my company a couple of weeks ago.
unknown:Oh my God.
SPEAKER_02:It was just awful.
SPEAKER_06:Was this a was this like a covert research operation?
SPEAKER_02:Uh sort of yeah it was more that it's like went out for dinner and along the way trivia was on and I won't say too much but the presentation of the show was okay like the actual the the way the questions were put up on a screen that was okay. Yeah but the host was just awful awful and I'm like what you're not even trying what are you doing so that so that's a bit of advice I give do not attempt this if you're a nerd that knows a lot of stuff attempt it if you're an entertaining nerd who wants to talk to people because the the show is not about the questions that you ask it's part of it but it's about you it's about you learning their names right going hey Glenn it's good to see you again you know you've got to learn and I got 160 people at some of my gigs I'm working on learning all their names right that's important it's about when this lady comes up and says I won't see you for a month I'm going to Tasmania to see my grandkids you go awesome I'll see you we'll be here when you come back a month later they walk in and when she walks in you better look her in the eye and go how was Tassie? Yeah you're gonna remember that staff. Oh you must have had so many people in this time these 22 years people that have been coming for repeat customers you must people get married divorced have kids grandkids you know bury loved ones go through personal tragedies and come into trivia like you said has been there Yeah mate I've been to a lot of funerals for trivia players you know really and some weddings um really yeah yeah okay yeah that's cool um seen all kinds of scandals through it you know like this table aren't talking to that table anymore because it turns out that this guy was sleeping with that girl from over there and they're both married to someone else and then both teens leave and yeah like amazing but it it's a mini community and communities do stuff like that. Yeah yeah yeah just inherent within the makeup of people is that every now and then someone's gonna jump the fence and go she's all right over there and she's gonna go well come jump the fence I'm up for it. Yeah and it's a microcosm of the of society as a whole.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah happening of trivia well mate you're doing a fantastic thing I reckon you know I really do from from a mental health perspective it's it's awesome and I love it. And the fact that you've made a career out of it is and you brought so much joy to people is I just love so much of it.
SPEAKER_02:Right okay so let's uh let's bring this home with what we call the feel good five okay the feel good five my friend okay do no fast of all our guests right answers can be as short as long as you like whatever uh so the first thing what makes you happy you do Mark okay no what makes you happy my dog Charlie I love Charlie my son there's a special person in my life that I won't talk too much about but yeah there what else? You know what the work that I do the you know I'm just gonna say this in the last four or five years I have reinvented myself and I'm the happiest I've ever been you look fit as and I'm is it is it because of the workout regime that you've been that was the start of it. Yeah and along with that if you see if you're serious about getting fit it means you're gonna look after your body which automatically means you will probably stop drinking and smoking cigarettes which I did. Yeah. Right? You'll probably stop smoking everything which I did quite a few years ago actually. Yeah. And and then it means I'm don't easy sugar although I'm sneaking a bit more chocolate back in than I used to but I don't do fast food anymore as I used to nearly every day. I can't believe I wasn't 140 kilos at the worst of it. But the best thing I did was got myself out of a toxic relationship and changed my life. Yeah right changed my life best thing and and everything that I've done since then this is the best version of me that's ever been walking around on the planet. Yeah. So I feel very lucky about that. I'm quietly proud of myself for doing that because getting out of that whole situation was ugly and difficult and I didn't think I could and that's also true for cigarettes and alcohol didn't think I could stop doing that.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah well that's the thing is you know like all that toxicity when it comes to whatever it is that in your life that's doing you harm, not good. Yeah making the break is difficult. Yep.
SPEAKER_02:You know and but I cannot speak more highly about keep get your body moving particularly for a guy right a guy that is not on top of his physical health right is a liability to everyone around him. You know so if you have people you love that are depending on you right and I'm not saying you've got to start running marathons but move your body you know and my life changed when I started doing that and everything else is a flowing from that.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah yeah yeah look after yourself fellas. Yep what are you grateful for today mate?
SPEAKER_02:Oh I look you know what I have to remind myself about this sometimes that I have a newish car. Yeah you're very lucky to have I got somewhere to live there's a tent city near my house mark. Really? Yeah there's there's sixth rate guys that started as one guy living in one tent and I guess and you're in like you're not out in the you're in suburbia. Yeah I am yeah absolutely and there but there's a tent city there and these same guys I see them most days because I walk sort of sort of near them walk on my dog. So I'm grateful for the basic things. I'm grateful that my son is healthy right grateful for the person I mentioned just before. Yeah. Grateful that I can make a living doing what I do and ironically I don't have to get up in the morning but I do. Alarm goes off most days at 5 30 grateful for the fact that I'm a quick thinker and active and ambitious and happy because for the longest time I was not happy. Yeah. So very grateful for that.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah well probably grateful for for the fact that you found the strength to do all of the to make all those changes.
SPEAKER_02:For so many years I slept next to someone and I was unhappy.
SPEAKER_06:There's a lot of people probably listening doing exactly the same mate and I'm grateful for our friendship. Absolutely I I was talking to someone about it the other day and I'm like you know aside from two or three guys that I went to school with people like yourself there's probably half a dozen guys in the comedy industry that are my longest friends because of the fact that I've been doing this for so long for such a long time. Yeah yeah so I'm very grateful mate that you're still here and we still get the chance it's always a pleasure it's always a treat when I rock up at a gig or I find out that we're working together. Because it doesn't happen as often as we used to.
SPEAKER_02:And honestly there are times when I show up and I look at the lineup who's on and I think oh my God I can't stand it. So when it's one of when it's you or you know there's a few people around that I go oh how cool. Yeah yeah yeah what are you looking forward to mate what's coming up that you're looking forward to I wonder if it's the same thing I'm thinking uh well it is cricket season so the ashes start on Friday I I will have a a look at that I've got some side projects going on in my life that I'm looking forward to about to start a podcast of my own based on trivia looking forward to that doing some work on my house Christmas yeah oh my daughter my daughter I'm gonna be a granddad is that right yeah in April oh congratulations man that's great yes I'm very excited about that so yeah I got um like I find it hard to look too far into the future I've never been great at that so episodically I'm my family's coming over on the weekend uh but also on Friday the the cricket starts.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah you know well when I when when I talk about this in the laughter clinic the live presentations and I say what are you looking forward to I get people to divide it down into three timelines. Yeah. What are you looking forward to in the next two days, two weeks two months? Right. Okay. You know that works it's pretty easy to do that way. Yep. I'm looking forward to the ashes but I uh I have not followed the cricket leading up to this so I have no idea who our team's gonna be I just know that it's Australia versus England and I'm excited about it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah England have got their best chance and they've had for a little while because two of our best bowlers aren't playing this game Josh Hazelwood and Pat Cummings right and I saw an English journey go this is our chance to jump Australia in their own backyard because they're two of the guys that have tormented us for years aren't playing but to them I would say do you remember the Mitchell Johnson series when he terrorized the boss he grew the big Dennis Lily moustache fast aggressive people aggressive yes I do remember that. That year he was our seventh picked bowler what? He was not in the team at the start of that series successive guys were unavailable they were injured injured injured injured and he plucked from obscurity had played test cricket but was out of the to out of the side they bring him back and he wreaks havoc so we have never traditionally relied just on our best two players admittedly one time that we we lost very badly when Glenn McGrath stood on a ball the morning of the Nashville I remember that twisted his ankle rolled his ankle heading there Edgewardson I can't remember and we were gone yeah right but we've had a some time to prepare for this we've known for a while Pat Cummings wasn't playing uh Scott Boland going to be great do you know who that is?
SPEAKER_06:Have you watched it I know yeah I know absolutely I'm the thing I'm interested in is to whether or not there's going to be any niggle because the last time that they played together correct me if I'm wrong was the controversial run out the run out yeah Johnny Bear so yeah no is that right have they they haven't played since together?
SPEAKER_02:I think that was the fourth test but I could be wrong about that. But that's the last series. And there will absolutely be niggle because it's the ashes you know of course and and it will be game one and if England get any kind of a sniff they'll get more aggressive with it. Yeah yeah but I who it it's actually very interesting because it's hard to say with any certainty if Australia's going to win 4-0 or it's going to be two all going into the fifth, you know so bring it on. I don't have time to sit and watch it anymore like I used to.
SPEAKER_06:It's it's such a shame isn't it because I know that you like myself you know I know when I came and shared a house with you when you kindly opened your door to me in a time of need. Yes. We watched cricket for days on it. We watched quite a bit of cricket. We watched quite a bit of cricket. But we didn't have much else to do. Well that's right now I do like the idea of you know it's it's weird because I like the idea of it sitting there watching every ball of a five day test. Never get it but I know I know that I'd make it to I'd make it to you know tea on the first day and I'd have my laptop out sitting on the couch with me.
SPEAKER_02:I don't I wouldn't make tenovers I'd have my phone out. Yeah because cricket is just not action that action packed yeah you know like by the very nature of it is you can I okay I used to go to the Gabba with my mate Kerry and who was uh had big responsibilities in his day job and he would sit there on his laptop and if the bowler ran into bowl his brother Ricky would go ball and Kerry would look up, watch the ball, watch what happened, watch them field it if they got some runs, applaud if they got a boundary Yeah. And then the bowler walks back and they throw him the ball and he gives a little bit of a rub and then he'd turn around because the fast bowlers they walk back a long way and then start running again and as he gets near the umpire ball didn't care he'd look up.
SPEAKER_06:Isn't it fun like he's probably you could probably sit there for a whole day and in actual fact you've probably watched 20 minutes of cricket.
SPEAKER_02:Well yeah like uh an NRL game there's only 20 odd minutes of actual play yeah and and NFL it's even less it's really yeah yeah gridiron whatever they you want to call National Football League American football I think it's 11 minutes of actual play in the game actual like 11 minutes all the rest yeah all the rest is I think I I did this as a trivia question I think it's 11 minutes. And I think NRL it's about 24 910's in my head for something as well but it's not much. It's nowhere near as much as you think.
SPEAKER_06:Wow you know so I know in the AFL they have time on for every quarter.
SPEAKER_02:Yep you know so to make up for stoppages.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah yeah yeah you know so well okay so the cricket yes we're looking forward to that and what's your me time Mike Van Acker when you want to switch off from the world what do you do?
SPEAKER_02:I walk my dog I hit the gym yeah the gym is very very restorative to me. Yeah beautiful yeah and and I do like just going and having a lie down for ten. You know don't actually quite don't very often fall asleep but I like to almost use it as a bookend because I don't sleep very much at night. I'm not a good sleeper at all but I can go have a ten minute period of flatness and come back and go, okay now I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna go mow the lawn, I'm gonna put the wa hang the washing up, I'm gonna do whatever I quite enjoy giving myself that ten minutes of just Are you an afternoon napper? I I love an afternoon nap if I can but I don't sleep well then either I'll wake up 15 after 15 15 minutes or so.
SPEAKER_06:For a long time I would have if if I had the opportunity I'd I'd set my alarm and I'd go 40 minutes afternoon nap. Yep. Right? Yep. One of the joys about being a comedian yeah yeah it's great it's great being us. But I started to do a little bit of research about it and apparently between 20 and 25 minutes is the optimum is it for an afternoon nap. Oh okay so anything over that apparently it affects you trying to get to sleep that night. That's asleep now okay whether that's the case or not I don't know all right yeah it's good to be us and um what is it that's made you laugh recently mate?
SPEAKER_02:I saw I a conversation I had with someone that I did I can't I could not a good example because I can't talk about it. But uh I've saw a couple of things on social that I just lost it at and saying there sayings that people have whatever no I probably don't have a whole lot that I can recognizably point to and say to people this because they're personal things with someone that I know and you're not welcome there. But so people can't go look it up but as a guiding principle there's heaps of funny stuff on TikTok and Instagram.
SPEAKER_01:The scrolling the i I just who doesn't love it it sucks me in me you know why because it's awesome yeah it's uh and this is something I used to have to say to people when they give me on your phone too much I'm going okay okay okay if you want me to be off my phone be more interesting you know entertain me yourself because otherwise do you know what I got here?
SPEAKER_02:I have got in this little device I got the comedic brilliance of some of the best creators in the world right doing fresh stuff I've got guys putting clips up of comedies from forever ago that I can watch there's amazing stuff out here. Are you kidding me? Of course I'm scrolling on my phone. You're a dickhead if you're not you know that's where the good stuff is and look I'll be the first to but I I've had to while I'm out driving with Jake in the car. Especially when he's younger okay he's rarely in the car with me now he's got his own car but back in the day I used to you just have to say then put your phone down, look out the window, see the world, participate in the world, you know? Yeah yeah and he would grudgingly do it but even when I was telling him to do that I totally knew why he was doing it because it's awesome.
SPEAKER_06:Well there's a balancing act of three things because there's a lot to be said for the entertainment aspects of it. We've all got sucked into the scrolling and because it's it's entertain you know a 30 second clip that makes you laugh who's not gonna like that. Yeah bang bang but yes you know looking at the world looking out the window and engaging in the world that you're driving past is important. And and this you know, like a fr a friend of mine's recently done this thing where she's initiated you come into her house, everyone puts their mobile phones in a thing at the uh front door so you can't look at 'em when you when you're in the house. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_02:I had a friend who did a similar thing, but they were keys in the bowl.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I know I never got invited to that party for some reason. Anyway. Mike Van Acker, it has been an absolute treat having you here today, mate. Thank you so much. And we will get you back in another point, no doubt. Uh, we might even have a chat after the ashes and see how all that's gone.
SPEAKER_02:Cheers, Mark, and good luck with the podcast. I love that you're doing this, brother.
SPEAKER_01:You're a legend, mate.
SPEAKER_06:Thank you so much for everything.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for listening. The information contained in this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended, nor should it ever replace advice received from a physician or mental health professional. Want more info? Visit thelaughterclinic.com.au. If you enjoyed the episode, please share and subscribe. Thanks again for listening to the Laughter Clinic Podcast with your host, Mark McConville.