Briggs began his career as a rapper, but these days you’re just as likely to find him in a writer’s room as you are a recording booth.
Over the past five years, the Yorta Yorta man has served as a writer and actor on the sketch show Black Comedy, ABC drama Cleverman and satirical news program The Weekly. On top of that he’s also penned the children’s book Our Home, Our Heartbeat and founded Bad Apples Music, a record label devoted to championing Indigenous artists. On 22 August, Briggs will discuss all this and more in conversation with YouTube sensation Nats What I Reckon at Sydney Town Hall as part of Vivid’s 2021 Ideas program.
Also up for discussion will be Briggs’ latest TV credit: a job writing on Disenchantment, the animated sitcom from Simpsons creator Matt Groening. That gig would have been a big deal for any writer but it felt especially momentous for the self-professed “Simpsons nerd”.
His most cherished possession, in fact, is a Simpsons script from the show’s season six glory days. Here, Briggs tells us how he got his hands on that priceless piece of memorabilia, as well as the story of two other important belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
I don’t care about my laptop. All that stuff lives in the Cloud and Dropbox anyway. I’m not super duper attached to stuff.
But I’ve got a Simpsons script for the episode Sideshow Bob Roberts from a table read from the 90s. A friend of mine, Josh Weinstein, was a show runner on The Simpsons and sent it to me, which is pretty neat. Anyone who knows what a Simpsons nerd I am will understand why that’s one of my prized possessions.
And that’s how I ended up working on Disenchantment with Matt Groening – through my friend Josh.
My most useful object
You know what, my coffee machine. It’s a La Marzocco.
I picked it up in 2017. I actually got it off Gumtree. I bought it off this girl who was moving to New York and obviously didn’t want to take her machine with her. She worked as a barista, and she had this coffee machine at home that she never used because she’d make coffees all day and then come home and look at this thing in disgust. So I got this basically brand new machine for super duper cheap. It was probably the best deal I’ve got in my whole entire life.
I make my coffee first thing before I do anything else, it’s my morning routine. I’m properly addicted. But I’ve had to pull up [on my coffee consumption]; I can’t go over two a day anymore. Coffee’s my thing though, I live for it.
The item I most regret losing
At the moment, I can’t find the commemorative bottle of whiskey that I got when I was in Dublin in 2019. I poured the bottle myself at the Jameson distillery. You put your name on it, and then it’s “your” bottle, and they log the details so it’s all connected – so should anyone in my family go to the same distillery, they can see that I went there.
I recently moved house and lost it in the move, I think. I’m one of those people that if I can’t find a thing, it really fuckin’ gets on my nerves and it becomes a project for me. It could have been a regular bottle of whiskey and it would still piss me off. Like, I should have this, where is it?! But I know I must have left it in a box or in a bag somewhere, like a dummy.
