Melburnians may bristle at the idea that their city needs a new landmark to embellish its more understated charms, but Pete Crofts is convinced it needs something very specific – a vast training centre and museum based around comedy.
Crofts, a former standup comedian, is planning to create the Australian Institute of Comedy, preferably in central Melbourne.
He invited Guardian Australia to his current home-cum-workplace, called the Humourversity, where he excitedly jabbed his finger at a detailed plan of a large glass building with ample parking. A statue of a grinning hippopotamus standing upright in a pond will greet visitors.
“Sydney has the Opera House, why can’t Melbourne have the comedy house?” Crofts asks, rhetorically. “The image of Australia will benefit as a result. We will look for a community that can see the value in what it means to have a sense of humour. It’s not only comedians who do comedy.”
Crofts, who is 71, has run the Humourversity since 1975. A small-scale version of the planned centre, it sits on a suburban road in the Melbourne district of Murrumbeena and is a slightly anarchic window into Crofts’ lifetime devotion to the art of comedy.
The Humourversity brings in money by teaching people to be standup comedians or, more commonly these days, speak in a raffish, jocular way in the world of business, through its public speaking course.
But the incredible interior of the place seems the principle reason for its existence – it’s plastered with pictures of comedians, books and blown-up quotes about comedy, and pictures of Crofts and friends in his comedic heyday. There’s a portrait of a laughing Jesus – “He was the world’s first standup comic, but people didn’t really get his stuff,” Crofts says – and a “coat of arms” which is, well, an actual coat with many arms.
There is more of this stuff, collected over a 50-year period, out the back, which we access via “laughter lane”. Crofts tells us we must bellow with laughter walking down this path, until we get to a shed with more than 800 boxes of comedy memorabilia, featuring books, posters and trinkets of Australia’s comedy past.
“I hustled and bustled all of this stuff at op shops,” Crofts says. “I don’t really think it belongs to me. It belongs to all Australians. I’ll have to go through all of it and work out what we want to display. The new centre will have a ‘mirtheum’. Or maybe we’ll call it ‘amuseum’.”
Crofts’ journey to being a leading aficionado of Australian comedy began at the age of nine, as a way to cope with the “molestation, bullying and bullshit” of life at a Catholic boarding school in Gippsland, eastern Victoria.
Crofts was teased over his wavy red hair – now all gone – and diminutive stature. After seeing Charlie Chaplin in the 1952 film Limelight, Crofts decided to become a clown-like figure. “It’s a defence mechanism, it’s a way of coping,” he says. “People said I was a natural comedian but I was a frightened, scared, lost young man. Seriousness – it’s the biggest sin of the century. If you take it all too seriously, you’ll go insane.”
Crofts’ parents became the first people on the street to own a television, enabling their young son to meticulously record the routines of comedians such as Lenny Bruce. Crofts started by telling jokes to passers-by at a chemist for 10c, before working in comedy clubs across the country and ending up in Sydney’s Kings Cross, where he spent a decade entertaining audiences.
His work brought him into contact with actor Jacki Weaver, as well as Bill Cosby – “I knew what he was on about because when we shook hands he tickled my palm,” Crofts says – but after a while he realised that the life of a standup was making him unhappy.
Instead of ditching comedy altogether, however, he became further enmeshed behind the scenes, setting up comedy nights and comedy training courses, and played a part in launching the careers of Russell Gilbert, Elliot Goblet, Rachel Berger, Tim Smith, Dave Grant and Tracy Bartram.
He began to think deeply about humour and its role in life, especially for Australians. “I was brought up in the bush and as a country kid the attitude is ‘you gotta laugh mate’,” he says. “That, in a way, is the very fabric of our nation. If you’ve got war and sport memorials, you’ve got to have one for comedy.”
Crofts’ dedication to his craft has seen him pen many books, which he darts around the shopfront to fetch, and picks out selected quotes. One of the Humourversity’s walls is bedecked with a complex flow chart explaining how humour and entertainment have evolved. He quotes Freud and Confucius to back up his argument that we’ve created a mirthless, constricted society.
We gaze at the complexity and I can’t help wonder whether you can really teach someone to be funny. Crofts’ response is to get even more intricate, drawing a line on a whiteboard that shows comedy as “interrupted thought”, with one comedic technique, involving a large swish of the pen, known as the “pendulum”.
Finally he says, “a comedian doesn’t tell jokes. They tell the audience who they are in a funny way. People want that human connection.
“If you can teach religion, you can teach comedy. You learn the forms, the formulas.”
We pick through some of the boxes housing his collection. There’s a stack of copies of a magazine called Pinkie, dating from 1926, with the promising handle of “Australia’s greatest laugh maker”. Sample joke: “Does she dance badly?” “Yes, if the chaperones aren’t looking.”
The collection is astonishing but it needs a home. Crofts is closing the Humourversity and hopes the new comedy institute will display the memorabilia, while others run the place. He feels it’s time to take a step back. But the passion for hilarity remains.
“These are more than just plans, I’ve outlined it step by step,” he says of the comedy institute. “The goal is to have a Humourversity in every city in the world with more than one million people. We need it. The world needs it.”
