Wil Anderson and I are sitting outside a South Melbourne cafe, our ears burning in the sun. We’re here to discuss his mammoth year of multiple tours – but the ears of other comedians might be burning too.
I’ve suggested that Nanette – Hannah Gadsby’s subversive 2017 show, which became a global hit as a Netflix special – has put pressure on comedians to create something profound and altruistic. If not a life-changer, then it was at least a game-changer.
Anderson agrees – but reckons it’s just the contemporary equivalent of when Eddie Izzard toured Circle and suddenly everyone thought you had to talk about Star Wars and jam; or when Bill Hicks recorded Revelations and the topics de jour were UFOs and government conspiracies.
“What you’re seeing is people suddenly thinking, ‘I have to tell the story about the day I had the brain tumour’,” he says, “but it’s missing the fundamental point, which is that it’s not what you talk about but how you talk about it.”
Anderson might almost be at a professional disadvantage right now, being a white, middle-class, straight male with little grist for the mill.
He laughs at this. “I mean, sometimes it helps when you get arrested.”
This year, Anderson will tour three shows across Australia, having cleared the decks by quitting Triple M’s Hot Breakfast. He’ll juggle Wilegal, about his arrest at an airport in 2017; his improv show Whatchu Talkin’ Bout WIL?; and Wil-Informed, which covers issues including climate change and men’s changing roles in the world. On 20 January, he’s also taking part in a Victorian bushfire appeal – a comedy gala also featuring Gadsby, Judith Lucy, Nazeem Hussain and Joel Creasey among others.
If there’s a common theme to Anderson’s output, it’s his ability to dismantle something to understand its inner workings – whether through standup, his books on pop culture, or the ABC TV show he helms about the advertising industry, Gruen.
Take Wilegal. He could have used the show to have the last word on an embarrassing scene on a plane, which escalated when he needed to pace up and down to relieve his osteoarthritis. Instead, he holds up a 36-hour window of time to the light and examines it from every perspective. “I take each minute detail – what I was wearing, what was in my pockets – then put them back together in some order to be comedic,” he says. “It tells a bigger story of how we all have our own ways of interpreting the world.”
Perhaps it’s because Anderson initially studied journalism – at the University of Canberra – that he seeks answers where he might simply put punchlines. He was accepted into the intern program at the Canberra Press Gallery, reporting for the Australian Financial Review, before realising his heart was in standup. For a son of dairy farmers, it was a big announcement to make.
“People look at comedy now like it’s a job,” he says. “Mine was the last generation where it was like running away to join the circus. I was the only person in my family to finish school and suddenly I was going to tell dick jokes for a living. The irony is, 25 years later, journalism’s nearly dead and comedy’s thriving.”
The most successful comedy adapts to the times, he says. It’s something he discusses with curmudgeonly comic Marc Maron on Anderson’s podcast Wilosophy. Maron thinks that by using words that cause offence to whole groups of people, comedians just marginalise themselves by limiting their audience.
“There’s this argument at the moment about the death of the larrikin, but comedy is reflective of our times, and so as times change it’s right that comedy can become outdated,” Anderson says. “People go, ‘What would Bill Hicks or George Carlin do today?’ They’d be brilliant comedians because they’d be challenging both sides.”
Most of us soften somewhat with age. We’re not as competitive and we learn empathy, if we were slow on the uptake. I wonder if that poses a problem to comedians, or if it brings interesting new perspectives. Anderson can’t resist a metaphor about Radiohead, who he thinks willingly lost some of their fanbase post-OK Computer in their mission to delve more deeply into ideas. He says he’s similarly more eager to examine complexities, despite the fact that comedy works so well in absolutes.
“Steve Martin said it well in Born Standing Up: he said it’s hard to joke about cancer once you’ve lost a friend to cancer. But does that mean you can’t talk about cancer again? No, you just find a way to do it that’s more cathartic.
“I didn’t get into standup because I thought it was an easy job. Standup comedy is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle: whatever works one night might not work the next night. Or society might move on, or circumstances might change and your joke isn’t funny any more. Part of the process is having to relearn all the time. If you feel defeated by that then you’ll feel defeated by comedy.”
His podcast Wilosophy, while not funny ha-ha, has many comedians as guests, and as their peer Anderson manages to coax out startling vulnerabilities by sharing his own, in a quest to unearth their philosophies on life.
In one episode, guest Andy Lee turns things on their head. He tackles Anderson about being the only person Lee has ever had a lasting grudge against – for Anderson’s persistent jokes, during his hosting of ABC show The Glass House in the early 2000s, that targeted Hamish and Andy. It’s a long and difficult conversation, and admirable for it.
“I’m now thinking about other people I’ve met along the way who I can have that conversation with,” Anderson says with enthusiasm. “Well, you make a lot of jokes in your life!”
In the past, he says, he defined himself by the things he rejected. “I think that’s common in entertainment: ‘I’ve never been to a premiere’, ‘I don’t go to the Logies’,” he says. “Now I’m trying to define myself by what I’ve made and what I like. The podcast has that attitude to it.”
For that reason, Anderson says, he’s not about to invite Andrew Bolt onto Wilosophy. Which raises the question: did he have a strategy in mind when working on Hot Breakfast alongside the controversial Eddie McGuire, in the event that he found himself in a landslide of headlines one morning?
“My fear is always more that I would say something that I’m not proud of, than anyone that I would work with [would],” he says, deftly turning the specific to the general. “I thought, we’re going to have some conversations – but as I’m in the studio, instead of screaming at the radio, I can address them. If you believe in something and you don’t believe you’re perfect, you can have a conversation about something all day.”
• Wilegal opens at the Art House, Wyong on 11 January, and runs at Melbourne International Comedy festival (MICF) from 27 March–5 April. Whatchu Talkin’ ’Bout WIL opens at the Comedy Store in Sydney 14-25 January, and runs at MICF 8-19 April. Wil-Informed runs in Brunswick Heads from 11-16 February, and at Adelaide Fringe festival from 3-15 March. The Stand Up for Bushfire Relief comedy gala takes place on 20 January at the Palais theatre in Melbourne, in support of the Victorian Bushfire Appeal.
