Stand Up Comedy-One Night Only

Welcome to the Melbourne Comedy Festival and thanks for dropping by. I can’t see you too well, what with the lights and everything, but I’ll assume the hall is full. That fits into my feeling of paranoia. I’ve always assumed that people are following me. Unfortunately, I’ve got low self esteem. So I assume these aren’t very important people. But please don’t take that as an insult. See I also suffer from a fear of upsetting people.

I’m part of the meek population. We’re the ones that God says will inherit the earth. But being meek, we’ll feel overwhelmed with the responsibility and say to God “No actually, if you don’t mind, you can give the Earth to someone else. We’ll just stay here and stare at our shoes.”

I have to admit that I’m a bit nervous about this as it’s my first public performance. You tell yourself these jokes in front of the mirror but when you start laughing at them, you convince yourself you’re mental. That stops you laughing and then you get depressed at how fat you look and start to notice the tuffs on your chin that you forgot to shave.

Blokes shouldn’t really look at themselves in mirrors. We’re programmed to think of women as good looking, so staring at yourself can be a little unsettling. Girls on the other hand are happy admiring other girls, which is just as well because blokes like looking at them doing it.

They make you fill out a form before you can take part in this comedy festival. It asks loads of personal questions for reasons that have to be evil. Why do they need to know your mother’s maiden name? Are they trying to check whether they dated her in an earlier life, so as to avoid embarrassment later?

I had to answer that question about eye colour. As I was standing in front of a mirror telling stories to myself, I took the opportunity to check. Guys only know three colours. Red, Blue and Green. We think Peach and Orange are fruits and that Magenta is a porn star’s name. I figured my eyes couldn’t be blue or red, despite all the booze and lack of sleep. So green they must be. Imagine my surprise when I looked and saw that they were mainly white!

But enough of the observational stuff. What’s been happening in the news? Well I see that poor old Charlton Heston is dead. No doubt the anti gun lobby are currently trying to snatch the rifle from his cold dead hands. They’d do well to remember one of his most famous quotes. “Guns don’t kill people. It’s the little bullets that come out of the guns that kill people”.

Sage words indeed, but that’s no surprise given the biblical characters that Charlton played down the years. His gun totting attitude got him into a lot of trouble on those sets though. He tried to get them to rewrite “The Ten Commandments” so that when Moses is expelled from the land of Egypt, he retaliates with a blast from his legally held AK47 assault rifle. And he caused more trouble on the set of “The Greatest Story Ever Told” when he tried to slip a rifle under his John the Baptist tunic so as to blow Salome’s head off instead of his.

Charlton is a big hero of the religious right in America, which is ironic because his most famous role was a vindication of evolution. Except that “Planet of the Apes” suggests that apes evolved from men and not the other way round. By the way, did any of you find that one of your early sexual experiences was to fancy the female ape in Planet of the Apes? Still bothers me that one.

Americans are weird about their guns. Just because a document written 230 years ago says “We uphold the right of all men to bear arms” doesn’t mean you have to stick by it now. If that was the case, Italians would still think it was OK to marry horses and England would still think it ruled most of the world. OK maybe that last bit is still true, but the yanks are on dodgy ground if they are relying on old documents. I mean there were a lot of misprints in those days. What if the revolutionary American army was short of men and wanted to enlist trained grizzly’s from Yellowstone national park (Imagine Yogi and Boo-boo in military fatigues and you’ll get the picture). Jefferson turns to Washington and says “We better write this down”. But somewhere in the process “We uphold the right of all men to arm bears” gets screwed up and before you know where you are, you’ve 300 million guns and defenceless bears being shot at. As Alanis Morrisette would say, “Now isn’t that ironic”.

Talking of ironic, I’ve been looking around Melbourne lately. You guys have a great City. But you’re a bit boring with the names. How many dead white men can there be? But the Harold Holt swimming pool in Malvern makes up for this. What delicious imagination you need to call a swimming pool after someone who drowned. Harold was Prime Minister of Australia in 1967, when he mysteriously disappeared at sea. Calling a swimming pool after him would be like Dallas opening the “John F Kennedy Memorial Rifle Range” or Buckingham Palace launching the “Princess Diana Memorial Driving School”.

Harold may well be enjoying the irony because many people believe he didn’t drown at all but was picked up by a Chinese submarine and whisked back to Beijing. But I prefer to think that he’s up above, arguing with God about how he’s too meek to inherit the earth. Last week Charlton Heston arrived in heaven. St. Peter said, “what did you die off?” To which Heston replied “A Tuesday”. St. Peter didn’t laugh as he’d heard that joke from every dead Irish person since 1850.

“What killed you?”

“The Big C”.

“Right” said St. Peter. “You can share with Harold Holt. The same thing happened him in 1967”.

You’ve been a great audience, goodnight.