Cal Wilson: ‘It could have been me’
Cal Wilson talks about disrupting the boys’ club of comedy, the explosive success of her friend Hannah Gadsby and her ominous connection to Eurydice Dixon’s murder.
Stand-up comedy has never been a career for the faint-hearted.
A thick skin and sharp tongue are vital appendages for anyone trying their hand at a profession where aggressive heckling is par for the course.
So it’s understandable that after more than two decades in the industry, Cal Wilson is as bulletproof as they come — not that this was always the case.
“Essentially what you’re doing when you stand onstage and talk about yourself is saying, ‘Please accept me and love me,’” Wilson tells Stellar.
“And if people don’t, you have to learn to go ‘OK, well actually that doesn’t matter. This is the truth that I want to tell.’”
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For 48-year-old Wilson, the fact that she also had to break through comedy’s glass ceiling made her swift rise to fame that much sweeter.
“Starting out in New Zealand, you’d walk onstage and there’d be a kind of perceptible ‘Oh.’ Early on I did think about walking away because it was a boys’ club, it was hard, and there’s no HR department in comedy,” she says.
“But if I go then there’s one less woman onstage. Plus,” Wilson adds with a laugh, “now it’s too late to learn another skill.”
Growing up in Christchurch, New Zealand, as the youngest of three, “I loved performing, but I was quite shy,” says Wilson.
“And I realised if you make people laugh then you don’t have to have a proper conversation. So that kind of defence mechanism really turned into an asset.”
After falling in love with acting in high school, Wilson joined an improvisation team that ended up taking out the 1994 World Theatresports title in Los Angeles.
More improv and stand-up gigs followed, before Wilson cut herself a deal: try comedy full-time for five years, and if she failed, give up and get a job in advertising. It was a back-up career that never proved necessary.
Wilson cemented her comedic status in the 2000s, when she diversified and became a stalwart of Australian television. Wilson’s regular appearances on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Australia, Rove Live, Spicks And Specks and her “all-time favourite TV experience” Thank God You’re Here would earn her fans across the country.
Since then, there’s not much she hasn’t tried her hand at — radio hosting, podcasts and even the creation of a children’s book titled George And The Great Bum Stampede.
She’s performed to critical acclaim multiple times at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Montreal’s Just For Laughs Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and this year was included in the Netflix comedy special Comedians Of The World.
It’s ironic given Wilson’s new show Gifted Underachiever, which she’ll be debuting at the Adelaide Fringe Festival this month, is based around the idea that Wilson feels she hasn’t done as well as she could have in certain aspects of life.
“My husband is a primary school teacher,” she says.
“And the mum of one of the kids in his class described her daughter as a gifted underachiever, which I just thought was brilliant. It’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card! So [the show is about] me reaching my 40s and realising I still haven’t figured out how to do all these things properly.”
Unperturbed by naysayers claiming women aren’t as funny as men, Wilson’s favourite motto stems from fellow Melbourne-based comedian Milly Thomas: “The question isn’t ‘Why aren’t women funny?’ The question is ‘Why don’t you find women funny?’”
Wilson sighs. “It’s just that some people have a learnt resistance to finding things that women say of interest,” she says.
“And the more outspoken you are, the more people are annoyed by that. There’s definitely gendered harassment that you don’t get as a man. You don’t get your physical appearance commented on in the same way, or get physical threats to you in the same way that women do.
“It’s amazing what some people are happy to say to another human. But at the end of the day, you’re the one onstage who has the microphone and people came to see you, not the drunken dick at the bucks’ night.”
The only way to continue changing the face of the industry, argues Wilson, is through strength in numbers.
When friend and fellow comedian Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special Nanette went viral last June, Wilson was “blown away”.
The show, in which Gadsby shares intimate details of her experiences with sexism, homophobia and assaults over the years, was hugely successful internationally.
“People respond to authenticity,” says Wilson. “And Hannah was so courageous, showing people her pain onstage. It resonated with so many people [who] have felt ‘othered’ or like they’re misfits or outcasts or have been treated cruelly because of who they are.”
Around the same time as Nanette’s success, emerging comedian Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered as she walked home from a gig in Melbourne.
The horrific attack sent shockwaves through the community. “Everyone was broken-hearted,” says Wilson.
“I didn’t know her personally, but I had friends who knew her and it’s just gutting because we all felt... I certainly felt that could have been me at that age. I’ve walked home from gigs before.
“Women are made [to feel] responsible for their safety in a way that — ‘Well, you shouldn’t be walking in the dark, you shouldn’t have worn a short skirt.’ But it’s not our behaviour that’s caused the violence; it’s the perpetrator’s, and the responsibility is solely on that person.”
Now at such an established point in her career, Wilson, who lives with her husband Chris and son Digby, nine, in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine, isn’t scared of getting a little political.
“For a while I was happy to tell stories that didn’t mean very much,” she reveals.
“But in the last few years I’ve kind of gone, ‘Well I’ve got this platform, and things do need to change, and if someone else can feel like they’re not alone in having this experience then I’ve done something useful.’
“Because for me, comedy is about connection. That’s all we really want as people, to be connected, and to feel accepted. Of course you can tell a joke about anything, but I think you need to ask yourself whether you’re making the world better or not. Are you making 50 per cent of the people in the room feel like shit?”
Cal Wilson is touring her new show Gifted Underachiever nationally from February 25. For tickets, visit comedy.com.au.
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