Cricket comedy duo Sam Perry and Ian Higgins take the The Grade Cricketer to the USA

Sam Perry and Ian Higgins have spent the past decade skewering Australian club cricket culture as The Grade Cricketer. Now, as they explain in between ‘champing’ SHANNON GILL, they’re taking their creation to New York.

The Grade Cricketer has gone from cult social media joke to packing out Broadway.

“I thought that we’d be doing the Weekend magazine, but this is fine … I guess,” deadpans Sam Perry, one half of The Grade Cricketer.

Chatting to the boys behind the wildly successful skewering of club cricket culture is not a linear exercise.

Perry and co-conspirator Ian Higgins slip in and out of the TGC persona so comfortably that punchlines jag in late and take your off stump when you least expect it.

Using ‘The Grade Cricketer’ pseudonym, Twitter jokes based on the absurdity of emotional investment in playing a silly little game has led to a decade of books, television, podcasts and live shows.

Their satire is specific to the futility of playing at grade cricket level with the tantalising slithers of connection to the professional level, yet its appeal is more universal.

Holding up a mirror to their own cricket experiences has exposed the fragility of male ego like few others have ever articulated in this country. They’ve picked up legions of fans and unintentionally taught a few important lessons with humour.

Now the cult heroes are undertaking their most ambitious project yet; hitting Broadway.

The Grade Cricketer has gone from social media jokes to a travelling live show.

Perry and Higgins are currently packing their bags for New York where they’ll perform live alongside Indian cricket royalty Ravi Shastri to coincide with the Twenty20 World Cup visiting the city.

Amazingly, they are on track to sell out the historic 1500-seat Town Hall theatre.

“Once we became aware that part of the World Cup would be played in New York we started trying to figure out if we could go because we love the city,” Perry says.

The promoter that handles their successful live shows in the UK has US contacts and soon the venue was booked and tickets were being sold.

That this could happen in a previous cricket outpost seems mind-blowing, yet Higgins says it was a calculated risk.

“Based on our own analytics, America’s quickly becoming our second biggest demographic, which I’m sure would be true for a lot of cricket as well,” he says, backing up the ICC’s rationale for heading to the US.

Aussie, English, Indian expats and World Cup travellers will all mix in New York for a show like they’ve never undertaken before.

“Every time we go overseas or play our shows at home, it’s pretty clear who the majority audience is and the subjects they like,” Perry says.

“But here we’ll have Indians, Pakistanis, Australians, English, Americans and ICC officials. We need to be ready if India beats Pakistan, or if Pakistan beats India.

“One is great for ticket sales, the other is probably funnier. Ravi Shastri will be shooting looks at us from the side of stage.

“We will investigate security.”

Perry and Higgins are taking their partnership to New York as part of the Twenty20 World Cup.

Like most things that grow in cricket, The Grade Cricketer’s expansion in recent years has much to do with India.

The idiosyncrasies of grade cricket fields in Sydney may seem as far culturally as geographically from the Indian cricket experience, yet Higgins says the evolution has been organic.

“We’ve always known that if you can reach India then the ceiling just becomes so much higher purely because of the population,” he says.

“I don’t think we’ve really changed our style at all, I think we’ve just become more educated in global cricket and specifically Indian cricket. Their successes and their hardships, not just in cricket, but in everyday life.”

The evolution of the podcast has taken it into discussing current issues in world cricket as well as anyone, without losing the irreverence that first endeared them to fans.

Higgins thinks the changing demographics of India have helped in striking a chord.

“There’s something like 65 per cent of the population of India under the age of 35 and their experience is different to their parents and grandparents,” he says.

“Many speak English and have a global outlook, so there’s a better understanding of our sarcasm than people here might expect.”

In a cricket-mad country they’ve found a youth niche along with ripe targets.

“The audience (mainly) enjoys us taking the piss, possibly because it’s comparably less easy to do that from within India at the moment,” says Perry.

Which means that the phrases that have infiltrated the Australian lexicon are now doing the same in India.

Even if you aren’t a regular listener to the TGC podcast, you’ve probably heard terms like ‘Alpha’ and ‘Champed’ that they’ve popularised like among many others.

Perry and Higgins with former Australian batter Simon Katich.

An alpha move in the TGC-world is a deliberate attempt to undermine someone else’s position through feigned ignorance, such as pretending not to know someone’s name.

Being called ‘champ’ is the condescending function of that.

Then there’s ‘circuit’, ‘pipes’, ‘rig’ and many more.

Bringing these phrases from the cricket field into the vernacular, they mercilessly satirise the ridiculousness of one’s social status being determined by the grade of cricket they play.

Which makes it even more hilarious that these two on-field battlers who knocked around in every grade of Sydney grade cricket where you pay for the privilege to play, are making a living out of their one-time lowly existence.

“We couldn’t believe guys were getting 50 bucks a game back then, and now I pinch myself that we’re making more than a dollar-a-run from grade cricket,” Perry says.

“I’ve actually just broken even,” Higgins chimes in.

Perry and Higgins decided to toss in careers in corporate affairs and law four years ago to make The Grade Cricketer a full-time concern.

They have an office with a studio in Melbourne, employ a producer and have just hired a business manager. They are by no means moguls, but they’ve made the dream viable.

“We have tried to set up a robust business and that side of things is something we’re really proud of. It’s just that it’s less interesting to people for whom TGC is an escape from the everyday travails of life,” Perry says.

Sam Perry and Ian Higgins at the Allan Border Medal.

That they’ve gone full-time has not signalled selling out. The TGC’s demographic of young males would be a natural fit for wagering companies advertising, yet they’ve resisted.

“There are lots of opportunities to make a lot of money short-term, but we’re more interested in trying to keep doing this thing we love for a long period of time, which actually involves saying no to lots of things,” Perry says.

The issue of longevity also informs their creative future too.

In an age of Tik-Toks, reels and bite-size content, The Grade Cricketer is happy to go against the grain. Whether it be interviewing administrators or rock heroes like Tim Rogers, their palette is expanding rather than contracting

“We’ve been advised several times by industry experts that our often two-hour-long podcast should be broken up into five 25 -minute shows because you can sell more ads,” Perry says.

“But we do want to make sure all our work that we’re putting out there still has some substance to it and some creativity.”

That might be more books or it might even be documentaries.

The idea of taking the TGC comedic style and applying it to bigger and sometimes weightier concepts holds significant appeal for the duo.

“Being able to interview like Michael Holding for an hour about the experience of Afro-Caribbeans in the 1970s in England is much more interesting to us than a Tik-Tok collaboration,” Perry says about the things that they’ve found most rewarding.

The one thing they won’t lose is the sensibility that started the whole thing. As we discuss the summer ahead, Perry suggests Higgins and I have met before.

“It’s Shane isn’t it?,” Higgins shoots back.

I’ve been Alpha-ed by the best in the business.

Originally published as Cricket comedy duo Sam Perry and Ian Higgins take the The Grade Cricketer to the USA