Micallef’s curse: no pollies, no swearing

From his position at the apex of Australian TV Shaun ­Micallef says there are two types of laughs he won’t touch | LISTEN

Nine and ABC comedian Shaun Micallef.

From his position at the apex of Australian television, Shaun ­Micallef makes it clear there are two types of laughs that he just won’t touch.

“I don’t want to be a dirty comic and I don’t want to be a political comic,” the star of major programs on the Nine Network and the ABC tells The Australian’s ­Behind the Media podcast, available online.

Critics will say there are plenty of comedians on the ABC who want to do both, and far too often. Micallef makes jokes about politicians all the time, but when an audience reacts to a gag in a partisan way that he doesn’t intend, it just feels wrong.

“I will not be misinterpreted by an audience!” he says in mock indignation. “I suppose they choose what to laugh at and that’s up to them, that’s their right. It just sounds wrong to me and it sounds ugly, it doesn’t sound right.”

The comedian, a former lawyer who started out doing university reviews in Adelaide, will even cut a joke if he feels the response is too partisan.

“There might be a sense of satisfaction in having your views about a particular subject confirmed or endorsed or validated by the television. But that doesn’t ­really interest me. It’s kind of not what I’m there for.”

Micallef, speaking to The Australian the morning after the ­Logies, at The Star casino on the Gold Coast, is in a surprisingly ­serious mood. He is taken aback when I mention his promiscuity, until it becomes clear we are talking about his habit of appearing on multiple networks. But he then takes the gag and runs with it. A few years ago he was working for three networks “that’s when I was at my most sluttish”.

This year, the comedy game show Talkin ’Bout Your Generation has just finished a successful run on Nine (after it was resurrected from a previous incarnation on Ten). On the ABC, Mad As Hell will be back later in the year, a rare example of the public broadcaster committing to two seasons in ­advance.

Micallef is at pains to make clear that he is not criticising other comics, but in a way he is — the vogue for partisan political commentary, often delivered with a flurry of blue language, is not for him. So why does Micallef avoid being overtly political? “I don’t know,” he muses. “I guess I’m just not a political comic. I’m a sketch comedian.” In the US, The Tonight Show circuit has turned a select few into millionaires, but it is not for him.

“It’s just not my thing. I don’t feel that my opinion is worth any more or less than anybody else’s opinion. I think there are lots of journalists out there who know what they’re talking about when they write about what’s happening in politics. I’m not a journalist.

“I have gut reactions like anybody else, but I don’t necessarily feel the need to share or burden people with them. So therefore Mad as Hel l does not have a ­barrow full of agendas that we’re pushing along.”

Which, given the airtime the ABC hands over to Charlie Pickering, Tom Ballard et al, makes Micallef, who grew up in Adelaide to Irish and Maltese migrant parents, something of an oddity.

The TV host has a similar negative reaction to swearing, which has caused trouble for the ABC this year, when Ballard’s topical comedy program Tonightly called a conservative political by-election candidate a “c...”, prompting a complaint from Com­munications Minister Mitch Fifield.

Again, Micallef makes clear he is not commenting on the work of others. “It is just not my cup of tea. I’m protective of the power of those particular words when you do need them. My general rule is that if you can do without them, then you do. If the end line of the joke is a swear word and you take it out and there’s nothing there then it’s probably not a very good joke.”

Plus, he is on the public broadcaster in an early evening timeslot. “I know there are kids watching. I’d rather do something a bit more interesting.”

Given this stance, when a senior politician phoned several years ago to complain about a sketch, he wasn’t expecting it. “It surprised me because we deliberately picked this particular senator, former senator now, who is a head- kicker and can look after himself.”

That man was the former NSW Liberal Party senator Bill Heffernan, who took umbrage at being included in a sketch that dismissed him as a “political thing”. The sketch broke some of Micallef’s rules about playing the man and not the issue, but the comedian thinks the senator, who rang wanting to point out all the good he did in the community, hadn’t seen the sketch himself but was told about it.

“I think once he found out it was a comedy show he exited the conversation with a vague threat of meeting me for a coffee at some point or having a beer, which mercifully he’s never rung up about since.”

And while Mad As Hell, the ABC satirical program that takes its name from the famous shouted protest in the 1970s media satire Network, appears up to the minute, when it returns later in the year it will be after a preproduction period of six weeks, where Micallef works with co-writer Gary McCaffrie and others, working up the filmed sketches and the program’s parody advertisements, which are pressed into use to balance the studio sketches.

“Once the show starts we start off with a blank piece of paper on the Thursday. We don’t have writers meetings with the other writers, we don’t have a workshop or we’re not prescriptive about what I’ve suggested before about what topics we might talk about. Whatever strikes them funny is what ends up in the box, literally in a script box.

“I go through the script box because I’m the script editor and on the weekend I’ll put the show together in order and also edit the material.” The program is filmed days before going to air on Wednesdays.

One sketch featured a send up of Annabel Crabb, also from Adelaide, who Micallef knows personally. “There was a delightful character who I think popped round and cleaned politicians toilets for them. I know Annabel well enough for it not to be a problem. Well, assuming it’s not a problem. I’ve not spoken to her about it.”

Micallef went to university with Crabb’s husband Jeremy Storer, an ABC legal counsel who clears programs for defamation prior to broadcast. “All the material would go to Jeremy. He would he would know. So it’s up to him!” he jokes.

Word is that Talkin ‘Bout Your Generation will return next year (although this is unconfirmed by Nine) and while ABC commissioning is inherently unpredictable, the fact that the corporation ordered two series of Mad as Hell for this year.

For me it’s such an entertaining and endlessly fascinating machine, comedy because you don’t know whether it’s going to work, and that provides the tension and the excitement of doing it.

“If you knew that it was going to work I wouldn’t do it. Probably.”