Working the room

BILLY Connolly said recently that he had no idea what comedy was and that he really did not want to know.

BILLY Connolly said recently that he had no idea what comedy was and that he really did not want to know.

"I'm just glad to be there when it shows up," he suggested. Local comedians Merrick Watts and Tim Ross also like to get in the way of humour, never quite sure where their brand of unscripted chatter may lead them.

"We just start having a conversation and it might take a little while before we say anything funny," Watts, the sturdier half of the Nova radio network's The Merrick and Rosso Show, once told me.

"And what we say might not be the funniest thing, but it is different to what anyone else does, and people won't hear it coming."

Merrick and Rosso are now among the biggest names in Australian entertainment, with sell-out stand-up tours, syndicated radio programs, DVDs and even a best-selling book.

For all their enormous success on radio, they retain a perverse desire to develop a program designed to work specifically as a live television event. They want to do something that is about the moment, the definition of live TV, their obsessions spontaneously laid bare.

Now they are back on the Comedy Channel, where they started trying to tame the omnivorous TV creature. "It's like making love to a gorilla," Bob Hope once said of TV. "It's not when you want to stop, it's when she does."

Merrick and Rosso's new series, carrying the same moniker as their radio show, dodges the female gorilla. It's a fast-moving, sometimes manic combination of audience interaction, recorded comedy pieces and guest appearances. Famous people such as Sophie Monk, Ian Thorpe, Ray Martin, even actor Will Smith, have their celebrity dismantled and hung out to dry.

Because of deadline restrictions, I've only watched the pilot, segments of which appeared in last week's first episode, but I love the energy the young comics exhibit and their often sly humour. They're maturer and graver than when they started in TV with the Comedy Channel's Planet Merrick and Rosso in 1997.

And their new show has more structure thanthe sometimes hysterical Merrick and Rosso Unplanned, which appeared on the NineNetwork in 2003 and ran for 36 underrated episodes.

Based on the anti-format established by Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned on Britain's Channel 4, it was an unscripted and unrehearsed show in which the comic duo talked to the audience and to each another about pretty much anything. Not that everyone was knocked out by their spontaneity.

The studio audiences found it hilarious, but for some older viewers it was like being shut out of the pub and trying to follow the conversation through a steamed-up window.

"When you consider it was on at 10.30 at night on a Wednesday, we consistently drew just under a million viewers each show, yet it was seen as unsuccessful," says producer R.P. Sekon, who also worked on the earlier show. "Potentially, it could be still running."

This new series also uses audience interaction, with Merrick and Rosso talking to the studio guests in their usual knockabout improvisational style, and then seguing quickly to the videotaped comedy sketches and interviews.

"There's a part of all comedians that remains a child, while other people get civility pounded into them," American comedian Bob Newhart said recently. And it is this child-like quality that so appeals in Merrick and Rosso as they chat with people who are more famous than them. And with some who just think they are.

Politeness and courtesy are not their way, though they are never particularly unkind or mean-spirited; whatever they glimpse in their audience or their guests, they talk about.

With Merrick and Rosso, the question is always the answer, and that's where the comedy is: in the constant questioning of everything. And especially of themselves.

They don't like inflaming guests or being agitators; that's not what they do, unlike their airwaves nemesis, the self-obsessed 2DayFM breakfast presenter Kyle Sandilands, who gives the impression on Australian Idol that one day he will simply explode from the weight of self-importance he can't help but share. On TV, he's oddly gauche, a pretender rarely in the moment which is something you could never say about Merrick and Rosso.

"We are comedians," Watts once told me of their style of humour, "who just want to involve our audience as eavesdroppers on a really greatconversation."

The Merrick and Rosso Show pilot featured a revealing six-minute interview with Thorpe, with the comic duo presenting the former champion swimmer with a Most Awesome Aussie Ever award in their typically ebullient fashion.

"The guys actually managed to make him really funny," Sekon says. "He's been a bit wooden on TV but he feels really comfortable with the boys."

Through the years the two radio presenters have interviewed hundreds of celebrities, many of whom have become their friends.

"We sent film crews all over the world to grab moments from them, snatching as many celebrity faces as we could, all treated with a slightly satirical bent," Sekon adds.

The producer says the nature of the new series is to let Merrick and Rosso extract from celebrity guests those elements of their characters that normally they would not allow to be seen, the way the comics do on radio. "Their great strength is their ability to draw people out of themselves," he says.

But equally important is their understanding that comedy is in character and that character grows out of the way people behave and pretend. Comedy is not really about jokes.

The pair creates a kind of joint production in which everyone who listens regularly is involved, picking up nuances and pieces of moments they own. They love to talk and are better now, they say, at letting conversation unspool in all kinds of unexpected ways, blending informed intuition with rational analysis and deftly switching cognitive gears.

Watts bubbles over with his own energy; stubborn and sometimes petulant, he is volatile and often deliberately ignorant. Rosso always looks slightly dishevelled, as though he has borrowed a flatmate's clothes at the last minute, but he's always the timekeeper manipulating the many elements of their shows.

There is often a mock hostility in their improvisations, though sometimes both seem nervous, as if they expect the world to fall in on them because they have taken too many liberties.

Through their improvised conversational style, they have created their own community that travels with them from radio to theatre shows and to TV, their comedy remaining inclusive and exclusive.

"If you don't believe what we believe, you are not as cool as we are," their bantering suggests to their listeners, and now their viewers. "By pure accident we seem to have set ourselves apart," Watts told me recently. "We never tried; we just did what we did."

And they seem surprised that they are still on air, let alone back on TV.

The Merrick and Rosso Show, Thursday, 8.30pm, The Comedy Channel.