Shaun Micallef, comedian, 62: Q&A

Shaun Micallef has seen huge disruption in the entertainment industry since his TV debut 26 years ago. But one thing hasn’t changed.

Funny: Shaun Micallef

It’s often the case that comics are pretty serious in real life - would that be true for you or were you a bit of a class clown as a youngster? I was not a subversive influence in the classroom. I was a high school debater, quite good on my feet and I always wanted to do drama at school. I’ve come full circle, doing the same thing I was doing when I was 18 – writing sketches and performing.

So the answer is yes then! Now it’s been 26 years since The Micallef Program premiered on ABC TV. Did you have more freedom pushing boundaries with your humour back at the start? I feel like I have a responsibility, now that I’m older, to not just do jokes that are outrageous or because they’re things you “shouldn’t” say. It’s all fun and games until someone pulls out a phone and records it.

What’s the biggest change in television you’ve seen? To be simply on television used to be the endgame. Now you can reach a huge audience without TV either through social media or streaming services. Aunty Donna [the Australian sketch comedy group] is a marvellous example of comedy’s transition from TV to platforms like YouTube and Netflix.

Are you more aware of your critics now? No, I think there’s always been armchair critics. When people used to only watch TV, criticism could lead to an entire household turning off your show. The audience has always had an opinion, I don’t think that’s ever changed.

You gave up drinking in 1986 (before sobriety was fashionable). What prompted that? My parents never drank, so it was never in my line of vision until I had my first drink at university. I would always drink until I got drunk because I thought I’d be more amusing. I see drinking as a free pass to misbehave because you can always say you didn’t set out to do a certain thing. But then when you get older you make the decision to take conscious responsibility for your actions.

Tom Gleisner, Santo Cilauro, Rebel Wilson and yourself... there is a great pedigree of Australian comedians with law degrees. What’s the correlation? For a lot of us it’s because during high school we were driven towards a degree we got enough points for, often either law or medicine. For a long time, being an entertainer or a performer existed in its own secret realm because it wasn’t something you could really make money from. I did give law a red hot go. I practised for 10 years before I made the move.

Is there a crossover between law and comedy in practice? The same rigour with which I approached cross-examination ended up helping how I wrote the interview sketches in Mad as Hell. Exactly the same.

Has it been hard to stay humble while preparing for a tribute to your own comic genius at The Wheeler Centre’s Spring Fling? Well, I’m very keen to be acknowledged for all the wonderful things I’ve done. It’s kind of an extension of the idea that in order to be heard you really have to yell. I’ve been known to do a lot of things over the years, even though a lot of my experiments haven’t worked. Australian audiences have been very forgiving.

Shaun Micallef appears at The Capitol in Melbourne on October 31 as part of The Wheeler Centre’s Spring Fling. His new book Slivers, Shards and Skerricks is out October 29.