“I was just about to try and sleep,” Okine admits, his voice slowly gaining animation. “Any later and I would have woken up at five o’clock this afternoon with only the vaguest memory of having some weird dream where I’ve been exposing my darkest secrets. You really missed out on some hot goss, dude.”
Not that we exactly want him to spill his guts about childhood fears and his first bedroom fumblings, but those kind of insights do give a glimpse of the person behind the art; a perspective that audiences are becoming increasingly hungry for. We want to break the surface of whoever captures our interest, and it’s a curiosity Okine shares in his own interview approach.
“I make the mistake of always wanting to know too much personal stuff. It’s only happened a couple of times, but you can see this little tweak in the artist’s eyes where you can tell they’re thinking, I do not want to answer this question on radio,” he says. “It’s difficult for me as a comic, because I’ve spent my whole life talking about everything. The good, the bad, the hairy and ugly – all of that. Whereas sometimes, you only remember halfway through talking to someone that they’re musicians. They wrote a song, it’s kind of cryptic but all the emotion is there and in the performance, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re up for talking about the most embarrassing thing they’ve ever done in the bedroom. So I definitely try and ask pointed questions sometimes that get met with some hesitancy, but still, I like going to a real place rather more than fucking around with pleasantries.”
It’s an ethos that makes for some great on-air moments. Okine is an observational comic, but one who is happy to leap into his own foibles and embarrassments with ease. Part of his success must stem from his ability to make his act seem so relatable, and given the brace of awards he picked up last year – an ARIA, a Helpmann, the Director’s Choice Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and more – there are many in the industry who agree.
“The comedy awards that are out there, including the ones that I’ve won, nobody knows they fucking exist,” says Okine. “It’s more an internal thing that lets people within the industry congratulate each other, and celebrate the work we all do, and how we do it; the constant monthly grind of doing twenty shows in a row at a festival, competing against 400 other acts, and making a product that really stands out in that onslaught of content and attention-seeking. That’s where those awards come in to their own. The ARIA was the most publicly known award, and funnily enough, the royalty check came in two weeks later and I think it was for around 60 bucks. What it does is make you feel that whatever you’re doing is on the right track. In our industry we’re also living in a world where awards don’t buy you dinner at night. Sometimes you wonder, do you want to be an award-winning comedian that plays for sixteen people in a closet at a fringe festival, or do you want to be a two-star comedian who sells 1500 tickets a night and couldn’t give a fuck except whether the caviar is more than a day old? Thankfully, what I’m doing has been really popular with people and I’ve been able to walk away with some awards, but that’s icing on the cake. Being able to do something that a lot of people are enjoying, that’s the most important thing.”
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival has treated Okine quite well in the past – starting with his Best Newcomer Award back in 2012. Peter Helier once remarked the Festival has a very relaxed atmosphere compared to other festivals; not quite so dog-eat-dog. You suspect that even if the festival were a cesspool of competitiveness, with comedians sabotaging each other and breaking kneecaps, it’s not like Okine would be naming names. Yet even the friendliest competition is still, well, a competition.
“We’re not competing with each other,” he says.” Really what you’re doing is competing in a market where there is only a limited audience to go to a whole lot of different shows. Everyone does their best to support each other – you drop in to other people’s shows, you’re Tweeting about them, sharing links. But when there are that many shows at a festival, unfortunately there’s just not enough room at the top of the cup for everything to float. Sometimes you see people who deserve a lot more recognition getting lost within the rubbish. But at the same time, we’re all realistic about it. Daniel Townes told a great story of when he was at a festival once, he had to cancel a show, and when he told another comedian friend about it the guy said, ‘Ah, that’s no good’ – but he could see the sides of his mouth kind of quivering, just desperately wanting to curl up into a smile. A lot of comics are dark in their thinking. We’ll laugh at a bad situation, and you just know when someone cancels a show how brutal that can feel. We’ve all been there where it’s not going to happen, no one’s turned up, it’s embarrassing as fuck. But at the same time, we’re genetically wired to laugh about it. It’s a really depressing feeling when you ask the ticket person how many sales you’ve had, and they tell you zero. You just … nothing braces you for that moment.”
His eponymous show is now in full swing at this year’s Comedy Festival, and while there are inevitable similarities with work that has gone before, Okine treats this as a very separate episode to prior performances. He’s still the same guy waking up at half past four every morning struggling to feel human, still spinning many different plates, but this is far from a sequel. It’s really just Matt, here and now, trying to make you laugh before collapsing in an exhausted heap.
“I really love making music, and do the odd hip hop gig on the side,” says Okine. “I just did my first DJ gig on Friday. If I’m not doing stuff, I feel really wasteful and lost in my time. Right now, I’m just training myself to use the time between the radio and the nightly gig to sleep. Otherwise, I might die. I got sick a lot last year, and that was from not stopping. It used to be [I would] do the radio, come home, try and make some music in the arvo, go out and do a show, get five hours sleep, do it again. And after finishing a run of festivals, you instantly start getting emails that say the Sydney Fringe Festival has opened for entries. And it’s like, you just finished the New York Marathon, you’re watching the blood drain out of your sneakers from all the blisters, you’ve barely caught your breath and are still seeing stars, and before you’ve had a chance to grab a water bottle someone says ‘Oi, so when are you trying out for the Olympics?’”
He laughs. “It’s like, ‘Fuck you. Let me chill for a minute, somebody get me a wet towel.’”
BY ADAM NORRIS
