“Even by saying it now I have a slight embarrassment because I figure no one wants to laugh about (animal rights), they don’t even want to talk about it. I thought well, that’s something you could attack in this show because that’s probably career suicide,” he says. “But there’s a comma in between the words career and suicide so it’s about my career, sometimes it’s literally about suicide and it’s about towels”.
When Quirk speaks with Beat via phone, it’s from the Adelaide Fringe Festival where he is performing Shaking Hands With Danger, the show that collected him the Piece of Wood (Comedians’ Choice Award) at last year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. He quotes one of his favourite comedians, Doug Stanhope, who says of awards they are just someone’s opinion, no more relevant than someone who thinks you suck. “He does have a point there and it keeps you in check,” says Quirk about the American’s perspective. “But that particular award, knowing how I feel about comedy and how much I love some of the others who have won that award, I am absolutely flattered. I really am,” he says.
He also thought that show, confessing his infidelity, might also be his last, so he decided to put everything into it. “I thought ‘well I’m just going to at least do this show. I don’t know what the future holds but I will write this show and write it well’ and it paid off…people responded to it . I thought, ‘oh? Is that all you have to do? Just pour your life and soul into a show? OK. Fine,” he says with that characteristic deadpan.
Fortunately for Melbourne International Comedy Festival audiences, it wasn’t his last show. Career, Suicide, he promises, will tackle both those topics and like he said, towels. Towels? “It started out very literally,” he says. “There’s a thing that happened to me, where I realised that I didn’t travel with a towel and I got into this massive altercation, which became ridiculous, with someone who I was staying with who I had never met. I had borrowed the wrong towel, quite literally, and used it to dry myself, and it just got so out of hand that I thought well that’s a story that can be in a show.”
However, as Quirk started to ponder the deeper meaning of towels and how they relate to the human condition, he started hatching a theory that they are “this subconscious thing we always need,” he says. “I say at the start how I found out about a decade ago that we are driven by an unconscious fear of death and most people have heard this before. It’s why we do everything but what I don’t believe is that it’s unconscious because we’ve all thought about death at some point, and some of us at length, so its not really that unconscious. But what I do believe is the unconscious motivator in our lives is a towel based drive. I also point out it’s also what sperate us from the animals, after thought, is towels. I don’t know if it’s possible to pull off a show centred around towels but I will sure try”. If anyone can take towels and spin them into gold, it will be David Quirk.
BY JOANNE BROOKFIELD
