Whitmer Thomas peaked when he was three years old. “I was as hot as hell,” he says down the phone from Los Angeles. “I was a hot three year old, which is why this guy wanted me. I was a gooood-looking three year old,” he emphasises in his southern drawl.
Thomas is talking about one of the stories he tells in his stand-up act, about the time he was abducted by a stranger as a child. “When I was a kid, I was three years old and hanging out in my kitchen, and a man broke in and kidnapped me and luckily my dad saved my life. It turned out this man had been watching me since the day I was born, really. Anyway, I’m ok now and he went to prison but I tell a funny story about it,” he says.
Thomas was raised in Alabama, in a tourist town called Pleasure Island. Fortunately, nothing happened to him (“it was only like one minute, he grabbed me out of my house and ran down the street with me…and my Dad attacked him”) and so was able to go on and have a relatively normal childhood, where skateboarding was one of his main passions.
However, like many kids being raised on Californian culture he felt the lure of Los Angeles and moved there 10 years ago, originally intending to pursue an acting career. “After a few years I found myself drifting, maybe due to cynicism, into comedy and kind of making fun of everything and I found those types of people much easier for me to be around. That’s kind of where I made myself a home, was doing comedy, doing stand-up, performing that way. Although I still do love acting, but it’s mainly comedy where things have started to happen for me,” the 27-year-old says.
In LA, he’s the co-creator of the comedy collective Power Violence and voices a part in the animated series Stone Quackers, which he says is based on his life and that of his writing partner Clay Tatum. He’s making his Melbourne International Comedy Festival debut this year as part of the Headliners show, which showcases North American talent. He’ll be performing at the Melbourne Town Hall alongside Beth Stelling, Mark Forward and Sarah Tiana for the first half of the festival.
Growing up in a small town has shaped the stand up material he’ll be presenting here. “I mainly talk about myself, my upbringing. I talk a lot about Alabama, where I’m from, my family, you know, people I’ve seen on the street – I really like that part of LA, it’s what drew me to it in a way. I grew up skateboarding in Alabama watching videos of everybody in California and I just always wanted to be here and so I guess my stand-up is from that perspective, of a relatively wide eyed naive person from a very small town in Alabama in the big city trying to acclimate myself, trying to adjust.”
And what has that culture-shock been like for him? “In your imagination you have what Hollywood is going to be like and then you get there and discover there’s only about two blocks of that, and the rest is just fucking crazy people shitting in Carl Jnr’s parking lots”.
By Joanne Brookfield
VENUE: Melb Town Hall – Lower Town Hall, Cnr Swanston & Collins Sts, CBD
DATES: March 24 – April 3
TIMES: 9.45pm (except Sundays 8.45)
TICKETS: $28 – $36
