Last week, The Guardian reported methamphetamine use is the biggest drug problem facing Australian police. But Brisbane-cum-Melbourne comic Corey White seems to have found a pretty good solution: “Stand-up is the new meth for me,” he says.
OK, so we’ve taken White way out of context here. He himself is an ex-ice addict, and he’s certainly not trivialising the major health issue that is addiction. However, on the other side of his drug struggles, White was led into stand-up comedy. At first, he was rather indifferent, but before long, he became completely wrapped up in this new pursuit.
“My best friend from high school, Shayne Hunter – a really great political comedian – he dragged me kicking and screaming into comedy when I was 20,” says White. “I started out doing really bad surreal one-liners, because I love Mitch Hedberg, and I sucked for a long time. Then I slowly evolved.”
White’s transition from the crack pipe to the comedy stage planted the seed for his current MICF show, Cane Toad Effect. The show’s founded on the notion of unintended consequences. To flesh out this theme, White looked way back into his personal history.
“[The show’s] a combination of having grown up in foster care, having been an ice addict and combining those things with a love of philosophy,” he says. “It’s essentially animated by one of Plato’s quotes that ‘No man does what is evil to him.’ People are always trying to do the right thing and the suffering that comes about in the world is an unintended consequence of that. I think I’m the first ice addict to quote Plato.
“I think it’s a clarion call for compassion,” White continues. “Even at their worst, people are doing their best. So reflecting on the idea of mistakes and unintended consequences should hopefully breed some empathy in us.”
White’s hopeful attitude is admirable, if a little naïve. However, when it comes to on-stage subject matter, you can be sure he’s not the sort of comedian to pull punches. In spite of this, the desire to shock an audience barely factors into his creative process.
“It’s not like I sat down and said, ‘How can I ruffle white Australia’s feathers’?” he says. “I try to say things I think are interesting and maybe other people aren’t talking about. If it so happens that people find that challenging or confronting, it’s not my intention. I actually find the whole idea of shock to be quite boring and banal. I think people like Jimmy Carr suck. Shock comedy is just a lot of white people jacking off.”
Any comedy show steeped in substantial and reasonably complex issues put its own popularity on the line. But MICF isn’t simply a swimsuit contest and White’s determined to use this platform to say something forceful, while also making people laugh.
“The whole worth of you as a comic is reducible to this one metric: getting laughs,” he says. “But then, that’s also the really appealing part of it. I love making people laugh and I love making people think. I feel as though we live in a society that’s increasingly crude and unsophisticated – people live in these bubbles of comfort. But stand-up’s one of the few places remaining in the culture where you can actually talk to people about ideas. I really appreciate that about stand-up. It’s just a person on a microphone, talking invisible things and being able to make other people think. I think that a lot of other art forms aren’t doing that. That’s why I love stand-up. From the moment I did it I fell in love with it.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
Venue: Portland Hotel – Pool Room, Cnr Russell & Lt Collins St, CBD
Dates: Currently being performed until April 19 (except Mondays)
Times: 9.30pm (Sundays 8.30pm)
Tickets: $15 – $20
