“It is sort of pressing the reset button on things a little bit,” he says. “Hopefully I can retain my Chopper audience and gain a whole new audience of Heath Franklin fans who may not necessarily find Chopper to be their cup of tea.”
Franklin’s MICF show, May I Borrow A Crisis?, is packed full of biographical detail. It might be a relief to strip away the costume and talk about himself, but Franklin isn’t being blasé about the transition.
“I want it to be as good as it possibly can be, so I’m not taking it easy on myself this year,” he says. “There’d be nothing worse than being like, ‘If you like Chopper then how about – Heath Franklin!’ and then everyone’s like, ‘Nah, I like Chopper better.’ I’m being as brutal with myself as I can be to get it there.”
The Chopper act’s substantial renown guaranteed Franklin decent crowds, so what sparked the decision to finally introduce his everyday-self onstage?
“The Chopper shows were getting less and less Chopper-y,” he explains. “It was still being delivered by a moustache and the glasses but instead of being Neville Bartos jokes it was gripes about Subway and cars and all this sort of stuff, which I think reflects my suburban lifestyle a little bit [more] than the Chopper world. So it’s one of those things – why take the moustache to work when you don’t need to?”
Although Mark ‘Chopper’ Read passed away late last year, Franklin is hosting Chopper’s Big F*ckin Late Show during MICF, indicating he hasn’t put the Chopper character to rest.
“As long as I’ve got a good idea for a Chopper show I’ll do a Chopper show, but this year I had a good idea for a Heath Franklin show,” he says. “Now that I’ve started doing stand-up as me, it’s re-invigorated my interest in doing Chopper. It’s a little bit like Thom Yorke putting out a solo album so he can get back to writing some cracking Radiohead stuff – to use a very clumsy analogy to a musical great,” he laughs.
The show’s titular plea for a crisis came from Franklin’s realisation that he’s led a calamity-free existence. He elaborates on why this became the premise for his solo debut.
“I’ve seen a lot of these really wonderful comedy shows where it talks about some crisis or moment of darkness in someone’s life. When it’s deftly handled, the levity and the payoff for those things is so great. The big problem I had was I don’t have any of these moments in my life. I’ve never been to hospital except to have my two children, I’ve never been arrested, no drug problems or dad issues. So I guess that was about: how do you write a totally moving or wonderful comedy show when you don’t have that moment in your life where things fell apart?”
Franklin launched the show to strong applause at the Adelaide Fringe last month, but he’s not resting on his hands just yet. His three-week run at MICF is likely to be the ultimate test.
“I’ve been really enjoying doing it and audiences have been enjoying seeing it so far. I can’t wait to get it to a Melbourne audience. The Adelaide audiences are great because they’re big and generous, [but] the Melbourne audiences are very comedy-literate.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
