Renowned Melbourne comedy couple Two Little Dickheads are returning to Melbourne International Comedy Festival with 'Kapow!', after honing the show at Edinburgh Fringe.
Sharnema Nougar and David Tieck may be silly, but their comedy is seriously funny, courtesy of the duo’s stellar and varied CVs. Sharnema is a Prague Fringe Award Winner who’s worked with the likes of Fringe Wives Club and comes from heralded comedy stock, while former LA improv David is a regular humour contributor for The Herald Sun.
Together, they’re Two Little Dickheads, the pyjama-clad purveyors clown, sketch, cabaret, improv, ridiculous magic and decidedly stupendous dance routines. In addition to Kapow! the pair are also playing an entirely improvised show called Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha. We had a chat about their upcoming extravaganzas at Comedy Festival 2022 and the results speak for themselves…
What you need to know
- Two Little Dickheads – Kapow!
- Storyville Melbourne, 185 Lonsdale St, Melbourne
- Wed 30 Mar – Fri 1 Apr: 9pm; Sat 2 Apr & Sun 3 Apr: 8pm; Tue 5 Apr – Fri 8 Apr: 9pm; Sat 9 Apr & Sun 10 Apr: 8pm; Tue 29 Mar: 9pm
How would you describe your act to someone unfamiliar with Two Little Dickheads?
Dave: We are a couple of absolute twits.
Sharnema: We use bombastic and beautiful imagery, and mesh it with artful idiocy and sharp writing; absurd sketches, catchy original songs and really stoopid dance moves.
Dave: If Lano and Woodley were bonking, had no budget, wore cat pyjamas and rolled themselves in bio-glitter they would be…
Both: Us.
How did you get started as a dual act?
Sharnema: Both of us had been travelling the world doing solo stuff, and we were both weird. Dave had been doing hour-long interviews with inanimate objects and I had been pulling 12inch tongs and broccoli from my cleavage, you know, typical solo comedy schtick. When we hooked up (after six months of trepidatious courting) we didn’t even think about it, we just got on stage and started experimenting with random shit.
Dave: I just wanted to interview the tongs. And now I have a partner and four cats.
Your show spans a huge variety of performance genres, do you both bring specific strengths and interests?
Sharnema: Yes! We have very different training and backgrounds, but very similar comedic sensibilities. I’m a theatre-kid turned cabaret clown and Dave was a boring banker until one day his brain popped and he woke up a hairy sketch-writing, improv-addict. It means we’re constantly learning from each other’s toolbox and challenging each other and laughing in each other’s faces.
Dave: Sharns is more of a visual and physical comedian, and I’m more of a cerebral and joke oriented comedian, so we both jumped into a big pot of boiling water together, threw in a few carrots and celery sticks, and now we are dickhead soup.
Sharnema: I love soup.
How much of the final act is research and preparation, compared to audience-fed improv?
Dave: It’s absolutely both. We find ideas and songs just riffing around the house or singing in the shower or playing silly buggers with the cats, and I write that into a giant script, whilst Sharns will wake up in the middle of the night with some huge visual concoction that turns a ‘riff’ into an ‘act.’ Once a show is mounted we end up improvising around the material, which morphs over time, and usually gets longer and longer till we have to cut stuff out.
Sharnema: Yeah we have a script, and some well choreographed visual material, but it’s also just more fun to see what happens on the night. We treat mistakes as gifts from the Gods of Idiocy and when those muses are in the room we party with them.
Dave: We also have a second show this year – Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha – this one is TOTALLY improvised – so you can see us get totally loose and witness the ‘process’ very much in action. Some of this may end up in future shows, and some of it will be one time only – you had to be there.
You’ve been described as ‘Monty Python for the new century.’ – how does your show innovate upon the sketch comedy tradition?
Sharnema: We like to take the ordinary things in life and turn them into something extraordinary. Simple daily tasks – like making toast – become fodder for bombastic, joyful and surreal long form sketches.
Dave: Yeah we take some typical sketch structures and comedic tools, and turn them inside out, add a theme song, and a chance for at least one of us to get injured or slip out a body part – and kapow, something fresh appears or gets bruised.
Cats and pyjamas appear to be a theme, what else should people expect?
Sharnema: Magical arse scarfs, beautiful love songs, and the best match-ups in condom tennis since the Australian Open 2008.
Who are your comedic inspirations, and whose fans would you appeal to?
Dave: Lano and Woodley, and Aunty Donna, and Sam Simmons, and Hot Department, and Double Denim, and Demi Lardner and Josh Glanc, and Garry Starr – all the beautiful weirdos. Holy crap, Australia has tons of beautiful weirdos these days – go us. There’s an alternative comedy boom about to pop in Melbourne, it’s going to be like London in the 80s – please adjust your haircuts accordingly.
Sharnema: Oh and The Goodies. The original deeeekheeeadss.
Dave: Dickhead dickhead yum yum.
What’s your favourite story behind creating the show?
Sharnema: I’m not sure I would say ‘favourite’ but the most poignant fact is that we are prophets and the entire pandemic is our fault. In our debut show we blew up the world with a diamond encrusted meteorite. It was the funnest end-of-the-world experience ever and was more like a giant dance party with flying bananas and immersive light tunnels that the audience wore on their heads. Hard to explain really. Anyways, Kapow! the show is the sequel to that, where us dickheads and the audience have survived the apocalypse and we are building a whole new world – Dicktopia – and the audience are all survivors in the post-apocalypdick era. The funny thing to me, is that we wrote this in 2019 as a far-fetched load of nonsense, that would never, ever, be relatable.
Dave: When we were in Edinburgh in a backstage bathroom and Sharney was trying to stick lettuce to my testicles with double sided tape and *gulp* staples.
Sharnema: It was art.
Can you provide a shameless plug to get our audience excited?
Dave: This show was a total cult hit at Edinburgh Fringe 2019 – and after many false starts, we’re finally bringing it home to Melbs!
Sharnema: Kitson came to our show! KITSON!
Dave: Daniel Kit(ty)son???? Woo hoo!
Sharnema: Best cat ever.
Dave: We’re a fun idiotic show, in a fairy-tale venue, you’re destined to leave with big silly joy grins plastered on your face fronts.
Both: We’re the perfect show for; the kind of people who would spill mustard on their shirts. Cat lovers. And people who would never spill mustard on their cats.
Buy tickets to the gloriously weird Two Little Dickheads here: Kapow! and Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha Pha.
