“It’s fun to see your material on TV,” Taylor says, “It’s a visceral joy.” He has written for the singularly absurd Shaun Micallef as well. Taylor is about to appear on stage at MICF in Funny, which is either a brilliant or basic title for a show. Is Taylor allowed to recycle all those TV jokes? “Legally not,” he says. “I don’t tend to, anyway. I don’t do topical humour. What I do is storytelling.” Taylor describes himself as a “reclusive observationist.”
“Actually, I’m a pretty joyful person,” he admits. Is he the sort of comic who writes everything down? “Writing sort of goes hand in hand with performing,” he says. “But this show for MICF, there’s no script. I wrote nothing down. It is ‘written orally’…But I’ve worked it out onstage in comedy clubs over 11 states in the USA. Ideas I’ve talked about, things I’ve found funny – I talk about my impressions, my observations. It’s an organic approach.”
Is he onstage for himself or for the audience? “Funny started out as a challenge. My only focus was to be funny. What I find funny dictates what I share. What makes me laugh personally, that’s what I share. Usually what I enjoy the most is being over-analytical.”
How has he found performing in the States – are the clubs as brutal as we imagine? “Comedy clubs are the same as in Australia,” Taylor replies. “Clubs have these condensed shows. At a club people do want gags if you’re doing a 15, 35 or 45 minute gig. Other people are in the lineup. They want the rapid fire gags. Festivals are different. You’re doing a longer show. People are there to see you; they’re a little more patient.”
Is the man onstage close to the one his friends know? “I’m getting closer and closer to the real me,” he says. “There is a transition from the normal me to the stage me. I do use some stage technique, like a heightened voice; it’s an overly exaggerated me. But it’s a progressive thing, it’s ebbing and flowing.”
Comedy comes from some special and intense drive, Taylor reckons, something that keeps him, and probably many others, striving for laughs. “That confidence, that ambition driving you, it’s deep in you. There’s a dichotomy: if it falls flat you need to do it again and again until you get it right. When it does work, there’s the glory.” He says he loves to listen. “If there’s a conversation or a debate going on, I’ll be in the background, I’ll sit back and see how it unfolds. There’s always a part of my head that’s ticking away, thinking about where the joke is in this.”
Is there anything Taylor wouldn’t joke about? “No. In the right context, with the right sensitivity and empathy, everything is jokeable.” What’s the worst thing he’s experienced in his stand-up career? “I did a Rovers camp on the coast of Victoria. It was in the middle of a forest. These were people who are too old for Scouts but they don’t want to leave. It was terrible. They were drunk, they were throwing things at us, yelling, not listening, and they were heckling. I was with my comedy buddies and we were lambs to the slaughter. But I didn’t get off the stage; I thought ‘I’m doing my time’. It’s such an obsessive comedian thing to do. I don’t care, I love being on stage. Our attitude that night sums up comedians pretty well. It made me stronger. Once you die, as I did then, you can’t be scared of death!”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
