Wil Sylvince’s trip to last year’s MICF was his first attempt at performing comedy in Australia. The ironic and self-deprecating Haitian-American had no trouble winning over plenty of Melbourne punters, which encouraged him to put together the show Syllables, Fat, & Celibacy specificallyfor this year’s festival. Prior to last year’s debut, however, Sylvince wasn’t feeling overly confident.
“I was super nervous,” he says. “I was not sure if some of the references would get mixed up. Comedy is really about knowing stuff. If you don’t know stuff, then you’re not going to get the joke. So my concern was how much explanation I had to do so I could get into the joke. But then that kind of worked out, because sometimes the explanations turned out to be funny – another bit itself.”
Sylvince’s comedy dips into various aspects of personal life – making frequent reference to his Haitian heritage and relationships with family members. Syllables, Fat, & Celibacy is a curious title, and once again the show’s content is derived from lived experiences.
“I basically talk about my entire life change with my health…basically I’ve been self-helping myself,” he says. “This is a real example but it’s going to sound dumb: I used to walk pigeon toed and I just forced my feet to walk outward everyday for three months until I started walking straight. I changed my diet, I stopped having sex with girls that I don’t care about. So that’s basically it, but of course I’m going to talk about other stuff.”
It’s easy to picture a discussion of overweight woes and rejigged sex preferences turning into soppy motivational speaking. Sylvince admits that he finds comedy in darker places, but he doesn’t dwell on the sentimental details.
“Most of my humour comes from serious situations,” he says. “I’m not trying to make everything funny. My thoughts, or the way I process stuff, just happens to be funny, if that makes sense. I just take it and that’s how I process it in my head. For example, in Brazil, I think Brazilians, they bleach their arseholes. So in Brazil I assume if you call someone an arsehole, it’s a compliment. You know, their arseholes are squeaky clean. So that’s how I process it. People are like, ‘Oh anal bleaching,’ but I think it’s a good thing – you can go down to Brazil and call someone an arsehole and they’ll say thank you. But that’s probably a bad example of how I interpret things.
“If something happens to me, if I can turn around and make it funny, it’s going to end up in my standup,” he adds. “So even if I go into detail, as long as the detail is going to get people to laugh, that’s fine with me. I don’t mind being too personal. I can be perfectly honest with my life on stage.”
Having conquered his personal demons and flipped them into an hour worth of stand-up, Sylvince returns with a great deal more confidence than what he had 12 months ago. Still, he doesn’t pretend to have cracked a secret code.
“Comedy is always a new challenge,” he says. “Even if you’re doing the same club every night, every crowd is different. So I’m still nervous. There’s a lot of new jokes, I’ve got to make sure they work, so there’s no rest period where I’m like ‘OK I’m good now.’ It’s a whole new challenge. I did like 20 minutes last time, now I’m doing an entire hour. 20 minutes was easy, but now it’s a hour.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
