Sun Herald, Sunday Metro, 9th February 2003 - Brett Thomas
Breakfast of Champs
On his morning radio show on Triple J with Adam Spencer and on stage during his increasingly successful forays into big theatre stand-up, Wil Anderson is the quintessential 100-words-a-minute bundle of comic energy.
But ask him to talk about the comedy scene in Australia and Anderson - a member of a small group of top-shelf local comedians that also includes Dave Hughes, Judith Lucy, Merrick and Rosso, Peter Helliar, Anthony Morgan and Corinne Grant - becomes surprisingly thoughtful.
"For mine, I think the best comedians in Australia are as good as the best comedians anywhere in the world," he said. "The best comedians here go to the Edinburgh Festival and other places where you have the cream of comedy, and they're easily the equal of those people.
"What we don't have here is the depth you get in the US or Britain. There may be 12 or 15 comedians in Australia who make a decent full-time living, but that next level [down] is a hard level on which to survive."
Anderson, who is one of many comedians making a living on breakfast radio (there's Merrick and Rosso, Wendy Harmer and Greg Fleet in Sydney; Hughes and Lucy in Melbourne), said the success of the better performers was taking them out of the regular stand-up scene because they were invariably snapped up by either radio or TV.
"Brekkie radio is damaging for your stand-up career, because the majority of stand-up is late at night," he said. "Anyone who is doing five days a week radio doesn't want to do a Wednesday night gig starting at 11pm."
Anderson said people were constantly surprised at the level of hard work that went into creating stand-up comedy.
"You can write an hour of drama quite quickly, but stand-up takes a long time to put together," he said. "You get pissed off when people think you have an easy job working on radio between 6am and 9am. You kind of want to say, 'There's also eight hours at the office and the rest of my life thinking about it!'.
"The best comedians are the ones who work the hardest but make it look the easiest."
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