featuring : WIL ANDERSON

Wil Anderson's comedy festival show, 'Wilennium', began on a brown paper table cloth in a Fitzroy Cafe. Lists and arrows and asterisks covered it completely, a huge mind map of ideas decipherable only to him. Since then its taken on it's intended form, evolving into another one of his solo shows. Anderson used his time in Sydney last week to run in bits and pieces of it, whilst the Sunday night audience at Builders helped solidify it further. It's pretty much ready to go, except he still doesn't know how it's going to end. It begins with a visit from God. "Its set an hour to go until new years eve and God arrives at my new years eve party and tells me that he hasn't decided whether the world gets to go on or not, whether he's going to end it all at twelve o'clock and he can't decide, and he thought he'd leave it all up to me," he explains, as he eats his breakfast at Joe's Garage. "Because I figure that comedians take a real weird risk anyway if they ever believe that people listen to what they say, that they have something important to tell people so I thought I'd blow that myth right out of the water by putting the fate of the entire world in my hands," he laughs. Does this mean he has a good relationship with God? "That's part of the irony, because I don't believe in God, so I have to struggle with and deal with that throughout the show. That this entity that until now I haven't had any belief in has challenged me so it's like, do I do it or don't I do it? And I'm the wrong person to ask too, because I'm not the sort of person to defend the world - I'm a complainer, I'm a whinger, I'm a moaner. I'm not a person who sees good in things. I think I'm pretty unsuited to the task," he says. "I'm not a saviour in any way, shape or form, which is where the comedy will come from, I'm hoping," he continues. "I think the point of the show is that it could be anyone. The whole idea is there's meant to be an hour to go until the end of the millennium and I'm sure at 11 0'clock, as irrational as it is, some people will just go 'oh, I better call my parents just in case', Just in case you don't call them and the world doesn't end and they go 'why didn't you call, just in case? Don't you love us?'. The world could realistically end at any stage, any hour. You could walk out of here and get hit by a bus - you're going to, I've arranged it - driven by Sandra bullock. She actually has to drive a bus now because of the unsuccessful turn of her film career. It's the only gig she can get." "The concept is that everybody is responsible for the fate of the world," he says, clearly relishing the opportunity to talk about these ideas. "We tend to rely on people in our lives, the Prime Minister's meant to solve this, my Mum's meant to solve this, we're always looking for other people to solve things for us, whereas I guess the point of he show is that everybody is responsible for the fate of their own lives." In philosophical terms, is this idea existentialism? "It kind of is," Anderson replies, "but there's this thing with existentialism that conflicts with that, existentialists are more to do with meaning, is there meaning? There is no meaning? Blah blah blah. They're some of the things I'm dealing with, philosophies of whether there is a meaning to life and that's the whole point of putting god in it at the start, because that's the thing a lot of people hold onto as a truth. The show is essentially a search for truth. A search for truth in our lives, and that's what meaning is, we're looking for truth, but truth has become blurred and obscured in the nineties through advertising, and stuff like that." in his search for truth as he was writing the show Anderson thought of all the worst things in the world, all the things that appeared to him to be the bad things, and cites war, death, and advertising as examples. He's going to explore these ideas on stage. "People see death as a bad thing, well most death, not all death. Like John Denver's death, not so much. Sonny Bono's death, we're OK with that too. Princess Diana, they weren't so happy about, you know." He also plans on tackling the socially constructed bas things, "like advertising and the media, these are things that obscure our truth, that create a whole myth of their own." "I guess I'm more like John Lennon when he said 'ow I've been shot'." Anderson is quite amused by that idea and writes it down. "I haven't finished the show yet so it could still go in. No, when he said 'I don't believe in the Beatles I just believe in me' and I guess that, above all to thyne own self be true I guess. To get comfortable with yourself, or at least the search to get comfortable. At least being honest with yourself, the worst thing you can do is start lying to yourself So I guess all I'm asking people to do is question what they're being presented, question why these things necessary, why we keep getting told that economic rationalism is the best system to live under, why it's not possible for the redistribution of wealth to happen in an equitable way, all these sorts of things." He pauses as he finishes his meal. "And there'll be pooh jokes. Just sounded all a bit serious, so I thought I'd better put something in it that might sell a few tickets. Now I really hope those people don't just come for the pooh jokes. Where are the pooh jokes? We came for the pooh jokes? I've had enough of this Satre based madness, where are the pooh jokes?", he imitates a hypothetical heckler. "the task I set myself this year was that it's going to be a brand new show, people who some won't have seen any material before. Essentially it's a brand new show, it's not a collection of my stand up, it's a show written specifically for the festival and stylistically it's a little bit different to what I've done in the past, it's a lot looser, there's some weirder stuff in it, and hopefully some more interesting stuff to play with," Anderson says. "It would've been easy to do another 'Jeff Kennett, he's got weird hair' kind of show, but then you're just doing the same thing and then you're Ugly Dave Grey. But I don't smoke cigars." The next question was obvious. Will Wilennium have any Bill and Monica jokes? "No Bill and Monica jokes but there'll be an aeroplane food joke, I'm reinventing the aeroplane food genre. And next year, cats and dogs and how they're different."   Beat Magazine April 1999 By Joanne Brookfield