Is your humour Y2K compliant?

What would you do if you had an hour until the end of the world? Would you shag your next door neighbour? Take your beloved bike for a spin? Loot the nearest corner shop that has been ripping you off for years? Wil Anderson WANTS to know. And he's coming all the way to Sydney to ask you personally. His new show, Wilennium, takes the simple premise that the computer geeks and religious fundamentalists are right - that come midnight, december 31st 1999, the world is going to end. In a brave departure from ordinary standup routines, Anderson poses the question to his audience, and they dominate the evening's discussion. He modestly refers to himself as a 'crap conduit' for exploring people's desires and motivations. What he has discovered is that what people want can be very dark indeed. Forget final sunsets or humble prayers. Lots of us, it appears want to wallow in glorious sin. 'A lot of them have to do with violence, or revenge or breaking laws or social taboos. o had this whole period where people would come up to me after the show or a few days later and say 'You know what I'd really do? I'd kill somebody' Nobody would really say that out loud because they didn't feel like they could, but I heard it a lot, and started mentioning it in the show, and a lot of people would nod! I use that as a way to explore 'that dark side of our nature.' Anderson is no stranger to dark desires. As a former political journalist for the Herald Sun in melbourne, he lived and breathed the foul air of the media beast. It was their handling of the Port Arthur massacre that finally drove him into the arms of comedy. Disgusted by an article which appeared 13 days after the shootings, and which claimed that Martin Bryant had been driven to mass murder by drinking too much tea and coffee, Anderson quit. Bizarrely enough, his moral indignation became the launching pad for his new career. he was 'having a bit of a rant' to his friends about it. 'I started riffing of all sorts of stuff to my friends, saying things like'Yeah my nan drinks a lot of tea and it hardly turned her into the Bingo Hall butcher! You know look out for Nan, she's got a thermos, run!' and they were laughing. It was weird, coz no one was laughing about the massacre at that time,' he notes proudly. Wiping the tears of mirth from their eyes, they pointed him in the direction of the nearest comedy space, where he could indulge his hatred of pointless journalism - among other topics. The rest, as they say, is history. So, what does he think teh future has in store for him - specifically, that fast approaching blip on our chronological horizon - January 2000? While he agrees that Y2K is likely to 'cause some problems,' he's highly sceptical of the whole milennium reference. 'It's pretty ridiculous to put some symbolism on the idea of 2000 years when the world has been around for billions of years. It's a bit like building a road from sydney to melbourne and only putting direction signs from the Goulburn Macdonalds' he quips. He even points out that we've most likely missed the real milennium, thanks to the bunglings of a sixth century monk known as Dennis the short. According to the experts, it happened anywhere between 1992 and 1997. Despite this cynicism, he does like the fact that the new milennium gives us all a chance to have a long hard think about why we're here, which is perhaps the simplest explanation for the success of his show. But what if he's wrong? What if Y2K does short-circuit the Western world? Wil figures that at least there's hope for the long suffering Beta video users. 'You know that Beta video recorders actually, when they were made, were Y2K compliant! They've had to watch that one copy of Porky's 2 for the last 25 years. Come midnight, they'll be right!' Interview by Elizabeth Bentley Taken from Drum Media 13 July 1999 page 58