BMA & Comedy’s Suma Iyer has a chat to pretty boy comic, Ray O’Leary. It goes places…
Are you always shocked when people come to your shows?
I feel concerned for the well-being of those in my audience. I wonder if they were maybe missing a father figure growing up, or some issue that I will not resolve. I just do my best in the available hour.
I was in Melbourne last year, and saw Your Laughter Is Just Making Me Stronger. Good to see the mattress bit get a Gala run!
If I died, that’s what I would be known for. A guy who had a mattress protector.
You made a bold claim in the title of that show. Do you feel stronger?
Unfortunately, I just arrived back from the UK where I was touring the show, and I’ve caught some sort of cold. So I actually feel quite sapped of strength from doing the show. You’ve got me at my weakest.
I think the show’s title was a warning to those who might laugh at me: just know if you laugh, it’s actually what fuels me. It did keep the hecklers at bay, including you.
I could feel your strength that evening. I just didn’t dare. Speaking of daring, your Wikipedia page claims you’re a former public servant. Have any messages for us?
“Good luck, guys!” Yeah; that’ll do.
Canberra’s the first place I visited in Australia, at the ANU. My first impression was roundabouts.
Last time I was in Canberra, though, was for my Street Theatre show, which was grand. I was a public servant back in New Zealand. It was where I honed my brass. So, to some extent, I’m the most comfortable in front of public service-types.
You also threatened to bash people in that show…
Yeah, so… that sounds bad.
I just want to take this opportunity to assure your readers… it also sounded bad on stage. There is no context in which it is justified.
The title being what it was, it was just a coincidence. At one point, I thought, should I say, ‘Your Laughter Is Just Making Me Stronger’? but felt it lacked the bite that comes with a threat to bash people. I wanted the audience to leave with a strict sense of fear. I wanted them sharp, y’know; concerned about what I could do.
You came to Canberra initially to do a Masters of Philosophy. Was academia a possibility for you?
At the time, I was thinking about pursuing a career in academic philosophy. The ultimate irony is that to be a good philosophy professor, you need to turn out papers and articles all the time and constantly have something new and interesting to say. I felt I couldn’t do that, so I quit philosophy.
Then I wound up doing comedy… that meant I had to come up with something new and interesting to say every year.
Academia tries to make logical, structured arguments that arrive at a great truth. With comedy, you don’t care about truth. It just has to be funny.
I’ll admit, a big part of my motivation for the Masters was avoiding the workforce. So, I postponed it for as long as I could. I had a day job only for a few years. That was more than enough. Now, I do comedy.
Now you do comedy.
Yeah. My whole life has been an avoidance of a 9 to 5.
You did work on Taskmaster, though.
I recommend to all your readers to do Taskmaster if they get asked. [During the show’s filming] you’re suddenly asked to do something, there’s always a time limit, and it’s often very short. The longest I was given for a task was an hour.
An hour or two sounds like plenty of time to come up with something interesting, but you have to brainstorm an idea, execute it, and write the script. I became this one-man sketch producer.
With stand-up, I can write jokes and crowd test them. I can be picky about what I give to the audience.
On Taskmaster, you don’t have such luxuries; you don’t have the time. The first thought you have is the one you do. So you are more authentically yourself, and the fact that audiences seem to have responded to that well is great. Because the whole time, they are asking you to do ridiculous things.
What about your character, ‘Cool Ray’? Is that how that happened?
That was freewheeling insanity. That task was to make a teenager think we were cool. Right off the bat, this teenager hated me. She was given quite a lot of freedom to be however she wanted.
The whole time we were talking, she was on her phone. She was giving me nothing. So I became panicked; I only had 10 minutes to converse. I talked about the Chilean constitutional crisis happening at the time, which is still unresolved anyway.
Anyway, I took my shoes off at one point and tried to slide sock-first, Risky Business style into the room. As I say, I was panicking; it was the only cool thing I could think of. Otherwise, it would have been what I saw in the ‘90s cartoons. Y’know, a guy in sunglasses smoking.
So, I smoked a full bit of rolled-up paper in front of a teenager to make her think I was cool. I was in sheer survival mode.
Back to the familiar, tell us about your new show, Laughter? I Hardly Know Her!
It IS brand-new! Many comedy shows are very long narrative pieces where, at the 45-minute mark, the comedian tells you that their mum died or something. I can promise my show is nothing like that. It’s just going to be very silly. I won’t ask anything of the audience members. There’s also very little violence. From me. But I can’t promise that the audience won’t attack each other.
That’s a pretty good promise.
For an hour – yeah.
Ray O’Leary’s show, Laughter? I Hardly Know Her! is at Manning Clark Hall, Kambri, ANU, on Saturday, 22 March, at 6:45pm. Tix are available from the Comedy Festival website.
Suma Iyer is a local stand-up comic. Go see her and Felix McCarthy in Realistic Beauty Standards at Fun Time Pony on Friday, 16 May, at 7pm. Tickets via Trybooking.