Wil Anderson

Yeah, I worked out that last night was the tenth time I'd slept in my own bed in nine months. It hasn't really been one place, it's just been out on the road living out of a suitcase and stuff. It's kinda nice to be back in one spot for a little while. I literally don't know how I'm gonna handle it. Even now it was weird packing clothes into drawers. That idea that you didn't have to fit everything back into a suitcase three days later and that I don't have to leave money on the pillow for a maid and all those ridiculous things. Now it's 'oh hang on, I have to clean the toilet myself?' I have to leave myself a chocolate on the pillow and turn down my own bed at night.

 

As long as I don't have some illicit affair with myself and don't pay myself afterwards and have it become a political scandal. That's when I get in real trouble. 

 

I don't think anyone knows any more. I was talking to [US comic] Marc Maron about it and he said in the old days there was a really simple system: people did stand-up for a certain amount of time and then they did the Tonight Show. And if you did the Tonight Show a few times and people thought you were pretty good, you might get a sitcom or a TV development deal or a movie or whatever. And now, even for established acts, no-one has any idea how it works. It might work that way, or you might end up landing a TV series out of your Twitter feed. Who fuckin' knows?

 

Yeah, but it kinda suits me cause I've never really been particularly good at making decisions based on career. I've always tended to make decisions based on things that I thought might be interesting to do. So I think an environment where if you do things that you're interested in and then one of them might be developed into something actually is probably an environment that I enjoy being in more. In the last few years of my career I've done that thing where I've tried to choose stuff that I would just be interested in doing.

 

Me and my friend Charlie [Clauson] do this podcast [30 Odd Foot of Pod] and we just do it in his front bedroom with these two microphones that barely work and we're not sure which side of the microphone we're meant to talk into, and his the dog seems to have better microphone technique than the both of us cause when it barks in the background it always seems to be clear and on mic, whereas we don't seem to be talking into them. [laughs]

 

Gruen's been sold to a whole bunch of countries overseas and it hasn't quite been made into a show in any of those countries yet. And someone was asking me why I thought that was and I was saying because I just don't think the show should work. We went into it thinking it would be this quirky little thing that we would all be interested in doing. It wasn't made to be this big powerhouse show. We still have this tiny little staff. I went in for my first meeting yesterday for the new series and there are more people in the Australian Cricket Team than make our entire television program. It constantly amazes me. I keep looking around and thinking “um, shouldn't we be more people? Shouldn't there be more people involved in this? How do we manage to get this shit done?”

 

I've really not been going over with any grand ambitions to do anything big. My ambitions were to do cool gigs with people that I think are cool and that's been kinda what happened. I was lucky enough to do a show with Sarah Silverman and I've been doing a couple of gigs like Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn, comics that perhaps people outside of the comedy industry might not be overly familiar with. But for people who know comedy and like comedy, these are the sort of people you're obviously very excited to not only be in the same room as, but to actually be able to say I'm doing gigs with these guys.

 

Absolutely. I did a series of gigs with Daniel Tosh [Tosh.O.] when he was working up a new set, and he wouldn't be in my top ten favourite comics in the world or anything like that, but to watch a guy like that work up a new set over a couple of weeks, where on the first night he's got a notepad and some ideas to two weeks later really having seen him every night, working jokes, working the structure, and ending with a really tight 15 minutes. That's the kind of stuff I've been really digging, and I figure that if you're enjoying the work of it and the process of it, if anything comes out of that, then hopefully it will be something that you would enjoy doing because its come out of a process that you enjoy.

 

Oh, totally. I always say this to people who want to get into comedy: “If you wanna do it for any other reason than you have to do it, then don't do it.” There are heaps of easier ways to make money, there's heaps of ways be famous. If they are the things you want out of it, then there's heaps of easier ways to do those things. I feel like its something that if you don't enjoy the process, then there's no destination that is good enough or exciting enough that its gonna make up for not enjoying the journey. I think that going overseas has really enabled me to reengage [with comedy] as a fan. 

 

It's harder to be a fan once you're established. I had a couple of realisations about myself overseas, which I think I knew subconsciously, the big one of which was that I'm nowhere near as interesting as I assumed I was. 

 

[laughs] Well, If I walk into the backroom of an Australian comedy club and I say something, people tend to stop and listen to me whether they like me or not because they'll think “what does he have to say about this?” Whereas I've just spent the last six months not being able to get a word in conversations because I'm the one that nobody knows. I just sit there and listen. You learn so much from listening to other comedians talk. 

 

Yeah, but you know what? It doesn't even matter if it's Sarah or Patton. It reminded me the best way to learn stuff is to shut the fuck up and listen to other people. Because when you're just listening to the sound of your own voice, you're not learning anything new, are you? You're just hearing the shit you already think or know. Whereas if you sit back and listen, then you get to hear what other people think, and you get to go “Do I think that is true?” that forces you to engage and challenge what you think. It's hard to do. I was forced to do it. It wasn't like I had made the decision that I was gonna go over there and sit quietly and listen, it was just that nobody was interested in what I had to say. And I found it incredibly illuminating.