Wil Anderson - I Am NOT Fine, Thanks

Wil Anderson is the host and executive producer of the ABCs popular and long-running Gruen and new hit Question Everything. He is a Helpmann Awardwinning stand-up comedian who has also received the Peoples Choice Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) a record six times, selling more tickets than any other act in the history of the festival. In 2022 his show WILOGICAL won the Directors Choice Award at MICF and Best of The Fest at the Sydney Comedy Festival. Wil currently hosts the popular podcasts TOFOP, FOFOP, 2 Guys 1 Cup AFL Podcast and Wilosophy.

First published in 2022

Copyright Wil Anderson 2022

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For Irene and Winnie

I had just walked off stage at the Adelaide Fringe when I found out that the Melbourne International Comedy Festival was not going ahead. I had been expecting the bad news, but when it arrived it still didnt feel real. These days every city has its own comedy festival of some kind, but Melbourne is The Festival, and now, along with the Australian Formula One Grand Prix, it was one of the first major events to be shut down. The irony was that there had been nonstop stories in the press about comedians and what lines they could and couldnt cross. Every interview I was doing would inevitably contain the question: Are you worried about being cancelled? Little did we know that all live comedy was about to be cancelled.

It was a shock, and there was natural fear and anger from my clown community, but we all understood why it needed to be done. Comedy likes to pretend it can be dangerous, but suddenly and unexpectedly it most definitely was. In the shadow of a global pandemic, gathering people in a poorly ventilated room to force them to expel fluids from their mouths as often as possible didnt really seem like a responsible night out. In fact, the funnier you were, the more likely you were to be a super-spreader. Comedians like to say that they killed, but Im pretty confident most of them dont actually want anyone to die. If nothing else, it is a bad business model to kill off your customers. I work for the ABC, so I have already lost a percentage of my audience to natural causes. I cant afford to lose any more.

I was disappointed but I didnt have any sense at the time that everything had changed forever. Maybe this is too much to ask, but I feel like life-changing moments should feel like life-changing moments. They should come with some sort of trumpeter and an announcement: From this moment on, your life will never be the same again. Turns out sometimes life-changing moments dont come with a bang, they come with a resigned shrug. Things changed so quickly, and in some ways so permanently, that it is hard to remember what normal really felt like back then. All I know is that there were some things I did without thinking that I will never do again.

Five days before Melbourne was cancelled I was doing a Sunday afternoon line-up show with other comedians at a suburban pub in Adelaide. It was a fun gig, but being a pub, the room we were performing in hadnt been purpose-built for comedy. I am not complainingmost places you perform in as a comedian arent purpose-built for comedy. For the rest of my shows in Adelaide I was performing in a tent in the middle of an amusement park, so I was grateful that today I had walls and a roof and didnt have to time my punchlines between teenagers screaming on a roller-coaster.

The room was a long thin space that held a couple of hundred people with an aisle down the middle for them to access their seats. As a comedian its not ideal to have an aisle down the middle of a show, as it means the main place you would normally perform to has no audience sitting in it. It also makes it very hard to stage dive at the end of a successful set. Most importantly, if something happens in that aisle it is likely to catch your eye.

The other problem with the setup of the room was that there were only two ways in, one door right at the back and one right at the front, which meant that once the show started a patron entering from the front would have to walk past the stage right into the performers eye-line to get to their seat. For this reason, once the show kicked off most people would only enter from the door at the back. Most.

I was the final act for the afternoon. About five minutes into my 20-minute set, one bloke carrying six beers burst through the front door and started slowly walking across the area in front of the stage. He immediately had my attention, because he had everyones attention. Every single eye in the room was on him, but he didnt notice because he was staring at something much more precious to him: the beers. Id never seen such laser focus. He did not want to spill even one single drop. If you want to be happy in life, find someone who stares at you the way this man stared at his tray of beer.

I tried to get the audiences attention back on my jokes, but to no avail. I was fighting a losing battle. I had lost them to something more fascinating. Sorry, Wil, I know you are trying to entertain us with your carefully crafted jokes and satirical observations about society, but this guy is trying to balance at least two more beers than he should have comfortably attempted on a tray. We need to see how this ends.

I didnt blame the crowd. I got it, I was fascinated too, and thats what I love about stand-up comedy, when something happens in the room that will never happen again. So I figured if you cant beat them, join them. I took the microphone out of the stand and stepped off the front of the stage into the aisle and started following him. I dont know what I was thinking; I wasnt really, I was just in the moment. I didnt know the destination, but I had set out on the journey. I expected it to be a short trip: surely you would only come in the front door in this situation if your seat was right down the front? Surely.

He walked past the first row, the second row, the third row, and kept walking. So I kept walking too. We were now already far enough back that he should have definitely entered through the rear door, and he didnt show any signs of slowing down. When he got to the middle of the room I couldnt believe this was still happening. I thought about heading back to the stage. But just as I was about to retreat, the spotlight caught the top of his bald shiny head and it seemed like a sign. I felt like a wise man following a star, although I am sure that some would mount the argument that this story does not involve a wise man, or a star.