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  And in the meantime, if you’re struggling and you can’t get out, you’re still living at home, you’re stuck in a dead-end job, make the plan. But find an ally. In every tiny town or workplace there will always be one. It’s 2017. Hint: It’s probably the lady wearing the most jewellery. Find that person and get it off your chest. Say the words ‘I’m gay’ out loud to them. You’ll feel better.

  And then get to Melbourne, find me on the dancefloor at Poof Doof and let’s have a drink. I’ll probably pash you.

  Because if I could choose, I would choose to be gay every time. Hands down.

  And if you can read the final sentence of this chapter again but finish with your best Elphaba-from-Wicked-at-the-end-of-’Defying-Gravity’ ‘Ah-ah-ah-Aaaah!’, that’d be even better . . . and gayer!

  7

  When It All Goes Wrong

  Comedians absolutely love talking about their worst gigs. (To be honest we reaaallly love talking about other comics’ bad gigs. That’s our favourite.) Bad gigs are something we love talking about backstage, it’s something we love talking about in interviews, it’s something we love writing about. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because a bad gig is so excruciating that the only way of dealing with it is by laughing. At least we can if the bloody audience doesn’t! Imagine it, standing in front of a room of people and trying to make them laugh . . . and they don’t. Normally when people say the phrase ‘it’s the stuff nightmares are made of’ they’re exaggerating. But comedians aren’t. One of the most famous fears in the world is public failure. And a bad stand-up gig is public failure of epic proportions.

  Often the worst gigs aren’t because of hecklers. A lot of people assume this but, to be honest, in this day of modern stand-up comedy, hecklers aren’t such a big thing. I think stand-up has really evolved through television and YouTube, and audiences are far more savvy than they used to be. I will say some comics are more partial to hecklers than others. Some even actively encourage them. But I don’t think I’ve ever really had hecklers at my solo shows, probably because my audiences are always so attractive, and classy, and intelligent. (Oh, for Christ’s sake – what am I trying to win you over for? You’ve already bought the fucking book.) I also talk extremely fast on stage – so it’s hard for a heckler to even find an opening.

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind the odd heckle. And I’ve certainly had my share. Sometimes it’s been dumb shit like ‘Faggot!’, which is just the most stupid insult and sets you up for such an easy come-back. ‘Yes, thank you, I know! You’re just stating the facts! Everyone knows that – it would be like if you walked out on stage and I heckled you by calling out, “Cunt!” – we know!’ Zing! Saucer of milk for table Joel Creasey!

  But I do think we learn more from our worst gigs than our best gigs. Joan Rivers even told me about a few horror gigs she’d had. And now whenever I’m having a particularly tough gig, I tell myself, ‘This could’ve happened to Joan Rivers too.’

  Often a bad gig is your fault – your timing might be off, or you may have made a bad judgement call on a joke early on and gotten the audience offside. Sometimes a bad gig can be the audience’s fault. But all too often, a bad gig can be the event organiser’s fault – sometimes a booking is badly matched to the comic and they just don’t like you. (Let’s just say I won’t get invited to perform at Margaret Court’s Christmas do.) Just recently, after performing stand-up at a travel agents’ awards evening to a crowd who were far more interested in drinking than listening to me talk, I had the following conversation with the event organiser post-gig.

  Them: Would you like to stay for a drink?

  Me: I would genuinely rather stab myself in the face.

  Always the consummate professional.

  One of my worst gigs was the latter – event organisation crisis. I think sometimes people think you can just grab a microphone and start performing stand-up wherever, like a musician. But you can’t, there’s a science to comedy; people need to be seated, engaged, there needs to be a mic, a stage. At this horror gig, I was twenty years old and my dad had got me booked to perform at the Duxton Hotel’s staff Christmas party. This is what is called a ‘corporate gig’. The fee is a lot higher at a corporate gig, but that’s because there’s a lot more room for error and a hell of a lot more pressure. At a comedy club people are expecting and wanting to hear comedy. At a corporate . . . well, they usually just want to drink and possibly fingerbang a receptionist.

  The hotel had hired staff from another hotel to run the place for the night so that the entire Duxton staff could attend the party and get fucking loose. They used the hotel ballroom as the function space and they really went all out. Sadly, my own yearly staff Christmas party usually involves me alone on the couch necking a bottle of red wine sans glass and heckling Rhonda Burchmore and Marina Prior on Carols by Candelight.

  Back to the hotel gig – I know what you’re thinking . . . what could possibly go wrong? An extremely inexperienced comedian performing stand-up to five hundred drunk hotel staff at Christmas? A lot, as it turns out.

  I rocked up with Ashleigh for my sound check in the afternoon while they were still setting up the room. I immediately noticed there was no stage – and it didn’t look like they were constructing one either. Problem number one. The organiser said, ‘Well, you can perform in the middle of the dance floor.’ Only being visible to a quarter of the room is not ideal for stand-up. Look, it’s fine for Jesus Christ Superstar – Arena Spectacular, not fine for twenty-year-old Joel Creasey. A lot of stand-up requires a connection with the audience, and being able to make eye contact with people really does help.

  But I didn’t have the confidence then to back myself as the expert and say, ‘No, look, it’ll work better with a stage.’ So I instead thought to myself, Okay, I’ll make it work, I’ll keep turning so everyone can see me, I’ll just. Make. It. Work.

  Problem number two: the microphone didn’t work. The sound guy said, ‘Don’t worry, it will work for the gig.’ But this was a cheap microphone, and you can always tell a cheap microphone: if it’s really light, that’s the giveaway. If it feels like a SingStar microphone, it’s probably not going to be great for stand-up or vocals or any kind of performance that requires a decent fucking microphone. But the guy said again, ‘Seriously. Don’t worry, it will be fixed by the time you come back.’ So I thought, Okay. As I said, I couldn’t and didn’t want to argue, as I was also only twenty and it was one of my first corporate gigs and I was getting paid fifteen hundred dollars, which for me at that time was amazing money. (Janelle, who has done all the edits on this book, read that bit back and said, ‘Is fifteen hundred dollars not amazing money to you any more, arsehole?’ Just to be clear – yes, it is. That’s three thousand Macca’s cones!)

  So after my rehearsal I went across the road with Ashleigh to grab something to eat and wait for the gig. I was due to perform at 6.15 pm, which I thought was a little early for stand-up, given that the event itself started at six. But once again I was young, so I didn’t think too much of it.

  All the hotel staff were waiting eagerly in the foyer when they opened the ballroom at 6.05 pm. They all flooded in, full of excitement, very busy saying hi and grabbing drinks and telling each other, ‘Oh my God, Trish! You look amazing!’ (Obviously they weren’t used to seeing each other out of their hotel uniforms.) To be fair, Trish did look great. I could tell immediately there was going to be a bit of frisky Christmas party action behind the bain-maries later that night. (Side note: I once hooked up with someone at a Christmas party in a bush. Never behind a bain-marie.)

  No one was even close to sitting at their tables when I was due to go on, and the room was big, a proper ballroom. At 6.15 pm on the dot, though, the hotel CEO – who was clearly a stickler for punctuality despite opening the doors five fucking minutes late (probably from years and years of experience refusing people complimentary late check-outs) – wanted to get started with the entertainment portion of the evening. So he jumped on the mic –
which, surprise, surprise, had not been fixed – and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage comedian Joel Creasey.’

  First of all, nobody knew who the fuck ‘comedian Joel Creasey’ was. Second of all, no one could hear the CEO thanks to the microphone, which might as well have been a carrot or a shoe. And third of all, nobody was even sitting down in a style suitable for being a receptive audience for a live comedy performance.

  Not to fucking mention the balloons . . . (Sorry, having some serious PTSD here.) What they’d done, between me going in for my sound check and the guests arriving for the event, was fill the ceiling above the dance floor with helium balloons. Normally that would be fine, except for the fact that attached to each of those helium balloons was a length of ribbon. Long, curly ribbon that hung from the bottom of each balloon to about the height of my knee. So on top of the fact that no one knew I was performing and they couldn’t hear me – they couldn’t see me either as I was literally enshrouded by a jungle of fucking multicoloured ribbons. Seriously, all you could see was my feet. It felt like that scene from Finding Nemo when Marlin and Dory are trapped in the school of jellyfish – only this was more painful.

  The only person watching me was the CEO and he was glaring at me through the ribbons. He also happened to be the person who was paying me, so at least he got to enjoy the show.

  I didn’t know what to do. I was eyeballing Ashleigh up at the back of the room and she was just staring back at me, wide-eyed. I started panicking, and in that panic I decided the best thing to do was to start bagging the hotel. I started going on about the hotel next door and how much better it was than this one, thinking that would be a good way to get a rise out of people. That didn’t work. The staff clearly did not give a shit – there were free drinks to be consumed (or they agreed).

  So then I decided it would be a good idea to just start screaming at the top of my lungs, thinking that might make people pay attention, but I didn’t really think it through beyond that. I just started screaming and when they did turn around, I panicked, dropped the microphone, grabbed Ashleigh’s hand – and ran! So all any of the staff at the Duxton Hotel saw at their 2010 Christmas party was the feet of a young gay boy as he screamed his head off in a thick sea of helium balloon ribbons and scampered out of the room. I’ve had similar sex dreams.

  To be honest, no, it wasn’t a great gig, but I’ve never been paid faster before or since. And it’s taught me to demand a strict no-balloon policy in my live performance contracts and to always – always – wear good shoes on stage. Just in case they’re the only things the audience can see.

  What might pleasantly surprise some people to learn is that I’ve never really experienced a great deal of homophobia on the road as a touring stand-up comedian. I mean, yes, it has happened, I’ve had the odd gay heckle, or someone has posted online saying they’re uncomfortable with me being gay, all the standard stuff. ‘Go die, faggot’, all those really impeccably crafted, Shakespeare-esque slurs. They don’t faze me though. To quote my favourite drag queen, Jinkx Monsoon: it’s really just water off a duck’s back.

  But never on the road has it been particularly bad. I mean, obviously I was once literally chased out of a town by homophobes, so maybe that took up my own personal quota of homophobia for the next fifty (thousand) years.

  Sorry, what? You got chased out of a town by homophobes?

  Yep. Totes did. But I’ll get to that in the next chapter.

  First let me tell you about the strange, thinly veiled but quite malicious homophobia I experienced to my face from a man in a small rural town. That sounds like fun . . . right?

  I was on tour with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Roadshow, which is a really awesome gig for comedians. It’s a mini gala that tours to over one hundred cities and towns across Australia each year. They pick five top comedians who have performed at the festival that year – one MC and four comedians, a mix of up and comers and comedy legends. The cast changes depending on the comedians’ availability, and there are often multiple casts touring different states at the same time. I did my first roadshow when I was nineteen and toured with the show for the next couple of years. Being part of the roadshow was an absolute career highlight. I got to experience towns in Australia you’ve never even heard of. Not only that, but I got to perform in them. As an avid fan of vanilla slice, it also really helped me review the entire vanilla slice spectrum Australia has to offer. Yackandandah is my pick of the bunch.

  In 2013, the roadshow ended up in a teeny tiny town in rural New South Wales, very much a farming community. We stayed at the one motel in town and the venue we were performing in was a shearing shed. Someone rocked up on horseback. Another person arrived on a tractor. One guy even turned up on a ride-on lawnmower fuelled by casual racism and Carlton Draught . . . this is how regional we’re talking.

  I do like performing in odd venues, I’ve performed in burlesque bars, in rum distilleries, on stages where the lighting has been provided by construction lights, in tents, on beaches. After a couple of drinks, I’ve performed unrequested at every single nightclub I’ve ever attended.

  On that tour I was the headline comedian and during the day I was asked to go and do an interview at the local radio station. Our tour manager, the gorgeous Katie Minchin, took me to meet a local businessman, an older guy with grey hair, who locked up shop, went next door and grabbed a pair of keys, then walked me down the street to a small shed which happened to be . . . the radio station. He unlocked the place, flicked on the fluorescent lights and then turned the radio station on for the day. Which means if you happened to be listening to the local channel that day, apart from my five-minute interview, all you would have been listening to was static. I like to imagine people sitting in their cars . . . waiting . . . wishing . . . for anything to be broadcast.

  Katie and I were standing around casually preparing for the interview. It was all very relaxed and, to be honest, I was already thinking about the nap I was going to take later that day, post-vanilla slice. But then just before the interview began, the businessman/radio broadcaster/possibly local mayor and headmaster said to me, ‘Now, I hope there won’t be the same nonsense we had last year.’

  The roadshow had being going to this town for a couple of years, but I had no idea what he was talking about so I asked, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, look, a few people were a bit upset about the topics discussed on stage last year.’

  I said, ‘Oh, okay . . .’ having no idea who had been on the tour the year before. As he was talking and going about setting up I started to google the tour from the year before to see if it might come up. ‘Well, what were the topics discussed?’ I asked, thinking it might have been something really horrible or inappropriate. I know my limits when performing for a country town, I’m not going to give them my most graphic material. Perhaps one of the previous year’s comics had. In a way, I started to empathise with him as it does bug me when a comic doesn’t know their audience.

  The old man said, ‘It was one of the female comedians.’

  That’s when I got the first red flag that this wasn’t going to end well, but I took the bait and asked what she had been talking about.

  He said, ‘Well, she was talking about her –’ and he got really uncomfortable ‘– lifestyle.’

  I said ‘Sorry, what?’ but by then Google had downloaded (thanks, country internet), and I saw that he was talking about DeAnne Smith, a brilliant comedian from Canada who just so happens to be a lesbian.

  This guy continued, ‘Yeah, you know, lifestyles . . . people around here aren’t really comfortable with that kind of strange, you know, weird behaviour. We had a council meeting afterwards and we decided we aren’t comfortable with it.’ Then he disappeared back into the studio to start setting up in there and begin the interview.

  At this point I turned to Katie, speechless. She looked equally shocked but immediately said, ‘Look, Joel, you don’t have to do this interview if you don�
�t want to, we can call it off, you don’t have to be anywhere near this guy at all, he’s disgusting.’

  And yes, I did feel gross, as well as a little embarrassed. I felt extremely nervous because I was the headline comic and it was pretty clear I was gay. I don’t think this guy had worked it out yet because obviously he was one of the dumbest of fucks to ever exist. But the audience there in the shearing shed were sure going to work it out pretty quick smart. Y’know, when I started talking about having sex with men . . . (Pro tip: that’s a good way of telling if someone is gay. Also a Grindr account is a bit of a giveaway, too.)

  Thinking again of the desperate farming community waiting for its five-minute daily broadcast, I decided I would go in and do the interview. And it was very uncomfortable, because he eventually clicked that I was gay – probably when I spent five minutes talking about Bette Midler being a major influence in my life.

  I left the interview and Katie said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to get to the bottom of this.’

  I went back to my room for that nap I had totally forgotten about.