Exile on Swanston Street

“April”, according to T.S Eliot, “is the cruelest month”, and I’m inclined to agree with him. Shortly after that cracker of an opening line, “The Waste Land” mentions the mixing of memory and desire: that’s the thing that makes April cruel to me, but not in ways Eliot imagined. In the northern hemisphere, April breeds “lilacs out of the dead land”, but here it is the time of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Once upon a time, MICF was the highlight of my year.

I have lived a few lives, and in one of them, I was a stand-up comic. I never expected to make a living out of it, because I knew fairly early on that my material lacked the broader appeal that could give you an income. I played well to the back of the room, but I did it well enough to get paid, to collect a couple of industry awards, and to be involved with other people’s award-winning shows. I took it overseas a couple of times. I had some troughs, but a good few lofty peaks.

Comedy used to be my world. In a parallel other life, I wrote it for a living. Performing it was something else, another realm in itself. To be part of it, I felt I had to earn my place. I can pin down the very moment when I knew that I’d done that – it was the night Anthony Morgan decided I was worth talking to. That gave me all the validation I would ever need. I had proof that I had a right to be around the people I most wanted to socialise with. They were my tribe. This, for the most part, was a group of intelligent, interesting people, with a healthy appetite for popular intoxicants. Why wouldn’t I be delighted to be in their company?

In April, tribal membership paid off bigtime. For nearly a month, I could mingle with my peers, see their shows and engage in a measure of riotous living. I could mingle freely with the international guests, because I was in the same profession. Hanging out with the famous was never a priority, but I find it interesting that to this day, there are people who appear regularly on TV that I owe drinks to. In April, I could feel like I owned this city. I wasn’t comedy royalty, but I could have made a solid claim to being comedy landed gentry.

Life changed… it can do that. 

My writing career evaporated, some other things went bad and funniness became thin on the ground. I was no longer able to live the life of a comic, and I drifted away from the scene. I became a civilian. The golden ticket was withdrawn, and for years, there was a big void in March and April. I learned to avoid the Festival precinct.

Three years ago, I was called back to active duty by friends I had worked with extensively in the past, but the experience was clouded by the death of my mother during our run. We did another show the next year, but my dad was dying then. It was hard to engage with the old world of laughs in a daze of grief and anxiety. I had a bit of a look around the venues, but couldn’t find the old buzz. The bars were full of the children of strangers, and I felt like a ghost.

Last year, MICF celebrated 30 years. It would have been good to catch up with old comrades, but I missed out on the big anniversary do. That hit me hard. It may have been down to being particularly vulnerable at the time, but it left me feeling as though all my years of involvement, the awards, and the whole experience had been meaningless. I know I am actually remembered, but a reminder would have been nice.

These days, I have another life, another tribe, another world… but sometimes the echoes of the old are harsh. 

In the ancient world, exile was a dreaded sentence. 
I understand why.