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...