Review: Tripping Over Myself — A window into the world of Australian comedy

Micallef narrates his memoir like he’s playing a character on his comedy show.

After Tripping Over Myself, I rolled over, sat up, and put ‘Shaun Micallef’ into my search bar. I had constructed a specific image of the author in my head — an effect of having him monologue to me about his life and career for 314 pages — and found that he wasn’t the bumbling, foolhardy, awkward but benign figure I’d expected him to be. He’s very dignified, with dark Mufasa eyebrows that make him look serious and important when he’s not grinning with glee. He’s also very good at Twitter.

When the book is published, though, his face will be plastered all over the front cover, and I expect that this will change the sound of his voice. Lower it a few pitches, maybe, and give it a kind of cunning nuance drawn directly from his eyebrows. What I’m getting at is that Micallef narrates his memoir like he’s playing a character on his comedy show; either out of modesty, or because it’s his particular brand of humour, his tone is often gawkish, haphazard, and always self-deprecating (at one point he claims to have “the IQ of Lennie from Of Mice and Men”).

However, when he analyses comedy and his relationship to it, his cleverness slips through, almost helplessly; it’s these lucid passages that seamlessly joins the anecdotal structure of the book.

The first time he does this is when he’s seven years old, and someone makes a quip that has “barely the shape of a joke or gag anywhere,” but it doesn’t matter. Comedy is about making people laugh, and making people laugh is “about having good humour rather than being humorous.” In those early situations, the point of laughter seems so clear: to “make the day seem a lot less miserable than it probably was.”

As he grows up, so does his grasp of comedy. You can hide things in a joke, he discovers — wicked things, impolite things, a double entendre, an insult — and with the audience’s laughter is an “implicit approval of the transgressive thing you’d done or said”. This is probably why so many comedians get in trouble for jokes that err on the nasty side, especially if they’re riffing on politics. But like every other contrarian teenager, Micallef takes advantage of this rebellion-by-laughter and embarks on the first step of his comedic journey: university revues.

Doing the law revue, he meets his lifelong rival, Francis Greenslade, who’s “posh” and “sophisticated” and had such a fantastical childhood he may as well have “been written by Evelyn Waugh.” (Micallef, who grew up in suburban Adelaide, is his natural foil.) The two of them would grow to become comedic partners in various productions. There’s an article on Greenslade in the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled “More than just ‘the idiot in a funny hat’,” which nods to their interesting friendship.

After graduating, Micallef dips into law for a couple of unsatisfactory years before moving on to the cutthroat world of 1990s TV comedy. He narrates for us the workings of this industry: where some editors will trash your work for poor grammar, and others for usage of big words; where comedians sit together at lunch to torture laughs out of each other; where white men in business suits sit behind a mic and make farting noises. It’s all very rigorous and dramatic and overwhelming and if you stay long enough it leads you to that uncomfortable, inescapable question — why? What are you doing with your life?

It’s a question many comedians have (dare I say, every comedian has) grappled with. Micallef refers to Gershon Legman, “that famous cultural critic and degenerate,” who has a rather morbid, depressing theory on the comedian’s psyche. Legman wrote that comedy is borne from “the subject of [the comedian]’s most desperate fears,” that the comedian’s “true guilt is … concealed from the audience” through joking and making them laugh. Similarly, but rather more cynically, Bo Burnham has a self-debasing song about that which draws a comedian to the stage:

Have you ever been to a birthday party for children?
And one of the children
Won’t stop screaming
‘cause he’s just a little attention attractor;
When he grows up
To be a comic or actor
He’ll be rewarded
For never maturing
For never understanding or learning
That every day
Can’t be about him
There’s other people,
You selfish asshole.

(from Art is Dead, Bo Burnham)

Micallef, aspiring comics will be glad to hear, is more upbeat than Legman and more sympathetic than Burnham. This entire book is a testament to his search for an answer — that despite the humiliations, the almost-successes, the rampant censorship of the ABC and stiff humourlessness of Australian politicians, despite his idol calling him up only to ask for the number of his biggest rival — that despite it all, when he’s up on television, joking to hundreds of thousands of viewers, he knows that he’s standing in “exactly the right spot at exactly the right time … [it’s a] moment of perfect synchronicity.”