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Dave Hughes.
"I’m very happy to see the people of Adelaide can’t get enough of me!" says a little Aussie battler on hearing the news of his sell-out season at the Fringe.
We all know of Dave Hughes - we’ve probably all seen him on television - we’ve all heard his broadest Hughesian strine, delivered deadpan.
"It’s hard for me to say no," he responds when I suggest he’s one of the busiest lazy guys around. "It’s all in the family mentality, and you don’t know how long you’re here for." So he fills in his time doing breakfast radio in Melbourne, TV shows like ‘The Glasshouse’, and standup comedy on weekends.
"I love standup, I never wanna stop doing it, I won’t deny it. Doing standup comedy is just a hell of a lot of fun..."
"In a way it’s true though..." he confesses to the persona of the laziest man alive, "my girlfriend says I’m lazy in everything except my work."
So it must be hard pulling off a show with such an evocative title as ‘High Voltage’ I put to him. "It certainly is..." he fires back agreeably. "It’s funny how I can stand in the one spot for an hour. That’s not very ‘High Voltage’, is it? It’s ridiculous."
Part of the Hughes schtick is to confess to anything - everything. The more demeaning it is, the quicker he’ll agree that ‘of course, you’re right’. As we discuss what happens when a performance doesn’t go exactly to plan, it all becomes clear. An hour onstage can be a very long time.
"If it’s going really well you think ‘oh my God, it’s over’," he laughs. "Other nights I’ll have to pick on somebody, make fun of people in the front row. I mean, I know it’s a bit easy; some nights you’ll walk off stage not proud of yourself."
He becomes loquacious again as we discuss an aspect of the real Dave Hughes, not necessarily the same bloke you see on stage or on TV week after week. He is, for one thing, a football tragic; a lad who grew up close to the famous Carlton ground and will be a Carlton supporter until his dying day., It’s all about growing up in the culture he says, quite seriously, and I wonder for a half second whether his resort to comedy comes from being a shit footballer; "Carlton," he sighs. "Not much on on the horizon there, it’ll be another shit season, probably.
"Fooball’s a bit like reality television really," he offers
after the shortest of pauses. "After a while you wonder ‘why
do I bother with that?’."
Alex Wheaton
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Dave Hughes performs one extra show on Sat 6 March at Thebarton Theatre.
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