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Peter Berner.
 "If
I could put everything to music, that would play out much better,"
quips satirist Peter Berner about bringing stand-up comedy into
a cabaret environment. "I think there's a place for comedy and
satire," he continues seriously. "I think mine's really just
a good old fashioned comedy show and hopefully people at the
Cabaret Festival will find it in their heart to come and have
a look... I try to mix it up, as much for myself as for the
audience, to keep myself interested in what I'm doing."
Berner admits it's been close to five years since he did any notable live stand-up, but focusing on Triple M breakfast radio and presenting ABC TV's 'BackBerner' and the obsessive's favourite game show 'The Einstein Factor' hasn't diminished his taste for a live audience. How important is it for successful radio or TV based comedians to return to live stand-up comedy?
"Very, very!" Berner enthuses, "and I regret it's been as long as it has been between drinks for me, because I think doing stand-up regularly fuels your enthusiasm to do the other media. The thing you don't get with television or with radio is that immediacy that you get with a live audience. I feed on that as a performer, and the audience hopefully feed off my enthusiasm. I then take that with me into every other aspect of what I do."
Given his continued presence on television and radio, I ask, almost not expecting an answer, which of these three media is Peter Berner's preferred working environment.
"Well they all have different pleasures to offer," Berner begins diplomatically. They all give you something..." he suddenly cuts himself off. "You know what? To be brutally honest, stand-up! Stand-up, because it's me by myself. In television you're surrounded by producers, make-up, wardrobe, writers, networks. The same with radio, but a little less because it's a little more immediate. Radio's half way between television and stand-up, it has the immediacy of stand-up, but there are other parameters, being the commercial environment that it is."
One of the things Peter Berner likes most about working in front of a live audience is the lack of limitations on his material. "The difference with radio and TV is that you're playing to the unseen," Berner explains. "You can end up in someone's living room whether they mean to have you on their radio or TV or not, so you have to be cautious because you don't control the environment where the material is being presented. Whereas in the live environment the audience is there to see you, they know what you're about so they tend to lean a little bit more your way. They think like you, which is why you attracted them, I guess..."
Whether in the critically lauded ABC program BackBerner or in his stand-up, Peter Berner has never been shy about having a few clean swings at Australian politicians, state governments or billion dollar corporations. What is it that makes such big figures such easy targets?
"It's basically the jester in the court of the king," Berner surmises. "The jester is the one person who can tell the king the truth and tell it like it is. You don't behead the jester because everyone's laughing at him, but there's an underlying sense that the jester gets away with saying what we're all thinking. That was the beauty of 'BackBerner', of 'CNNNN' and other shows like that. Politicians are our leaders and we look to our leaders to lead us, and it's our job as satirists to keep the bastards honest, more so than the Democrats."
To continue the analogy, does the growing number of court jesters in our society (comedians, satirists, writers) indicate there's something rotten at the core? Berner laughs. "Yeah, the more jesters, the more troubled the times."
While it's been a while since Peter Berner performed in Adelaide doing stand-up comedy for the public, he admits he has been over few times to do corporate gigs. A good way of paying the bills, corporate gigs are not always something comedians admit to, but Peter Berner is candid about it all, and he appreciates the irony that many of the corporations willing to hire him in past were the same ones he'd be firing at on 'BackBerner'.
"It's a tough one to reconcile," Berner muses, "but as Lenny Bruce, a great comic I admire, said 'at the end of the day I'm a hustler, not a moralist'. Plus even at corporate events, there's still that undercurrent of the smart arse, the undercurrent of the niggler, that says 'well if you're going to allow me in then you have to accept that although I might not unload both barrels, I might personally shoot into the ceiling a couple of times'."
Steven Hocking
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Peter Berner appears Fri 18 and Sat 19 June in the Playhouse.
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