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Adam Hills.
 Adam Hills laughs when I ask whether his upcoming Fringe show 'Characterful' represents a move away from his tried-and true stand up technique and a move toward, say, a more Con-The-Fruiterer-style of character-based comedy. "No, it's definitely still Adam-as-Adam talking about stuff," he assures me. "I've had a few people say that to me recently, so perhaps I should have rethought the name of the show. But there are a couple of ideas behind the name: one is that I became a Godfather last year..."
Culturally or criminally?
"In the cultural sense: I didn't pop a cap in someone's ass," he laughs. "So the show's kind of about what I want to show and teach my godson, and at the end of the day what I want to say to him is 'whatever you do in life, just do it with character'. It seems to be vanishing everywhere: in an interview Martin Scorcese was saying that in Hollywood he can't find actors because no-one in LA has character on their face anymore; they've all had it Botoxed out. There's a lot of blandness taking over, so basically the show is an hour of people and places that I've been that have got character about them."
It's a good time to remind us: from the first rumblings of the Intelligent Design "debate" to the Federal Government's definition of what constitutes a family, Australia's not exactly a hotbed of free-thinking individualism in 2006. "I agree! And that's what a lot of the show is kinda trying to say."
Careful, you'll overlap with Rod Quantock's show.
"Well, his is more political - mine's more about being personally characterful. Like trying to save the English language from a dumbing down; and even the phrase 'dumbing down' is itself a dumbing down," he chuckles. "There's a big rant [in the show] about trying to save the word 'surreal'. If nothing else I'm hoping that people come to the show and then start using 'surreal' to describe things that are in fact truly surreal, as opposed to 'I went up to the bar to get a drink and there was one already there waiting for me, gee that was so surreal.' Actually, when I first started talking about this on stage I then had to actually explain to people what surreal actually meant and what surrealism was, and then people went 'oh, right, now I see.'
"I was in England for three months last year, which is where I developed this routine, and there was a great moment where I was talking about various words that had made it into the dictionary, like the word 'bouncebackability'. Part of the reason it got in there was that a sporting commentator in England had said that if he used it often enough, it'd get in the dictionary. And I stood on stage in this place called High Wickham and I said that as far as I was concerned that was not an appropriate criteria for a word being in the dictionary, and this guy down the front put his hand up and said 'um, it's criterion,'" Hills laughs. "I said 'that is superb: you've picked me up on misusing the English language in a routine about the misuse of the English language,' and he said 'yes, that's called irony.'"
Andrew P Street
 | Adam Hills' 'Characterful' runs at the Freemasons Hall from Fri 3 March to Sun 12 March. |
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