Justin Hamilton



"There's always something going on," Justin Hamilton says cheerfully. "I'm up in Sydney doing a week's worth of gigs at the Comedy Store at the moment." It's his warm-up for Adelaide, a precursor to him appearing at the Rhino Room during the Fringe.

"In a way it get better and better, working with mates, becoming part of the gang. I think the more known you get the more promoters know who works well together, so you get better gigs to perform on."

And, as it happens, Hamilton brings with him a bunch of new material not yet seen at the Adelaide Fringe.

"Basically I've written three shows for the Melbourne comedy festival, I've been given a Moosehead Award [which would seem to argue that it's an important award. After all, they'd hardly call something a 'Mooseehead' if it were trivial, I'm guessing]... they're stand-alone shows and they tell stories, three big stories, but if you see them all together it's one big story. I guess the way it works for me is that I can tell the story but without the context."

He admits he finds it easy enough to organize his hour onstage, even when caught up in the flow of a good rave.

"Yes, you can go different directions with it, and it's easy, especially when you do it all the time anyway," he laughs. "You just throw something out and think its good."

And then there's every standup comedian's favourite, the heckler, or the one person loud in the crowd. "I was at the Hobart comedy festival and there was this one woman, it's like she was a DVD extra, she just kept on at me," he recalls. "Then she just kept winking at me and came up afterward for a chat. I was rather surprised, but I quite like something strange, where something happens completely left of centre."

Hamilton has very firm views on the Fringe becoming an annual event. Like most people, I've been conducting a bit of a straw poll on the topic. So far I've met only two out of about 40 who don't like the idea. "The Fringe going annual is a great thing," he says enthusiastically, "but I guess it couldn't have been done sooner. I have a mate who wanted to know why we'd want to came and bleed the town dry every year rather than every two years. His take is that comedians come to Adelaide and get all the box office receipts... [errr, it is pretty much like that, isn't it?]

"Heaps of money comes into Adelaide, gets pumped in, it's good for the scene," he protests.

And as he points out, there's not umlimited opportunities for people in his line of work. I murmur something about 'The Glasshouse' being canned. "I suppose the prime concern now is where are we going to get something like that," he agrees. "Something that was so off the wall, not exactly political, but not shying away from it either."



Justin Hamilton performs at the Rhino Room until Sat 31 March. See the Prize Frenzy(tm)