Day 41 - October 10th

Day 41 - October 10th
________ hahahahahahahahahahaha
Aristocrats @ Station 59 - best comedy night ever, this night reminded me why I love drinking

        This card was the only bit of information in the deck that I've had to censor, but I can tell you that it was a name there, before all the 'hahaha's. The name belongs to a person who I kissed that night, who isn't really around comedy any more, but who I thought might not want to be reminded of some very poor decisions they made six years ago. I know I don't, and yet somehow here I am.

        Station 59 was the first place in Melbourne where I felt at home. It was a shitty pub in Richmond that survived because the owner, a fireman at the station across the road, offered discounts to his fireman buddies, and filled the six rooms upstairs with illegal lodgers who paid him rent in cash. The pub had an open mic comedy night every Wednesday, and the 40 year old man who ran it used to hold court to groups of mesmerized open mic comics, usually 20 years his junior, in the beer garden after the show every week. I was immediately in love with his “band-of-rejects-against-the-world” rhetoric, especially after he gave me my first gig in Melbourne on my second day in the city.
        Eventually us new comics started doing other open mics, which is what you need to do to get better, and we realised that our beloved leader wasn't the revolutionary figure we thought he was. It took me about a year to figure this out though, and in October 2012 I was still well and truly enamoured.

        The Aristocrats night that I'm talking about here was a night of comedy where every comic would come on stage and have three minutes (if I remember correctly) to tell their own, ideally improvised version of the classic 'Aristocrats' joke. The basic structure is a family walk into a talent agent's office with an act to show the agent, he tells them to go for it, and they proceed to do the most awful, heinous things imaginable to each other. When they finish, the agent says, “what do you call this act?!”, to which they reply, “The Aristocrats!”
        The point of the joke is for the comedian to improvise the bits in the middle, filling it with the most awful things they can think of, before hitting the ready-made punchline at the end.
        I'm absolutely sure that of the 30-or-so 'comics' who performed on that night, we wouldn't have had ten minutes of material between us. There was barely a scrap of actual comedy on that stage all night, just a bunch of whatever the opposite of performative woke-ness is – all racial slurs and sexist crap and naughty words that excite young morons. Offensiveness for the sake of being offensive, raging against the machine we imagined was trying to shut us down, but wasn't.
        But it wasn't about the offensiveness per se, that stuff was just a ritual, like a secret handshake, to prove your membership to the club. That night was about the community that we were a part of, and I remember it being one of the happiest nights of my life up until that point because I knew that night that I loved stand up and I had found a bunch of people who loved it too. People who I could share it with. I was sure we would be going on this journey together for years to come, and I finally felt like I belonged somewhere.

        I've not seen most of those people in years. A couple of them are dead now, and most of the rest of them have quit comedy. The leader figure still runs his open mic room, giving hope and outrage – and to be fair, some meaningful outlet – to his entourage of losers, drug addicts and borderline homeless people who congregate around him. The venue is different now though, Station 59 the pub is long gone.
        I did a split show in the 2013 Melbourne Comedy Festival at Station 59 with the inimitable Rob Caruana, we called it 'Two For The Price Of Free'. A friend of mine saw the poster for that show on Facebook in April 2018 after I posted it nostalgically as part of the promotion for my show in that year's festival. He took his group of friends to Station 59, having read the 5-year-old poster and thinking it was current. I was bummed that they didn't make it to my show that night, but because of his mistake, I can now confirm that Station 59 has been converted into a Mexican restaurant.

Click here to read the next part - Day 42 - October 18th