Pause for thought

Jeff Neems can't help but interrupt the slow-talking Australian comedian Carl Barron.

Interviewing Australian comedian Carl Barron is no easy task.

It's not that he has nothing to say. Far from it.

Nor is he rude or uninteresting. Nope, he's a nice, friendly bloke, with a sharp wit.

What makes Barron, a visitor to last month's Comedy Festival in Auckland, such a tricky prospect to interview is the way he speaks. Don't worry, he's perfectly understandable, and he is very thoughtful with his answers.

The problem is he talks slowly - very slowly. And the slow, thoughtful answers are punctuated by long, silent pauses during which the thoughts running through my head are something like "geez, is he gonna say anything else?", "is that the finished answer?", and "crikey, is he still on the line?".

"I think you're my last one," he muses quietly when I phone him, the last cab off the rank during an afternoon of interviews.

"It's, ummm . . . not normal to talk about yourself for so long," he concedes, introducing the first of many peculiar pauses.

So it's difficult then, talking about yourself all day?

"Well, no . . . I find it easy . . . but I think `this can't be good, talkin' about yourself all the time'."

Uh-huh. Strange - I'd have thought it was a piece of the proverbial cake for a comedian, especially Barron, who's been dubbed "Australia's funniest man".

"Well . . . you end up going out afterwards, meetin' friends, and you still think the interview's goin' . . . "

Oh, right . . .

" . . . and you're blabbing on about yourself," he continues, " . . . thinkin' everyone's a reporter."

Every time Barron pauses, I think I should be asking another question - interrupt, even? - and then off he goes again, picking up the sentence where he left it, continuing in his most Australian of nasal drawling monotones.

Queensland-born Barron, aged 40-something, has been making a living out of comedy for more than a decade. He's a regular on TV's Rove Live, and has appeared on the cult NRL programme, The Footy Show. He's a big drawcard across the Tasman, and has performed around the world. In his homeland, he's sold 200,000 copies of his Carl Barron Live DVD, which puts him ahead of Scottish legend Billy Connolly, in terms of stand-up comedy DVD sales.

It's his observational and personal comedic style which makes Barron such a popular figure. During a televised segment of the Comedy Festival, Barron managed to make some rather simple wisecracks about the predicament of having your undies wedged between your butt cheeks, and the need to lift a leg to alleviate the problem. It was very funny, honest and sincere, and it summed up why so many people from differing walks of life find this bald-headed slightly weedy Australian so engaging.

"I don't get sick of performing, I was just saying before to someone the travelling is tiring. There's pressure. You have to be funny, come up with new stuff. People come to your shows, they expect . . . they expect . . . they expect a fair amount."

By now, I'm starting to work out this pause mechanism, er, thing he's got going on. This really is how the guy talks. It's not an act, and if you've heard him before - perhaps at the Comedy Festival - or maybe seen one of his DVDs, you'll know the stand-up routines really aren't that different.

During the Gala performance at May's Comedy Festival, Barron says he concentrated on "making them (the audience) laugh and doin' what feels comfortable".

"The reality is there's always someone funnier than you . . ."

Really?

" . . . and there's always someone who's not as funny as you," he says. "You're backstage, and you hear these big laughs, and you think `oh my God, I hope I get those big ones he's getting'."

Barron believes on multi-comedian bills, one performer will almost inevitably stand out from the rest.

"Sometimes people like the weirdest and unfunny things you do - subject matter, or the shape of your ears."

The Auckland Festival is one of Barron's favourites, and he deems it "close knit and friendly".

"A lot of other festivals around the world, they feel competitive. The New Zealand one feels a lot more laid-back."

Not unlike Barron's understated, easy-going performance style. Or manner of speaking, for that matter.

So, as an Australian, is it easier for him to get laughs over here, given the cultural similarities and "spirit of mateship"?

"Yeah, yeah."

Long pause.

"Yeah, possibly. I know it's another country, but my experience of coming to New Zealand, I don't feel like I'm going into a major cultural kind of, ahhh, shift, y'know? There are differences, of course: I reckon you're more modest and reserved people, in general."

Australians, he reckons, are seen by the rest of the world - New Zealand excepted - as laid-back, "but then you come to New Zealand and you guys are more laid-back than we are".

"Suddenly, we're the loud Americans," he notes dryly.

"Quite ignorantly, I imagine my accent's not gonna stick out, y'know? (Pause) Yours sounds different, but not radically different. Aussies can make 10 words sound like one."

He has, he concedes, even given some thought to moving here permanently.

"In Australia, a lot of people know me, so it's hard to get a bit of, um, hard to walk around without feeling people aren't looking at you."

So he's stopped on the street for autographs and photos?

"Oh yeah, that started happening 10 years ago . . . done a lot . . . toured a lot . . . "

Ahh, right.

" . . . DVDs, y'know."

Bugger, I interrupted again.

"So," I ask, making the most of another pause, "the sense of anonymity is quite enjoyable for you here?"

"Yeah," he says, surprisingly without pausing, "but I've stuffed that up, doin' the galas and stuff."

Barron says comedy has allowed him to meet plenty of people, and it's an aspect of his career he enjoys.

He doesn't care about the "Australia's funniest man" title, and believes many comedians or performers would say the same thing, if they were bestowed such a tag.

"I wonder who wrote that?" he says.

"Some gushy media type, who kept interrupting?" I offer.

"Yeah, exactly . . . you might know them," he jokes.

Carl Barron performs at Hamilton's Clarence Street Theatre on July 9. Tickets are available from www.ticketdirect.co.nz

- © Fairfax NZ News

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