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SOURCE UNKNOWN
"You can actually hear the audience grip their seats and suck in their breath, because they're not quite sure where you're gonna go. I think they're more scared of what you're gonna say than you are."
Paul McDermott, former Doug Anthony Allstar/ Triple J Breakfast identity, and current host of ABC TV's Good News Week, has made his reputation doing comedy that cuts so close to the bone, it's deliciously sebversive. Every Friday night, in the monologues which introduce this comically-twisted, news-based game show, he dissects current events, exposing them for what they are.
A collection of these monologues has just been released, Paul McDermott Unplugged: The Good News Week Tapes Vol. 1. It opens with, what could be described as a Diana Spencer splatter joke. "Some jokes," explains McDermott, are "groaners- designed to make people groan. Or they're designed to make them laugh out loud, or designed to make people think. There's all different ways of writing a joke that will get different reactions, it depends on how you put them together to get the response you want. So yeah, sometimes we write something and we know there's gonna be a lot of upset in the audience."
Sitting behind a desk in Virgin Records' office, McDermott reveals various aspects of his personality. There's the serious side, like when he talks about ABC budget cuts. There's the wickedly funny side, his mind in Oscar Wilde mode, the infamous, irreverant wit sparkling. Then there's the side that doesn't like doing interviews. For McDermott, the process is perhaps something of a groaner in itself, especially seeing as it's a couple of days post-Mardi Gras party, and he hasn't yet recovered.
...But witticisms take a back seat when discussing ABC budget cuts. "Because of the cuts, there's a lot of pain there," he says of staff morale. "The real worrying thing is that the commercial stations always poached fairly heavily off the ABC- they've stolen ideas, they've stolen people. They might wait for an act to work up on the ABC, and then come along with the big money and say, 'Come over to us'. But if the ABC isn't producing this talent- because it hasn't got the time and money and resources - then the commercial stations aren't gonna be going out on a limb to produce anything new or adventurous. It's not worth their while."
A more light-hearted McDermott emerges with the subject of the utterly inept but blackly comic, Howard government. "I mean, it's a terrible thing to say, but I've got to admit that a conservative goverment is far better for comedy," says McDermott, his words travelling at high velocity. "If Howard does come back, I'm in a job for quite some time. It may be worse for the country, but I'll have a livelihood... The Liberals just kept on giving us gifts all year. You really can't get more slapstick that Alexander Downer. What a trooper, and he'll never let you down."
Thanks to Fleur for this article
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