Why He Gives The Audience A Moment To Shine

When we call Steen Raskopoulos, he is part-way through his run of shows in Brisbane, a hodgepodge of bits from his four years of solo comedy shows, including this year's, his fourth, You Know The Drill. Last night's show managed to impress members of the Brisbane Lions AFL team who were in attendance — and the lot of them became part of the show themselves, pulled up on stage as part of one of Raskopoulos' audience participation bits. Plus he spent yesterday at Dreamworld and Wet'n'Wild with Aunty Donna, Rhys Nicholson and Becky Lucas: "Me and Broden [Kelly] from Aunty Donna dominated on the tubes," he brags with a laugh.

"To get on stage for 55 minutes and play 25 to 30 different characters in a show, it's like therapy essentially."

It sounds as though the Lions boys were good sports when it came to getting involved — how does he make people feel comfortable enough that they'd eschew their first impulse, 'Please don't pick me'? "I think everything I do is with love and joy and I'd never want to get anyone on stage to bully or punish anyone — it's always done from a really fun place... If I'm going to use the audience it's to make them look like the star, to give them a moment to shine in the show."

Raskopoulos' solo shows are sketch comedy, a structured interweaving of different characters in different, hilarious situations. It seems as though sketch in general is having a bit of a cultural moment — Raskopoulos, Aunty Donna, Raskopoulos' improv duo The Bear Pack, and more are selling out shows across the country."I think with improv and sketch there was a big period where I don't know if it wasn't taken too seriously, but I think a lot of people were doing it and maybe it wasn't particularly good, or I don't know, I think it might have saturated the market a bit. But I think with groups like Aunty Donna, Susie Youssef, people like that who are amazing sketch comics, it's kind of reinvigorating, and they're coming at the medium, and like sketch, with a different angle as well — which is lifting everyone."

What appeals to Raskopoulos about sketch is the opportunity to 'play other people and other things'. "I find myself just as a normal person quite shy, so for me to just play someone else or perform as a character that's what I really like to explore — and same with the improve element as well. To get on stage for 55 minutes and play 25 to 30 different characters in a show, it's like therapy essentially."

The thing that appeals to audiences, Raskopoulos says, is the opportunity to see something unexpected. "I think it's just something different, and unexpected... With sketch you can have different characters who have different points of view, you can do songs, you can do dances, you can do characters and voices, stuff that is unrelated, or you can do a lot of narrative stuff. I think there's so much more you do, I guess, as a performer, and from an audience perspective there's so much you can take out of it if you do like accents and characters and music and dancing — then you can get everything in the one hit."