Channelling His Inner Douche

No carbs for Josh Thomas, if you please. In a swanky restaurant at the top end of Melbourne, the stand-up comedian is making the most of a late-afternoon lunch order that sadly will not include some of his favourite things. “I've cut out carbs, so I'm miserable,” he declares in his distinctive, hard-to-pin-down voice. “It's because I have to take my shirt off on television in a few weeks. Don't ask me what for. It's a secret.”

In a facetious statement that turns out to be a lucky guess, I tease Thomas about his possible involvement in that celebrity diving competition on Seven, not knowing that a week or so after our meeting it will be revealed that he actually has joined the line-up of familiar faces taking part in Celebrity Splash. “I'm not telling you anything,” smiles Thomas before declaring his carb-free lifestyle to be “a miserable, miserable existence”. Still, Josh, you'll have that lean physique so many people aspire to, right? “It'll still be bad,” he says as he tucks into his snapper and broccoli. “Just not 'as bad'. That'll always be the dream: 'not as bad'.”

I'm doing Thomas a disservice here, I realise. Despite some minor, tongue-in-cheek griping about his restrictive diet – and who could blame him? Carbs are awesome! – he appeared to be in good spirits during our encounter, and justifiably so. After all, his TV series Please Like Me, which has now finished its six-episode run on ABC2 but will soon be available on DVD (see sidebar), was getting some good notices and he was gearing up to present a new show at this year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Oh, and he has three chickens living in his home. So there's that.

“They're overdue laying eggs,” he says. “That's my obsession at the moment – when they're going to lay their eggs. I've spent months feeding them, caring for them, and now I want them to give me a delicious snack. They're pre-menstrual, I think. They're getting moody, getting noisy... that's how you know with girls.”

It's a crowded house at Thomas' place at the moment, what with the chickens, John the cavoodle (“He's not used to having girls in the house”) and housemate and best friend Tom Ward, who recently moved back in. Thomas and Ward collaborated on Please Like Me, although they weren't under the same roof when they worked on the show together. “But everything we wrote into the show sort of came true,” he says. Life imitates art, huh? “It usually does.”

Thomas is fairly chuffed with how Please Like Me was received both critically and commercially, although he admits with a smile that “commercially the response is redundant – it's on ABC2, and even though we've been killing it by ABC2 standards what does that really mean?”

So it won over a select or boutique audience, let's say. “Critically, they've been loving it,” he pipes up. “The conversations the producers and I had about the show four years ago are now being said back at us, the things we wanted people to like about the show are the things that are being liked. They liked the mix of comedy and sadness, and they appreciated that it wasn't traditionally funny. I mean, we made some odd choices – there were some parts, even in the first episode, that we deliberately wanted to be quite boring. My number one rule was that it had to be honest.”

A second season of Please Like Me isn't on the table just yet, with Thomas claiming he doesn't have further adventures of his TV alter ego in mind. “I didn't write this series to do another series,” he says. “This series ends... well, it does end with something of a question mark but that's because there's really no such thing as an ending in life. It doesn't end with a 'What's this, I think Josh is pregnant!' sort of cliff-hanger. It ends. But I enjoyed making Please Like Me – it was challenging – and I'd like to make another show.”

Working on Please Like Me kept Thomas from putting on a Comedy Festival show last year, but 2013 sees him return with a new show titled Douchebag. He's quick to point out, however, that the show is not about actual douchebags (“the devices used to clean orifices,” he helpfully clarifies). Rather, it's about his own inner douche, and the way that Josh Thomas could very easily turn to the dark side. Which brings us back to those chickens.

“The first day I got them, they were so small and beautiful... I was holding little Melinda, looking about how lovely and fragile she was in my hand, and all of a sudden I thought 'I could crush you to death',” he says. “It worried me, that that was a thought that came to me. I mean, I used to hate asparagus but now I love asparagus. So who knows, maybe my next thing will be crushing small animals to death.”

Calling Douchebag “a series of anecdotes about bad things I've done, bad decisions I've made”, Thomas admits that coming up with a solid hour of new, interesting and varied material takes some hard work. “You do have to plan a bit,” he says. “I know what I think is funny, it's easy for me to think about things I think are funny but it's a matter of coming up with things that aren't exactly the same thing for an hour. I usually find that all the material I've written will be about sex, and then I think 'Well, I'd better write something about my dog'. You need a bit of shading.”

Tapping into his dark side and exploring his badness has been a surprisingly pleasant experience for Thomas. “It's great fun when I have stuff to talk about,” he says. “I've had shows where I've felt like I've had nothing to talk about and it's miserable. I think every comedian has had those years. But this year I really felt like I had a lot to talk about because I'd had that year off. So I had stories, and that's what the show is about. I got introspective. This show's not painfully introspective, though – I cut that out because it was dull. But that introspection is always there, lurking behind the anecdotes.”

ME OH ME

Chatting with Josh Thomas on the set of his six-part ABC series Please Like Me last year, my initial take was that talking with him was not unlike trying to catch smoke in a butterfly net. When he wasn't taking the mickey with his answers, he was being entertainingly self-deprecating without revealing too much about the show. Gradually, however, he began explaining the parallels between his own life and that of Please Like Me's central character, played by Thomas and appropriately named Josh.

In the first episode, he's hit with a few life-altering situations when he's dumped by his girlfriend Claire (Caitlin Stasey), who informs him she's pretty sure he's gay, romanced by a handsome new acquaintance, Geoffrey (Wade Briggs), and compelled to move back home to care for his bipolar mum (Debra Lawrence) after she overdoses on painkillers.

“That's what it's about, more or less,” says Thomas. “The character is called Josh and he's very me-ish but the show is quite fictional. There's stuff in there that people will recognise from my stand-up in the past, stuff that has clearly sort of happened, but the show is fiction.”

It sounds a little more emotional and maybe even more meaningful than your typical comedy, I suggest. “It's not a sitcom,” says Thomas. “It's a comedy-drama. It's mostly a comedy but sometimes sad stuff will happen.” That said, viewers perhaps shouldn't search for anything too deep in Please Like Me.
“I didn't want to say anything!” he chuckles. “I didn't want to make any grand point. I just wanted to make an entertaining show...an honest show about what people are up to. It's about different things happening to different people, but from my perspective.

“I've written in the past that it was a show about growing up, but I'm not really sure what that means. Mostly it's about sex and death, but most comedy is about sex and death. There's nothing that cutting-edge about that. It's pretty basic.” Let's face it – Please Like Me is very much a Josh Thomas show. “Oh, it's very me-heavy,” he laughs. “If you don't like me, this is not for you.”

WHO: Josh Thomas
WHAT: Douchebag
When & where: Thursday 2 to Sunday 21 April, MICF, Town Hall, Lower Town Hall, Melbourne VIC