Liar Liar?

Winner of the 2008 Raw Comedy competition, Neil Sinclair is back for the 2013 MICF with his new show Phoney. “[The show] is about lying; about how to lie and how to spot a liar. It has lots of anecdotes about how people lie to themselves, and how lying is important,” Sinclair shares.

Inspiration for Sinclair's show came after watching Pamela Meyer's aptly named TED talk How To Spot A Liar. “The facts about lying were just mind-blowing and [despite there being] people who can lie exceptionally well, no one can hide lying absolutely. It was fascinating for me, and I was like, 'right, I'm going to do a show on that',” he says. However, he admits that despite all his hard work putting the show together he hasn't got any better at picking liars. Sinclair deadpans, “Except in myself. When I lie, I have no faith any more, because I'll be telling a lie and I'll be noticing all of this stuff that I'm doing. I turn red so easily.”

Sinclair got into comedy after going to workshop with friend and fellow comedian Craig McLeod at the Comic's Lounge. Sinclair shares that after a bad start where they were forced to endure “one comedian from the old days just sitting there getting drunk telling everyone how he started comedy in Melbourne and no one gives him credit for it”, he returned the week after “with some truly terrible jokes and got just one laugh”. However, “it was an amazing experience to get one little laugh. I was like, I want more of this. I want to get better at it,” Sinclair says.

The Englishman originally came to Melbourne with his then girlfriend. “[One night] we got really drunk and decided that it would be a pretty great if I were to move to Australia. So I told all my friends and family that I was moving. I then told her that I had told all my friends and family that I was emigrating and she was like, 'What do you mean? When did we decide this?'” he says. However, he moved, broke up with the girl and nine years later he's still here.

He did return to the motherland for a year and a half just in time to catch the London riots. “It was insane. [My housemates and I] saw it happening on TV and we convinced our bosses to let us go home early. At home we were all just sitting in the kitchen watching it on the computer and then the sounds started getting louder and louder and then suddenly people started to kick on the door, trying to get in,” he says. It wasn't that terrible, though, as he wrote his previous MICF show Panic! about the experience. On top of that, after the rioting had died down a little, “we'd go and look outside and there would be pockets [of rioters] just waiting. There was the constant threat that it was going to happen again. So we just got drunk,” says Sinclair.

And Sinclair's two cents as to why the riots happened: “My Dad always goes on about how he didn't have television, only pocket meat sandwiches and that was enough for him. But what he doesn't realise is that nobody came and took his pocket meat sandwiches away.”