The Daily Grind

Comedian Nath Valvo's career has followed a distinctly upwards trajectory. Directly after school he started a skit group with three mates called The Shambles, which was picked up by community television station Briz 31. The group, he says, got a bit of a following way back when Myspace was still socially relevant and The Shambles parlayed Myspace celebrity into a successful live show. Branching out on his own after a few years with the group, Valvo has since received enough acclaim that his name is regularly prefaced with “rising star of comedy”.

Our conversation turns to procrastination, with the fast-talking Valvo offering to speak for nine hours to avoid going to the gym. He laments the difficulties of exercising in South Yarra, “the gayest suburb in Australia”, where everybody is like the after shot in a protein shake advertisement. It's manageable, he says, “As long as I know I look good the whole time.”

Valvo's current show Grindr: A Love Story? debuted to acclaim in 2011 and was brought back in 2012. For the uninitiated, Grindr is an extremely popular social networking app targeted at gay men. Unlike Facebook, Grindr has GPS so you can see how many other users are nearby you might like to meet.

To demonstrate the popularity and addictiveness of Grindr using completely unreliable statistics, according to Google the average Facebook user logs in three to five times a day. The average Grindr user logs in eight times a day. More to the point, there has thus far not been qualitative research into the personal interactions Grindr facilitates, but it's fairly safe to say the app beats Facebook hands down in cultivating interpersonal relationships in the real world.

Valvo decided to base a show on his experience as a Grindr addict because, “Stand-up should always be an extension of what you're talking about with people you know. Me and my homo crew just got obsessed with the app a couple of years ago and everyone had a story about using it,” he says.

“Every time I told people what was happening to me they were just gobsmacked. I compiled these stories and, look, the gays are frickin' loving it. You just need to Google Grindr to find out how it's changing the gay landscape. People are on the dance floor at clubs using it instead of talking to people at a frickin' bar.”

Valvo adds, “I can only go on my experience and I've had some really positive experiences with people who are now my friends. But that's really boring. Who wants to hear that? So I've edited it down so it focuses on only the humiliating stuff.”